Introducing The Amazing Compact Disc | 1982 | Retro vintage 80s technology

and the shin, thank you, Mr. Kirkby will let you know these days that it is nothing more than a valuable antique, but when this phonograph first came on the market in 194, it and the phonographs that preceded it were part of a minor miracle , these things with their recordings on wax cylinders. forever altered the way humans entertained themselves. For the first time, music was available at will in the home for those who were not wealthy enough to maintain a private orchestra. The first recording ever made was of these words. the L was going to disappear, that was in 1887, the speaker was Thomas Edison himself.

Florence Nightingale describing the battle of balac clava followed the same as many other recordings of music and poetry. Tennyson's reading selections from M were very popular around 1890, but the cylinders were eventually replaced by flats. recordings, this is the Edison Diamond record from 1889, bakerite and shellac, fragile, heavy and very, very thick, as the '78s progressed, they lost a little weight as the records changed, as did, of course , the players. This is the Rams Horn player, obvious where it got its name from. The sound is taken in mechanically down here and then travels acoustically down the tube and out of the speaker.

There are no amplifiers or electronic devices. Sometimes these came with bamboo needles that had to be sharpened after each record in the 1920s. This was the height of elegance it had. metal needles literally very sharp needles and a very heavy head also had to be wound mechanically electricity of course was the power source in the 50's when the gramophone and radio shared a cabinet making the radiogram Now the long play record began from Micr Grove to dominate the market and with minor improvements has been with us ever since, but isn't there something better? And what you just heard is the latest in recorded sound.

It will make all conventional record and cassette systems obsolete. It is dust and scratch proof. digitally recorded test read by a laser and it is called a

compact

disc

and that is the biggest revolution in the recording industry since the invention of the long-playing gramophone record, but this is not an ordinary record of only 12 cm in diameter, the music is digitally recorded on it. and there is no stylus dragged through a slot, that information is read by a laser light and this is the little laser that does all the work, a small low-power semiconductor that emits invisible infrared light and plays the record inside out. outside, magnified 12,000 times more.

This is what the surface of the

compact

disc

looks like. You can see the thousands of tiny holes and grooves that the laser has cut into a thin sheet of plastic when it is monitored or read by another laser in the playback machine. The lengths of the slots and the distances between them give variable light patterns which are then captured by a small diode and, unlike a conventional gramophone record, this one is completely fingerprint and dust proof because the information is stored under a plastic film, it doesn't really matter how much you manipulate it. disc in particular will still provide very good audio quality this is a single sided disc on the other side simply the label of the disc and the turntable that plays it is also surprisingly small and compact that information is read by a laser the bottom simply places The record sits there like a conventional record player and that's it,

introducing

new

technology

to a popular market.

It has its own problems. The battle between cartridges and cassettes greatly confused the consumer and it took about a decade for cassettes to appear. establish a clear advantage the big manufacturers have learned from that experience with the laser audio disc two of the biggest Phillips and Sony have teamed up to produce Compatible hardware half a world from Holland in Tokyo Ian Finlay discovered that although their players look different the records are exactly the same just pause it for a moment the thing is that it is very difficult to try to transmit the sound to you now in this way when you are listening on a conventional television uh and also we are recording on a conventional recorder, so no we can communicate with you in terms of sound, uh, what this thing can do, but it basically revolves around five things, the background noise, the background, there's virtually no background noise, there's no hiss or anything like that. . there is no surprise or flutter.

Distortion is only 05%, which is very, very good, as any high-five fan will know that the frequency response is more or less similar to existing hi-fi equipment between 20 and 20,000 Hertz. The most important thing I can say about the frequency response though is that it is absolutely flat, with no pits or rises at all and finally, the most important thing is that the Dynam DC range is a remarkable 90 DB, which, uh , Hi-Fi fans will agree, it's very, uh, it's very notable, the player itself. It's a big step up from conventional turntables because it gives you the same type of control you have on a recorder, fast forward and fast reverse scan pause and stop buttons, and the ability to instantly select any track you want.

It also has some programmable memory. so that instead of playing the tracks in the correct order 1 2 3 4 5 and so on, you can select your own sequence beforehand so that they play in the order you want and meanwhile the monitor tells you which track you are on and how many minutes and seconds has been playing, plus all that little computerized Marvel is packed into something that you can pick up and move like that, even shake it and nothing happens, which is pretty incredible and means it has huge potential eventually once in the future such maybe get a little more compact uh for the car audio industry, plus the players will be released in late '82 in Japan and the United States in Australia and Europe sometime in '83.

They cost between $6 and $800 and the Records shouldn't be more expensive than records now in a way that everything sounds too good to be true. Other Heaven Knows systems have failed to deliver on their pre-release promises to change the way we hear quadraphonic sound. for example, it starved when not enough quadruple albums were released, but with compact discs we're sure there will be a continuous river of material. Seven major record companies have already signed up to produce on the system with hardware and software, both CDs lined up. He may well rule the roost at least until someone perfects a method of putting Beethoven's Ninth on a silicon chip.

Dont laugh. I'm sure that day is not far away.