at 17:38 on August 16, 2007, EST.
By TOSTERLING


Pieter Kramer poses for photographers in Eindhoven, Netherlands on Monday. Kramer was a leading engineer on the team that developed the CD, which was launched 25 years ago this Friday, in a joint project by Royal Philips Electronics NV and Sony Inc. of Japan. Kramer is holding a show model of the Compact Disc player, which was introduced in August 1982. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)


EINDHOVEN, Netherlands (AP) - It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany.

An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turns 25 years old on Friday - and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.

Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today, says Holland's Royal Philips Electronics NV, which jointly developed the CD with Sony Corp. of Japan.

The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format.

The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry's recording revenues, but its sales have been in a freefall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.

As the music labels slash wholesale prices and experiment with extras to revive the now-aging format, it's hard to imagine there was ever a day without CDs.

Yet it had been a risky technical endeavour to attempt to bring digital audio to the masses, said Pieter Kramer, the head of the optical research group at Philips' labs in the Netherlands in the 1970s.

"When we started there was nothing in place," he said in an interview at Philips' corporate museum in Eindhoven.

The proposed semiconductor chips needed for CD players were to be the most advanced ever used in a consumer product. And the lasers were still on the drawing board when the companies teamed up in 1979.

In 1980, researchers published what became known as the "Red Book" containing the original CD standards, as well as specifying which patents were held by Philips and which by Sony.

Philips had developed the bulk of the disc and laser technology, while Sony contributed the digital encoding that allowed for smooth, error-free playback. Philips still licenses out the Red Book and its later incarnations, notably for the CD-ROM for storing computer software and other data.

The CD's design drew inspiration from vinyl records: Like the grooves on a record, CDs are engraved with a spiral of tiny pits that are scanned by a laser - the equivalent of a record player's needle. The reflected light is encoded into millions of 0s and 1s: a digital file.

Because the pits are covered with plastic and the laser's light doesn't wear them down, the CD never loses sound quality.

Legends abound about how the size of the CD was chosen: Some said it matched a Dutch beer coaster; others believe a famous conductor or Sony executive wanted it just long enough for Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

Kramer said the decision evolved from "long conversations around the table" about which play length made the most sense.

The jump into mass production in Germany was a milestone for the CD, and by 1982 the companies announced their product was ready for market. Both began selling players that fall, though the machines only hit U.S. markets the following spring.

Sony sold the first player in Japan on Oct. 1, with the CBS label supplying Billy Joel's "52nd Street" as its first album.

The CD was a massive hit. Sony sold more players, especially once its "Discman" series was introduced in 1984. But Philips benefited from CD sales, too, thanks to its ownership of Polygram, now part of Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group.

The CD player helped Philips maintain its position as Europe's largest maker of consumer electronics until it was eclipsed by Nokia Corp. in the late 1990s. Licensing royalties sustained the company through bad times.

"The CD was in itself an easy product to market," said Philips' current marketing chief for consumer electronics, Lucas Covers. It wasn't just the sound quality - discs looked like jewelry in comparison to LPs.

By 1986, CD players were outselling record players, and by 1988 CDs outsold records.

"It was a massive turnaround for the whole market," Covers said.

Now, the CD may be seeing the end of its days.

CD sales have fallen sharply to 553 million sold in the United States last year, a 22 per cent drop from its 2001 peak of 712 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Napster and later Kazaa and BitTorrent allowed music fans to easily share songs over the Internet, often illegally. More recently, Apple Inc. and other companies began selling legal music downloads, turning the MP3 and other digital audio formats into the medium of choice for many owners of Apple's iPods and other digital players.

"The MP3 and all the little things that the boys and girls have in their pockets ... can replace it, absolutely," said Kramer, the retired engineer.

CDs won't disappear overnight, but its years may be numbered.

Record labels seeking to revive the format have experimented with hybrid CD-DVD combos and packages of traditional CDs with separate DVDs that carry video and multimedia offerings playable on computers.

The efforts have been mixed at best, with some attempts, such as the DualDisc that debuted in 2004, not finding lasting success in the marketplace.

Kramer said it has been satisfying to witness the CD's long run at the top and know he had a small hand in its creation.

"You never know how long a standard will last," he said. "But it was a solid, good standard and still is."

-

Associated Press Business Writer Alex Veiga contributed to this report from Los Angeles.


©The Canadian Press, 2007

Notice that they said "little things". I'm sorry but size does matter. How in the hell are you going to throw a party and shake the walls with a modernized version of a damn Walkman radio? I guess everyone will gather around the headphones. That just goes to show how dull this new generation has become. Do they even throw parties anymore?



Which is a shame because there are still a ton of folks that cannot afford computers or these other little gadgets that are out there these days. Not to mention an expensive monthly fee for high speed internet in order to download songs even if they could scrape up enough money for a computer. Hell, I couldn't afford a CD player until 1994. During the early 1990s when vinyl became extinct, I had to buy those crappy cassette tapes.

It just goes to show that they only seem to be concerned with rich little teenagers who have mommy and daddy to buy them all the latest little expensive gadgets. Working class grown ups can't afford all that shit.

Oh well, it almost makes me kinda glad that there isn't any good new music being made these days because I wouldn't be able to afford the computers and internet service it takes to get the music.

Anyway, as far as CDs go, they are pretty good, but I still prefer vinyl.
.
.
[Edited 8/17/07 10:26am]

this was bound to happen for a while . would be a darn shame if cds werent sold at all. so if you would download legaly you would have to need an mp3 player or something like that just to hear them.

all these new technology isnt better then the technology we already had
that goes for music ( instruments oposite to computer programs) and that goes for records cds vs mp3s.

i think i would cry when disapeared but then again there isnt great music created today its rare to hear new great exciting music

you changed your avatar! so, no more morales?

