The CD turns 25 today...

[brownie]

It was 25 years ago to the day....

From the AP today:

THE CD TURNS 25

by Toby Sterling

Associated Press

Pieter Kramer was a leading engineer on the team that developed the CD, which was launched 25 years ago today.

Photo: AP

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands --

It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany.

An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as compact discs, a product that turns 25 years old today -- and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.

Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today, says Holland's Royal Philips Electronics NV, which jointly developed the CD with Sony Corp. of Japan.

The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular format.

The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry's recording revenues, but its sales have been in a free fall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.

As the music labels slash wholesale prices and experiment with extras to revive the now-aging format, it's hard to imagine there was ever a day without CDs.

Yet it had been a risky technical endeavor to attempt to bring digital audio to the masses, said Pieter Kramer, the head of the optical research group at Philips' labs in the Netherlands in the 1970s.

"When we started there was nothing in place," he told The Associated Press at Philips' corporate museum in Eindhoven.

The proposed semiconductor chips needed for CD players were to be the most advanced ever used in a consumer product. And the lasers were still on the drawing board when the companies teamed up in 1979.

In 1980, researchers published what became known as the "Red Book" containing the original CD standards, as well as specifying which patents were held by Philips and which by Sony.

The CD's design drew inspiration from vinyl records: Like the grooves on a record, CDs are engraved with a spiral of tiny pits that are scanned by a laser -- the equivalent of a record player's needle. The reflected light is encoded into millions of 0s and 1s: a digital file.

Because the pits are covered with plastic and the laser's light doesn't wear them down, the CD never loses sound quality.

The jump into mass production in Germany was a milestone for the CD, and by 1982 the companies announced their product was ready for market. Both began selling players that fall, though the machines only hit U.S. markets the following spring.

The CD was a massive hit. Sony sold more players, especially once its "Discman" series was introduced in 1984. But Philips benefited from CD sales, too, thanks to its ownership of Polygram, now part of Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group.

Now, the CD may be seeing the end of its days.

CD sales have fallen sharply to 553 million sold in the United States last year, a 22 percent drop from its 2001 peak of 712 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

[andybleaden]

I knew they would never last. Just like the LP and the cylinder before that!

thanks for the article

Reminds me to take out the cds from the dishwasher where they are in for remastering

I wonder if you could go back in time with a person with a 30 gb mp3 full of lossless music and show them where we are now...would they be impressed or saddened?

Answers?

[David Ayers]

I hate CD.

[Kalo]

I hate CD.

Bring back the wax cylinder!

But seriously, I recently attended a lecture given by Larry Applebaum, the guy in charge of audio preservation at the Library of Congress (AKA the man who discovered the Monk/Coltrane live at Carnegie Hall tapes), and he said that the most stable medium yet known in the history of recording is the 78 rpm shellac disc.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

oh really? why is shellac the best? better than vinyl? why? tell us more about what he said!

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

My guess is

Not microgroove = thicker wall between the groove

Faster speed = less music per inch of groove

So, harder to damage from casual use (but unfortunately very brittle) and equivalent damage affects smaller duration of music.

MG