30 years of CD

Thirty years ago, on October 1, 1982, a completely new storage medium first hit the shelves of stores - in music stores, customers began to be offered Billy Joel's sixth studio album “52nd Street”, which was recorded on a compact disc (CD). The choice of artist and album for the new product was not chosen by chance - in 1979 the album received a Grammy, and the title song became the best in the nomination "Best Male Performance of Pop Composition".

The history of the invention of the CD is far from unambiguous. Its development was started in the bowels of Philips in 1974 with the goal of creating an optical audio information carrier with a sound quality exceeding the quality of vinyl records and a diameter of 20 cm, and the astronomical amount of $ 60 million for that time was invested in a new development. In 1979, Philips was able to release its first CD player, but soon after its release, the company began looking for contacts with another electronics leader, Sony, Japan, to join forces to develop a new audio technology.

The then director of Philips, Lou Ottens, believed that one hour of music on the disc would be more than enough. However, Sony vice president Norio Oga, who studied music at the Berlin Conservatory, insisted that the total playing time of the CD should be such that not only albums of contemporary (1979) artists were placed on the disc, but also classical works. As a result, an agreement was reached that the Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, lasting 74 minutes, should become just the standard for the duration of audio recording of a CD, which became known as CD-DA (Compact Disk Digital Audio).

As a result, three years later, on August 17, 1982, the first industrial sample of the CD was released on Philips production facilities, on which the album of the super-popular then ABBA “The Visitors” was recorded. Thus, the final disc size was set to 120 mm with a capacity of 74 minutes of audio recording and a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz.

In 1992, the sale of CDs for various purposes (audio and video) reached 200,000 units. And in 1996, the same alliance - Philips and Sony - introduced the technology of recording high-density optical discs, which was called DVD (Digital Video Disk).

UPD: Zhores Ivanovich Alferov, graduate of the Faculty of Electronic Engineering of the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Nobel Laureate in Physics in 2000 “For the development of semiconductor elements used in ultrafast computers and fiber optic communication” also made a significant contribution to the development of a “cold laser”, which are actively used when reading and writing CDs.