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back to article Happy birthday, Compact Disc

The Compact Disc is 30 years old - at least if you work back to when the platform first went on sale to punters. The first commercially release disc and player - respectively, Billy Joel's 52nd Street and Sony's CDP-101 - were introduced in Japan on 1 October 1982. The disc was released by Sony's recorded music subsidiary, CBS …

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          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Happy

            Re: Is there any truth

            "If you hold them up to the light you can see daylight through numerous holes that have developed in the silver layer"

            I can't speak for your disks, but pinpricks are usually caused by the sputtering method of vacuum deposition of the reflective layer, and would have been there since they were made (but you didn't get your new CD home and hold it over a lightbulb to look for them). As a commercial process, vacuum film coating was a bit of a novel art in the 1980s, and as I recall the earliest CD plants used sputtering rather than true vapour deposition. The sputtering often left pin holes, but as the error correction could make up for even a 2mm pinhole (which should never pass QC) there wasn't any obvious problem for users. Since then the technology has improved, and pin holes are much rarer, albeit they do sometimes still occur.

            The pinholes are unlikely to get any worse, so I wouldn't worry about them.

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    2. Weeble
      Reply Icon

      Re: Is there any truth

      Yes. Some truth at least.

      The discs pressed by PDO in the UK, for a certain period, all had a habit of turning bronze and becoming unreliable/unplayable. I still have a couple left that won't rip, though I haven't tried playing them in a normal player recently.

      At the time (and I think I'm talking about 10-15 years ago now), PDO did the decent thing and offered to swap-out the affected discs. An offer I accepted... I can't imagine the industry, as it is today, being quite so honourable.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Is there any truth

        I had a qutie a few PDO discs replaced.I learned about the issue on line so it must have been shortly after I got an internet connection in the late 90s.

        The discs would have been 5-10 years old at the time and had gone a slightly bronze colour. They were still playable at the time.

        Mine were mostly on the Hyperion label but PDO manufactured discs for a lot of labels. PDO discs made abroad were unaffected,

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    3. John Gamble
      Reply Icon

      Re: Is there any truth

      Nah. The closest I came to invoking that rumor was with my first CD player, a Technics SLP-1 (this was in the 1980s), and I found after a couple of years that some of my CDs weren't playing. But they were all Arista CDs (Alan Parsons Project), and they had played before, and I deduced that the Technics was getting old enough that it was missing some encoding that Arista had failed to do correctly.

      A new CD player found me able to play all my discs again.

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      1. JEDIDIAH
        Reply Icon
        Linux

        Re: Is there any truth

        There are a lot of CD's in the Library of Congress that have rotted away. It doesn't seem to be an age thing in particular. If anything it seems to be just down to a matter of luck in terms of who fabricated the disc. A lot of my own old disks are still perfectly playable.

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    4. Dana W
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      Re: Is there any truth

      My 1985 Klaus Nomi CDs still read "and rip" fine So does my first printing "Dark Side of the Moon"

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  2. Mage Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Fall in sales

    Added to the list of other reasons, all valid, is maybe there is less new music to buy? There is now mostly only the new recordings. Also have you tried to buy anything with a decent loudspeaker in an ordinary shop? Headphones is very solitary and also unless less you have a "bin-aural" processor, stereo isn't designed for it.

    Home taping never killed Music. But I think the industry is making a good attempt at it.

    Before as well as new releases, which might have been better, the previous back catalogue of 80 years approximately was being released? Not that all of it was ever put on CD, nor have I bought all the music I'd like to buy. Buying DVDs because the TV is so poor takes all my CD budget.

    When click did click Emile click Berliner's click Pressed click Gramophone click disc click replace click Edison's click Moulded click Phonograph click cylinder? click click click click ...

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  3. Christian Berger

    For a while it was even more popular than LPs...

    ... back in the 1990s there were actually more Compact Disks sold than LPs. This might have had something to do with the high price LPs had back then. Of course today you can get an LP for an Euro while CDs are still much more expensive. The LP has reached a price point now where you can just buy one without knowing what's on there.

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    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: For a while it was even more popular than LPs...

      But that's perfectly justified by the cost of converting all the studio equipment for digital - the EU said so.

      They still have to pay back the costs of the CD mastering for Dark SIde of the Moon - that's why it's perfectly justified to charge 25quid for it.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Damn you Sony

    And your proprietary formats like this, you floppy disks, and DVD, blu-Ray etc etc..

    Microsoft told you sucked and video should buy a HD-DVD player.

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  5. Steve Knox
    Joke

    And he wrote nine of these?

    ... 74m minutes - sufficient to accomodate the whole of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

    74 million minutes!? that's one heck of a symphony!

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    1. kwhitefoot
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Surely rather short ...

      74m minutes = 4.44 seconds

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    2. markp 1
      Reply Icon
      Headmaster

      Re: And he wrote nine of these?

      If you run the maths, that's approximately 140 years' worth of CD-spec audio. Or about 64 terabytes, for MP3s encoded at (rubbish but ISO-standard) rate of 128kbit. Working it back, that's 7783 dual-layer DVDs, or 1323 dual-layer Blu-Rays. Or of course 16 state-of-the-art 4TB 3.5" hard disks. Just about as many as you could fit into a ludicrous home-brew RAID server.

