The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It uses the Compact Disc Digital Audio format which typically provides 74 minutes of audio on a disc. In later years, the compact disc was adapted for non-audio computer data storage purposes as CD-ROM and its derivatives. First released in Japan in October 1982, the CD was the second optical disc technology to be invented, after the much larger LaserDisc (LD). By 2007, 200 billion CDs (including audio CDs, CD-ROMs and CD-Rs) had been sold worldwide.
Standard CDs have a diameter of 120 mm (4.7 in), and are designed to hold up to 74 minutes of uncompressed stereo digital audio or about 650 MiB (681,574,400 bytes) of data. Capacity is routinely extended to 80 minutes and 700 MiB (734,003,200 bytes), 90 minutes 800 MiB (838,860,800 bytes), or 99 minutes 870 MiB (912,261,120 bytes) by arranging data more closely on the same-sized disc. The Mini CD has various diameters ranging from 60 to 80 millimetres (2.4 to 3.1 in); they have been used for CD singles or delivering device drivers.
The CD gained rapid popularity in the 1990s, quickly outselling all other audio formats in the United States by 1991, ending the market dominance of the phonograph record and the cassette tape. By 2000, the CD accounted for 92.3% of the entire market share in regard to US music sales.[3] The CD is considered the last dominant audio format of the album era, as the rise of MP3, iTunes, cellular ringtones, and other downloadable music formats in the mid-2000s ended the decade-long dominance of the CD.[4]
The format was later adapted (as CD-ROM) for general purpose data storage and initially could hold much more data than a personal computer hard disk drive. Several other formats were further derived, both pre-pressed and blank user writable, including write-once audio and data storage (CD-R), rewritable media (CD-RW), Video CD (VCD), Super Video CD (SVCD), Photo CD, Picture CD, Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-i), Enhanced Music CD, and Super Audio CD (SACD) which may have a CD-DA layer.
History
The optophone, first presented in 1913, was an early device that used light for both recording and playback of sound signals on a transparent photograph.[5] More than thirty years later, American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record digital media on a photosensitive plate. Russell’s patent application was filed in 1966, and he was granted a patent in 1970.[6] Following litigation, Sony and Philips licensed Russell’s patents for recording in 1988.[7][8] It is debatable whether Russell’s concepts, patents, and prototypes instigated and in some measure influenced the compact disc’s design.[9]
The compact disc is an evolution of LaserDisc technology,[10] where a focused laser beam is used that enables the high information density required for high-quality digital audio signals. Unlike the prior art by Optophonie and James Russell, the information on the disc is read from a reflective layer using a laser as a light source through a protective substrate. Prototypes were developed by Philips and Sony independently in the late 1970s.[11] Although originally dismissed by Philips Research management as a trivial pursuit,[12] the CD became the primary focus for Philips as the LaserDisc format struggled.[13] In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the Red Book CD-DA standard was published in 1980. After their commercial release in 1982, compact discs and their players were extremely popular. Despite costing up to $1,000, over 400,000 CD players were sold in the United States between 1983 and 1984.[14] By 1988, CD sales in the United States surpassed those of vinyl LPs, and, by 1992, CD sales surpassed those of prerecorded music-cassette tapes.[15][16] The success of the compact disc has been credited to the cooperation between Philips and Sony, which together agreed upon and developed compatible hardware. The unified design of the compact disc allowed consumers to purchase any disc or player from any company and allowed the CD to dominate the at-home music market unchallenged.[17]
Digital audio laser-disc prototypes
In 1974, Lou Ottens, director of the audio division of Philips, started a small group to develop an analog optical audio disc with a diameter of 20 cm (7.9 in) and a sound quality superior to that of the vinyl record.[18] However, due to the unsatisfactory performance of the analog format, two Philips research engineers recommended a digital format in March 1974. In 1977, Philips then established a laboratory with the mission of creating a digital audio disc. The diameter of Philips’s prototype compact disc was set at 11.5 cm (4.5 in), the diagonal of an audio cassette.[10][19]
