CD’s, or compact disks, the underdog of the 80’s. This genius invention was an integral part of technology and its overall advancements dating all the way back to 1915 and up to as far as the 2000’s. How did it come to be so misunderstood after all of these years?
The most miraculous part about this invention is the utter creation itself. You cannot pinpoint one exact date or one exact person that accurately depicts a beginning when it comes to the compact disks, only never ending dates and names of contributors all over the world. “The inventor of the CD does not exist. Nobody even invented one part of the technology alone. The CD was invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team. Emil Berliner, the founder of Deutsche Grammophon, might have been able to invent the gramophone record on his own in 1887, but the technology on which the CD is based is too complex for just one genius”. We can, though, begin in 1915 when the gramophone was introduced to the people. The technology from the gramophone that existed upon many other inventions before that, was soon manipulated by a Swedish man by the name of Harry Nyquist. He theorized a new way to record digital audio, the CD. In another part of the world another man by the name of Alec Reeves furthered this theory by inventing pulse-code modulation, a standard way to display and interpret analog data. These technologies ultimately lead other inventors to the cream of the crop, magnetic tape. As all of these little pieces to the bigger puzzle began surfacing all over the world, Americans began to fish for them, seeking them out and pulling them in slowly, side by side with the new advancement of the vinyl in 1949. It was in 1960 that the inner workings of the cd, the code, the storage, the overall makeup and composition, was created by a new set of inventors. The sea of inventions and information in the technological world only continued to grow, with more Americans trying to fish for just enough to get them to that key regalia. They all wanted to get their hands on the rope that would tie communications and engineering together forever.
That was when Philips stepped in. This corporation seemed to have caught enough of the worldwide innovations to curate such an item, the first audio disk with new and improved recording quality and storage. The company went on to attend a press conference on March 8, 1979, where multiples of japanese technology firms became a part of this historical node in time. “J. van Tilburg, the general director of Audio, received a phone call from A. Morita, the president of Sony. Morita said that, after consulting the management of Sony, he had decided to cooperate with Philips” on the disk. This moment was monumental, and allowed the exponential growth of the CD to begin. The compact disc digital audio system has already been introduced in a large number of countries at this point around 1980, which began its overtake in musical excellence. Vinyls were out, these cd’s were in, despite the overall design of the CD system was to favor the basis of communication and other concepts and be generally impactful in the most basic parts of society, it typically gained traction within the musical world the most. The companies questioned how this would gain traction with the people. “The coming years after 1982 would therefore witness the appearance of several types of compact discs, most of them emerging from the seminal physical format standardized for audio playback.” The generalization of these disks allowed the company to take a step further in getting to the people, and “soon enough, a common system standard was defined, this standard gradually became the world standard for this completely new system of storage and reproduction of audio signals. An extensive catalog of discs with various labels, and several brands of Compact Disc players are now available. Most people who have had the opportunity to listen to this new sound medium, not least performing artists, acknowledge that a more intense musical experience is achieved. The improvement in sound quality is in essence obtained by accurate waveform coding and decoding of the audio signals, and, in addition, the coded audio information is protected against disc errors.”, When the D-50 was launched in order to play all of the discs, there became meaningful demand for the CD and its hardware. It became cheaper than the latter ways to listen to music, and more accessible to the people as its traction continued. The cd overall acted as the bridge to connect the older technologies now, submitting them to their graves. Soon, though, “software releases grew bigger: Windows 95, for example, was released on 13 floppy discs. This made an alternative offering of a more complete CD-release of the same program very attractive.” This was nearing the peak of the CD’s era. That is, until its direct influence on the PC world, was too extraordinary. CD became a crucial enabler for the evolution of the PC industry in that period of time. It did enable the distribution of games, with their extra storage space and the random access to content enabled games, to increase sophistication and with more appealing and realistic graphics, it was clear they were an unstoppable duo. Until it came to CHD, or the computer hard drive, held digital copies of music that was unlike anything anyone had come across yet. You could get the setup of a cd for about $15, when itunes had them at gunpoint with each song costing 99c. “The cultural impact of introducing digital technology for content storage, distribution and play-back proved to be even bigger than that. Digital content allows transfer to other media without loss of quality, even when the channel between the two is imperfect. This perfect-quality transfer leading to ‘pure’ sound was a technical ambition and inspiration to the experts in the seventies”. That is what made the CD boom so incredible. But now that the same quality was found on everyday computers and became even more efficient for music, and anything else people began to find themselves putting on their CD’s. This began the end of the end for the CD era.
Unlike the fateful beginning of this beautiful orphan invention of colorful rainbow disks of data, we can pinpoint the exact fall of this innovation. DVD and Blu Ray took over for about 5 years, trying to keep the discs afloat, until 2001. “iTunes was launched by computer company Apple. For the first time, people could buy songs online individually instead of having to buy whole CDs.”, along with storing the the songs in playlists on your computer CHD, you now had an online interface making it easier to access an endless library of music, you were not longer limited by the prices and evident collection at the time of cd’s, but an ongoing variety of songs at your fingertips. In this excerpt from an article I read, it talks about the time “Between 2003 and 2005, the way music was sold on the streets of Mexico City mutated.” The author goes on to explain how “vendors had sold pirated copies of commercially released compact disc albums. They had duplicated the packaging and contents of official releases with as much fidelity as possible, photocopying original covers or running off scans with ink-jet printers.” This clearly created issues within the already dying CD’s accompanied by the continuous “street market pirates competing less with the legal vendors of entertainment software than with the archives of downloadable music available for free on the internet. Once a key part of the counterfeiters’ practice, faithful copies of legitimate CD covers and booklets were no longer in evidence. The packaging for these new discs offered little more than quickly recognizable images of performers and cramped track listings produced with word processing programs.” Mp3’s were completely authentic with more and more variety, their increase in popularity was the inherent beheading of popular usage of CD’s.
Of course, the CD’s handed off popularity and inspired other companies to the soon becoming of the iPod, and the age of endless music. People still used Cd’s for other things aside from music, but without the hardware, the CD’s were useless, and it just became increasingly difficult to even use them. Regardless, so many important inventions came after the fact, and they left an impressive mark on the world. Personally, I am obsessed with the look and composition of compact discs. They are miraculous and magical especially to those that don’t know how the technology really works. They make for great personalized gifts too, and are a fun thing to collect (like vinyls.) I have provided a wiki link for you yourself to utilize these amazing parts of technology.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4020-9553-5.pdf#page=123
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2752/175470709787375751
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