      Such a lofty pipe dream they had, fitting that kind of storage into a single 4.75-inch platter in 1982. There probably wasn't that much data of any kind in the entire world.

      (Or maybe there was, though? It represents just under 10kb for every person alive today, or maybe as much as 14kb at the time. That's not a great deal. Name, address, phone numbers, basic demographic and biometric detail, a few index numbers to identify close relations and other common associates, and a tiny, grainy photograph...)

      I figure, however, I'll easily live to see the day where that's achieved with a spinning-rust hard disk, unless they're abandoned altogether for SSD and the cloud. Optical disc, probably not.

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  6. Turtle_Fan
    Unhappy

    A monument to FAILURE

    I present thee, the CD case.

    Textbook example of bad design. Fragile and infuriating to handle.

    I can't think of a worse industrial design.

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    1. stucs201
      Reply Icon

      Re: A monument to FAILURE

      Well the DVD case has to be a contender too. OK they're generally less breakable than CD cases (though I do have one made of the same brittle plastic), but seriously a case designed to hold a disk the same size as a CD, yet about 50% taller and thicker than a CD case?

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    2. JEDIDIAH
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      Re: A monument to FAILURE

      There's plenty of DVD packaging that makes the CD case seem positively sublime.

      Quite a bit of DVD packaging will ensure that your disks are damaged. Some won't even survive the trip through the supply chain while others will make it impossible for use your disks without scratching them.

      "Complete Series" collections seems to be especially bad in this regard.

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  7. Snapper
    Happy

    Dark Side of the Moon

    I actually asked a member of Pink Floyd about the dedicated factory legend.

    He smiled.

    Apparently a factory in Chermany did a single run of DSM for a few days a year to fill the warehouses around the world.

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  8. Goat Jam
    Happy

    Flashback

    I still remember watching Daryl Sommers on "Hey Hey It's Saturday" breathlessly explaining how this wonderous new cee-dee thing would make listening to scratchy old records a thing of the past, and emphasising his point by throwing one on the floor and grinding it with his boot.

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  9. Frederick Tennant

    30 years old

    Time to warm up my Mission PCM 7000R and get out my copy of Dire Straits Brothers in Arms CD just for when I return home. Yep a few of my CDs has gone nuts but every one has been treated with respect and I dont lend them out anymore as some people think they are indestructible.

    Cassette tapes are great, until your unlucky and put them into a crap player.......I remember taking the tape out followed by the cassette innards reeling out of the player, totally destroyed.

    I still buy CDs as if you read the small print for your itunes library when they go or you go, they are gone. I love my Turntable, but heres the thing, you cant put an 'algorithm' in a frame on the wall by your hifi.

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  10. Dave 126 Silver badge

    Any one remember...

    ... magazine cover CDs called "Don't Play Track One"? The first track contained 'multimedia' readable by your computer, the other tracks would play in an audio CD player.

    And I think it was the Rolling Stones CD single, a cover of 'Like a Rolling Stone", that first had a music video included on it, at least that was the claim at the time.

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  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    CD life

    Several CD/DVDs have been seen where there is a radial split at the centre hole. This appears to have two causes: very tight retention centre clips in cases - and the clip mechanism of thin players on laptops etc. Once the split reaches the data portion of the disc then that's it.

    On the other hand it is not unusual to buy a CD/DVD with the disc rattling about inside the case because the retention clip wasn't tight enough - or some of its teeth had broken off.

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Reguarding the drop in sales.

    I think the music industry likes to blame pirated music for the drop in all media sales, even if they do know the real reasons.

    The big one being that by now we all have a decent back catalogue of music covering not just the last 30 years of CD's life but all the music from 70's, 60's and before. Also as CD generally last a lot longer than LP's & cassets they don't need replacing. This meant that people of all ages were buying them. Today they leave just the odd replacement disc and kids buying bad cover versions of classics.

    The other big difference is that today kids have far more draws on their pocket money than those of us in the 60's to 80's could have dreamed of. Specifically computer games, mobiles, DVD's plus the vast amount of stuff online, and dozens/hundreds of TV channels and radio stations.

    That is very different to the 3 TV channels broadcasting only about 8-10 hours a day each (remember the test cards?) and maybe 6 or 7 radio stations (some on medium wave!).

    The simple fact is that buying music has decreased for most of the same reason that fewer book are sold today than in previous decades. There are simply more ways to spend you money and pass your free time.

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  13. A J Stiles

    Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms

    Weren't there more CDs of this than CD players in the UK at one point?

    I remember my first CD very clearly -- it was "Solitude Standing" by Suzanne Vega. My first CD player was a Philips, with a green LED illuminating the spinning disc.

    I also remember my first CD recorder -- and my first effort at making a multimedia CD! (It was a bootleg, made from a cassette, with audio in the first session and some HTML files in the second session. It was The Levellers, live at Glastonbury in 1992; and I only know that because I saw the actual show live. Of course I named the CD "Headlice, White Lies, Max Tar Ciggies" .....)

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