Heitaro Nakajima, who developed an early digital audio recorder within Japan’s national public broadcasting organization, NHK, in 1970, became general manager of Sony’s audio department in 1971. In 1973, his team developed a digital PCM adaptor that made audio recordings using a Betamax video recorder. After this, in 1974 the leap to storing digital audio on an optical disc was easily made.[20] Sony first publicly demonstrated an optical digital audio disc in September 1976. A year later, in September 1977, Sony showed the press a 30 cm (12 in) disc that could play an hour of digital audio (44,100 Hz sampling rate and 16-bit resolution) using modified frequency modulation encoding.[21] In September 1978, the company demonstrated an optical digital audio disc with a 150-minute playing time, 44,056 Hz sampling rate, 16-bit linear resolution, and cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon coding (CIRC) error correction code—specifications similar to those later settled upon for the standard compact disc format in 1980. Technical details of Sony’s digital audio disc were presented during the 62nd AES Convention, held on 13–16 March 1979, in Brussels.[22] Sony’s AES technical paper was published on 1 March 1979. A week later, on 8 March, Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference called “Philips Introduce Compact Disc”[23] in Eindhoven, Netherlands.[24] Sony executive Norio Ohga, later CEO and chairman of Sony, and Heitaro Nakajima were convinced of the format’s commercial potential and pushed further development despite widespread skepticism.[25]
Collaboration and standardization
In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. Led by engineers Kees Schouhamer Immink and Toshitada Doi, the research pushed forward laser and optical disc technology.[26] After a year of experimentation and discussion, the task force produced the Red Book CD-DA standard. First published in 1980, the standard was formally adopted by the IEC as an international standard in 1987, with various amendments becoming part of the standard in 1996.[citation needed]
Philips coined the term compact disc in line with another audio product, the Compact Cassette,[27] and contributed the general manufacturing process, based on video LaserDisc technology. Philips also contributed eight-to-fourteen modulation (EFM), while Sony contributed the error-correction method, CIRC, which offers resilience to defects such as scratches and fingerprints.
The Compact Disc Story,[28] told by a former member of the task force, gives background information on the many technical decisions made, including the choice of the sampling frequency, playing time, and disc diameter. The task force consisted of around 6 persons,[12][29] though according to Philips, the compact disc was “invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team”.[30]
Initial launch and adoption
Early milestones in the launch and adoption of the format included:
- The first test pressing was of a recording of Richard Strauss‘s An Alpine Symphony, recorded December 1–3, 1980 and played by the Berlin Philharmonic and conducted by Herbert von Karajan, who had been enlisted as an ambassador for the format in 1979.[31]
- The world presentation took place during the Salzburg Easter Festival on 15 April 1981, at a press conference of Akio Morita and Norio Ohga (Sony), Joop van Tilburg (Philips), and Richard Busch (PolyGram), in the presence of Karajan who praised the new format.[32]
- The first public demonstration was on the BBC television programme Tomorrow’s World in 1981, when the Bee Gees‘ album Living Eyes (1981) was played.[33]
- The first commercial compact disc was produced on 17 August 1982, a 1979 recording of Chopin waltzes performed by Claudio Arrau.[34]
- The first 50 titles were released in Japan on 1 October 1982,[35] the first of which was a re-release of the Billy Joel album 52nd Street.[36]
- The first CD played on BBC Radio was in October 1982.[citation needed]
- The Japanese launch was followed on 14 March 1983 by the introduction of CD players and discs to Europe[37] and North America where CBS Records released sixteen titles.[38]
The first artist to sell a million copies on CD was Dire Straits, with their 1985 album Brothers in Arms.[39] One of the first CD markets was devoted to reissuing popular music whose commercial potential was already proven. The first major artist to have their entire catalog converted to CD was David Bowie, whose first fourteen studio albums (up to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)) of (then) sixteen were made available by RCA Records in February 1985, along with four greatest hits albums; his fifteenth and sixteenth albums (Let’s Dance and Tonight, respectively) had already been issued on CD by EMI Records in 1983 and 1984, respectively.[40] On 26 February 1987, the first four UK albums by the Beatles were released in mono on compact disc.[41]
The growing acceptance of the CD in 1983 marks the beginning of the popular digital audio revolution.[42] It was enthusiastically received, especially in the early-adopting classical music and audiophile communities, and its handling quality received particular praise. As the price of players gradually came down, and with the introduction of the portable Discman, the CD began to gain popularity in the larger popular and rock music markets. With the rise in CD sales, pre-recorded cassette tape sales began to decline in the late 1980s; CD sales overtook cassette sales in the early 1990s.[citation needed][43] In 1988, 400 million CDs were manufactured by 50 pressing plants around the world.[44]
Further development
Early CD players employed binary-weighted digital-to-analog converters (DAC), which contained individual electrical components for each bit of the DAC.[45] Even when using high-precision components, this approach was prone to decoding errors.[clarification needed][45] Another issue was jitter, a time-related defect. Confronted with the instability of DACs, manufacturers initially turned to increasing the number of bits in the DAC and using several DACs per audio channel, averaging their output.[45] This increased the cost of CD players but did not solve the core problem.
