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| History of the CD |
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 The
first compact disc was produced 17th August 1979 in a factory in Germany
after years of development by Philips and Sony. We take a look at
the compact disc's history and how it shaped the music landscape.More than 200 billion CDs have been sold worldwide since then and it remains the dominant format despite the growth in digital downloads. The compact disc project was launched following Philips' failure with its video disc technology in 1978. The video disc was one of the first commercial products to take advantage of laser technology that could read information from a disc without any physical contact. In 1970 Philips began work on what was called the ALP (audio long play) - an audio disc system to rival vinyl records, but using laser technology. In 1977 Philips began to take the development of a new audio format much more seriously. A new name for the product was discussed and names considered included Mini Rack, MiniDisc, and Compact Rack. The team settled on Compact Disc because it was felt it would remind people of the success of the Compact Cassette. In March 1979 Philips conducted a press conference to show off the audio quality of its CD system in production and also to impress upon rivals how well it was progressing. A week later Philips travelled to Japan after the Japanese Ministry of Industry and Technology (MITI) had decided to convene a conference to discuss how the industry could create a standard for the audio disc. The company left Japan having agreed a deal with Sony. The CD was eventually jointly developed by Philips and Sony and the disc has also become a key storage method for computer users. The first CD produced was "The Visitors" by Abba and a recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss. Philips and Sony had always planned on the format lasting at least 20 to 25 years, but had technical issues as lasers at that time lasted no longer than 100 hours. Philips and Sony began work on the format in 1979 and targetted a disc which could hold an hour of audio that was 11.5cm. The capacity was extended to 74 minutes and disc size to 12cm, however, to accommodate a complete performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, forcing the disk to be made slightly larger."  In
1980 Philips and Sony produced their Red
Book Standard, which laid down all the standards for audio
compact discs. From that time on the companies worked separately on
their own CD equipment but in the early days agreed to share components.
In April 1982 Philips showed off a production CD player for the first time. "From now on, the conventional record player is obsolete," said Lou Ottens.The first models cost 2,000 Dutch guilders, about £1,000 at today's rate, taking into account inflation.  The
first CDs went on sale in November 1982 and were mainly classical
recordings.Classical music lovers were believed to be more affluent than pop and rock music fans, and Philips thought they would be more inclined to pay the price for the more expensive CDs and the very expensive CD-players In the last 10 years CD sales have been dropping worldwide while digital download sales are rising rapidly. "The CD remained the most popular Christmas present in Britain last year. Despite the rise of downloading we expect that the CD will be here for many years to come." In 1985 Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms became the first CD to sell more than one million copies. It is still the world's most successful CD album In 2000 global sales of CD albums peaked at 2.455 billion. In 2006 that figure was down to 1.755 billion. Discus Group are pleased to announce that the latest format of optical disc HD DVD Replication is a product we now offer, along side CD Replication DVD Replication CD Duplication and DVD Duplication |
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