Are CDs Making a Comeback?

This Metallica CD hasn't always been my coffee roller coaster. Music used to come from it, and for 40 years this summer, that's been the case for hundreds of billions of other compact discs. CD sales actually rose for the first time in almost two decades in the US. Last year sales of vinyl and cassettes also increased, so it's worth asking in this 40th year of the CD whether its glory days have been sold out or, like many optimistic four-year-olds, believe that life only begins at 40. CDs were developed during the 1970s by Philips and Sony and the first player went on sale in Japan on October 1, 1982.

The Sony CDP 101 cost around a thousand dollars, equivalent to about three thousand dollars today. Consumers were told that the convenience and sonic prowess of the all-digital CD made it a no-brainer. bulky vinyl records or uncomfortable cassette tapes and not only in homes in two years Sony had launched a portable CD player and another that fits in cars. Adoption grew exponentially in 1984. CDs only accounted for about two percent of recorded music sales in the US in 1985. It was nine percent and in 1986 it was 20, but they had really only been shown parts of the magic of CDs, at the time consumers had no idea that the technology held a big secret: the fact that CDs were not invented just to store audio, they were not actually created to store binary data that in In the first instance they were digitized sound recordings behind the scenes, engineers were figuring out how to format computer data for them.

Floppy disks at the time stored less than two megabytes of data, while CDs could store hundreds. Philips and Sony I have been working with computing giants, including Apple and Microsoft, among others, and the first computer CD-ROMs arrived in 1986. CD-ROMs quickly took off in much the same way as their Sonic siblings and in much the same way as the successful formula of simplicity and adaptability of the first iPhone CD that it seemed to be. unstoppable also like the iphone experiments on how it could be exploited were routine, some failed from the start of course in 1991 philips launched the cdi system, this 800 cd player connected to televisions rather than hifis or pc's and, although it played music, it also supported interactive video and even games, but the CDI cost too much.

I tried to do too much and it didn't accomplish anything very well. Sony succeeded where Philips had failed by putting the technology into something that people already knew how to use games consoles and in 1995 we got the playstation it could even play audio CDs and in fact the music from many playstation games was stored on the discs as cd audio files, you could literally put them into a hifi and play the soundtracks on there if you wanted, the cds hadn't shown up yet. all they could offer in 1995 also Philip said he had created specifications for a rewritable disk aimed at the corporate market.

He had already created blank CDs with Sony that could be written to at home using high-fidelity recordable players or expensive computer drives in the At the turn of the millennium there were still few signs that CDs were slowing down, even as the Internet took off with strength in homes, campuses and businesses around the world. In the United States, CDs accounted for about 95 percent of all recorded music sales in 2000, yet no one anticipated this. that CD had an Achilles heel. Students on campuses around the world had learned about Napster at the turn of the millennium, hence the famous lawsuit with Metallica, and we're

making

perfect copies of each other's music collections in a way that's neither Sony Philips nor anyone else. .

Another company responsible for the development of CDs had shortly anticipated that the same thing would happen with infinitely replicable software without loss of data, something that could never have happened with vinyl or on the same scale with floppy disks, the lawsuits and the drop in sales. of recorded music that resulted from napster and its imitators are well documented, but while the industry suffered greatly at the hands of piracy, it also forced the hand of innovation and the result was iTunes and then Spotify and you know the rest, so 40 years later is indicative of a slight increase in CD sales. of a revival of the format, I'm afraid almost certainly not in the heyday of the CD, they may not have offered that collectible appeal and beauty of a gatefold vinyl package, but what it did offer in sound quality and convenience was valued so much that no matter how magnified by the adoption of CD-ROMs in consoles and PCs, the versatility of what you can do with a CD and where you can do it simply cannot be competed with today, that convenience and versatility come with the Internet and apps, while vinyl, which outsold CDs last year, is the experiential collectible option for many people.

It's large, very easy to autograph, and lovely to place in a collector's frame. It also sounds fantastic with the right hardware and has no competition now that it had in the 1990s, which is why it is flourishing. The CD is something very special, being a game-changer like the iPhone or even the Web in many ways, but while it may be enjoying a successful little flame on its 40th birthday, it's almost certainly one last hurrah. after. a lifetime changing the world, you may have your own cd memories or spiritual relatives, the super audio cd, the laserdisc or the minidisc, find me on social media and let's chat about them for a quick viewing in london.

I'm nate langston and I've been technically speaking.