A breakthrough in the late 1980s culminated in development of the 1-bit DAC, which converts high-resolution low-frequency digital input signal into a lower-resolution high-frequency signal that is mapped to voltages and then smoothed with an analog filter. The temporary use of a lower-resolution signal simplified circuit design and improved efficiency, which is why it became dominant in CD players starting from the early 1990s. Philips used a variation of this technique called pulse-density modulation (PDM),[46] while Matsushita (now Panasonic) chose pulse-width modulation (PWM), advertising it as MASH, which is an acronym derived from their patented Multi-stAge noiSe-sHaping PWM topology.[45]
The CD was primarily planned as the successor to the vinyl record for playing music, rather than as a data storage medium. However, CDs have grown to encompass other applications. In 1983, following the CD’s introduction, Immink and Joseph Braat presented the first experiments with erasable compact discs during the 73rd AES Convention.[47] In June 1985, the computer-readable CD-ROM (read-only memory) and, in 1990, recordable CD-R discs were introduced.[a] Recordable CDs became an alternative to tape for recording and distributing music and could be duplicated without degradation in sound quality.
Other newer video formats such as DVD and Blu-ray use the same physical geometry as CD, and most DVD and Blu-ray players are backward compatible with audio CDs.
Peak
CD sales in the United States peaked by 2000.[48] By the early 2000s, the CD player had largely replaced the audio cassette player as standard equipment in new automobiles, with 2010 being the final model year for any car in the United States to have a factory-equipped cassette player.[49]
Two new formats were marketed in the 2000s designed as successors to the CD: the Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio. However neither of these were adopted partly due to increased relevance of digital (virtual) music and the apparent lack of audible improvements in audio quality to most human ears.[50] These effectively extended the CD’s longevity in the music market.[51]
Decline
With the advent and popularity of Internet-based distribution of files in lossy-compressed audio formats such as MP3, sales of CDs began to decline in the 2000s. For example, between 2000 and 2008, despite overall growth in music sales and one anomalous year of increase, major-label CD sales declined overall by 20%.[52] Despite rapidly declining sales year-over-year, the pervasiveness of the technology lingered for a time, with companies placing CDs in pharmacies, supermarkets, and filling station convenience stores to target buyers less likely to be able to use Internet-based distribution.[13] In 2012, CDs and DVDs made up only 34% of music sales in the United States.[53] By 2015, only 24% of music in the United States was purchased on physical media, two thirds of this consisting of CDs;[54] however, in the same year in Japan, over 80% of music was bought on CDs and other physical formats.[55] In 2018, U.S. CD sales were 52 million units—less than 6% of the peak sales volume in 2000.[48] In the UK, 32 million units were sold, almost 100 million fewer than in 2008.[56] In 2018, Best Buy announced plans to decrease their focus on CD sales, however, while continuing to sell records, sales of which are growing during the vinyl revival.[57][58][59]
During the 2010s, the increasing popularity of solid-state media and music streaming services caused automakers to remove automotive CD players in favor of minijack auxiliary inputs, wired connections to USB devices and wireless Bluetooth connections.[60] Automakers viewed CD players as using up valuable space and taking up weight which could be reallocated to more popular features, like large touchscreens.[61] By 2021, only Lexus and General Motors were still including CD players as standard equipment with certain vehicles.[61]
Current status
CDs continued to be strong in some markets such as Japan where 132 million units were produced in 2019.[62]
The decline in CD sales has slowed in recent years; in 2021, CD sales increased in the US for the first time since 2004,[63] with Axios citing its rise to “young people who are finding they like hard copies of music in the digital age”.[64] It came at the same time as both vinyl and cassette reached sales levels not seen in 30 years.[65] The RIAA reported that CD revenue made a dip in 2022, before increasing again in 2023 and overtook downloading for the first time in over a decade.[66]
In the US, 33.4 million CD albums were sold in the year 2022.[67] In France in 2023, 10.5 million CDs were sold, almost double that of vinyl, but both of them represented generated 12% each of the French music industry revenues.[68]