Fuck, I learning shit like this!

I remember the mainstream stores stopped bringing in records by 1990.

I wonder how the industry saw cassettes! It seems like the cassette market was bigger than both records and CDs in the late 80s/early 90s.

Seems to me* that the cassette format was eventually eclipsed by CDs, but they gloss right over that in this article?

*Maybe it's because I was buying rap which had a huge cassette market in the late 80s (and as a result some of those original CDs can fetch a steep price on eBay).

dammme said:

i know, it's sad

WHY I LOVE CD's:

luv4u, thank you for posting this.

vainandy said:

U kiddin' me? The docking interface on an iPod hooks into some very powerful home theater equipment (called iHomes). Plus if you're hacker enuff you can download a wealth of software that puts crossfaders equalizera and an entire mixing studio on your player (for the record "iPod" is just a brand name for an MP3 player. That's what it is if you strip off the proprietary I-Tunes crap. Check rockbox.org).

Well as i have said before the industry is shooting itself in the foot on this issue, and its not that they arent embracing "digital", its the fact that they are eliminating CD's from the one audience that is still buying them, the older crowd. Now i was in Music Retail for a long time, and when i started CD's were taking over, but we still had vinyl, but were beginning to downsize it, the process was pretty quick i must say, but all along you had DJ's and the older folks with their Vinyl wondering where the hell where they gonna get records now, well some of the older group went to tapes but that was phased out later. The thing is now, you are bringing in a whole "Digital" era, one that is different for everyone, you see a cd is a cd, it took some awhile to adapt but not many gavve up on music when cd's took over. But Digital is killing off a whole audience in my opinion, the process of downloading varies depending on your computer and your patience, and sorry to say that older crowd, the one that still BUYS music is not coming along this time like they did for CD's. There is gonna have to be something that is affordable, like the cd player was, and simple so everyone can get it, or else, you are not only seeing the end of cd's, you will see the end of consumers.

Cinnie said:

You're welcome

I think it's interesting what didn't happen to Compact Disc Digital Audio, rather than what did.

01. The Pre-Emphasis Flag

Early CDs included a code called a "Pre-Emphasis" flag. It was used because record companies sometimes used the same master tapes for CDs as they did for Cassettes. Because of Cassette Tapes' Dolby-compatible mastering, the treble would sound unnaturally loud if the pre-emphasis flag wasn't included to instruct your CD Player to turn down the treble automatically.

Some cheap CD players will ignore the pre-emphasis flag completely, which is why older CDs may sound artificially shiney (or lacking bass) when played. Only two ripping programs that I'm aware of will read the pre-emphasis flag, one being E.A.C. and the other being iTunes. If an old CD sounds great on your home stereo but sounds like shit when played on your home computer (or ripped to the hard drive), this is most likely the reason why.

Beatles fans are well-aware that the cassette master of Abbey Road sounds better than the overtly-cautious CD master released in 1987. A version of Abbey Road was released early on CD in Japan in 1983 which uses the cassette master and the pre-emphasis flag. It's known as the Toshiba Black Triangle version (due to the black triangle logo printed on the disc).

http://www.google.co.uk/s...asis&meta=

The pre-emphasis flag is rarely used these days, as record companies started to make a separate master for CDs (as they had already previously done for vinyl and cassette). However, even with the hiss and rumble of cassette tape, some of my tapes still sound better than their CD counterparts - Sign O' The Times being a good example.

02. CD+G

CD+G - or CD with graphics which can be displayed via a dedicated karaoke player, DVD player or an old CD-I player. Every CD has the capacity to include rudimentary graphics like sing-a-long lyrics, regardless of how much musical data is stored on the disc. I've always found it odd that record companies never included lyrics as standard, especially when DVD Players became so popular.

03. Multi-Channel PCM Audio

Four Channel PCM audio is accomodated within the standard CD specification, but has never been utilised commercially (presumably because it would halve the playing time). Multi-channel CDs containing DTS-encoded audio exist, but these are basically CD-ROM discs holding compressed audio data (rather than uncompressed PCM wave files) which require equipment with DTS-decoding capabilities to play.

p.s. This thread is in the wrong forum - it's about technology rather than music.

Ummm, I was thinking about something...

Will the digital downloads KILL the VIDEO STAR?

C'mon, A LOT of the current pop/rock acts uses the CD booklet to give to their fans a lot of pictures of the their pretty faces (Timberlake, etc.), their fantastic bodies (Beyonce, etc.) or other arty photos to hook the alternative-"serious"( ) music fans (Arcade Fire, etc.), but the digital downloads are completely ANONYMOUS , it's just a green bar in Emule showing that you have downloaded the album, you don't see the artits at all!

I bet that the CD will disappear sooner or later ( ), but the COVER of the albums will disappear as well...it's time for the ugly musicians to get major sells again...
[Edited 8/18/07 4:13am]

Justin1972UK, thanks for the extra info!
[Edited 8/18/07 10:13am]

Cinnie said:

actually this is not totally true.

some of my oldest cds from the eighties... the metal foil inside has started to detriorate and if you hold it up to the light u can see some of the pits are missing.

I thought technology was music.

novabrkr said:

http://www.thefreediction...technology

See! I was right.

novabrkr said:

Cinnie said:

That's laser-rot. It only occurs when the CD has been manufactured incorrectly. It won't necessarily happen to all CDs. It occurs when oxygen has become glued inside the layers of the disc during manufacture.

novabrkr said: