1984 News Story on Debut of the Compact Disc (CD)

The DADC guy did though

 

Frank's two-tone mullet is/was... unique.

 

I appreciate it because I was thinking as I read the title, "We've had this thread before".

 

thanks

thanks for the post it was really insightful

 

My mind is reeling from the idea that a book, maybe even a whole dictionary could be contained on a single disk. My floppy drive is dying and this may be a solution for me. Where can you buy these things?

 

That clip has been posted a few times over the years. It's a fun watch, I just wish they would have showed the label side of more of his CD's in his collection. That was me a little less than a year later (early 1986), buying CD's before I had an actual CD player. Minus the Mullet of course.

 

Dodgy mullet aside, actually think the guy was spot on in what he said. I'm not sure how good his 1985 Teac CD setup was, but he was right about CD playback being clean with no noise. I have yet to be convinced that playback of an LP is intrinsically superior to CD.

 

When did radio stations start getting CDs? I seem to remember my local rock station playing CDs in 82 or 83.

Chad

 

This was awesome! Thanks for posting. Too bad I was only 4 when CD's began to hit the market. It wasn't until the early to mid '90s that I began to buy CDs.

 

You didn't really miss all that much. For a while at the outset there were only two or three plants in the world capable of manufacturing CD's and the selection was quite limited. By the early to mid '90's things were quite different.

 

Nice clip!

I started getting CDs in 1985, my wife bought me a player and 5 CDs for my birthday. A Pioneer PD-70 I believe. My first CDs all seemed to be either Columbia, Billy Joel Greatest Hits Vol 1 and 2, Santana Zebop and Greatest Hits and Warner titles, The Doors Self Titled and LA Woman. Was Capitol/EMI late to the CD party?

BTW everybody in the Fire Department came over to my house to hear my new CD player as I was the first one of the guys to get one. Of course we had to crank it up. I had a Sansui 150 watt reciever and Kenwood triple 8 speakers. We shook the house!

 

Capitol/EMI had released CDs by 1985. However, as was stated in that 1985 news report, CDs were not so easy to find back then. Also, CD manufacturing was just ramping up in '85. It could be that Capitol/EMI was still importing CDs to the U.S. at that time, while CBS had their U.S. DADC plant up and running. I would therefore have expected that CBS discs would have easier to find in the U.S. than Capitol/EMI CDs.

You mentioned the Pioneer PD-70. Was that one of their heavy-duty Elite models? If so, that must have been a sweet player. Do you still have it? You said "PD-70 I believe", so it sounds like you no longer have it.

 

I am curious too. I tried a www search, but to no avail. Hopefully Pioneer expert McGyver will catch this thread

edit: it must be P-D70

http://www.tapeheads.net/showthread.php?t=329

http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll310/shaorin-chan/PIONEER/P-D705.jpg

 

http://stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=237878

 

I like how he puts the disc in the player upside down (shiny side up), for the sake of the camera person, so they can show the shiny disc and not the labels.

 

Radio and print were still serviced with vinyl for years -- no way the record companies were going to give "expensive" cds away for promotional value. The first album that I ever received a promotional copy on CD was Van Morrison's "Poetic Champions Compose," 1987.

 

He would have had no choice. Some players read discs that way. Pioneer used that type of laser assembly in their later models with Legato Link.

 

Brave new world. Funny how in retrospect CDs were "the thing" in the 80's and a lot of collectors sold well cared vinyl collections. Vinyl was virtually worthess cirka 1987 while people would even shell out for second hand CDs. I got talked into the digital world too but deceided I just don't like interacting with silverdiscs in plasticboxes, sold my 1000+ CD collection and got back into vinyl. Thank god that was in the late 90's when CDs still could be sold....

 

That's interesting- I never knew any players accepted/played discs like that. You'd think that inserting them text-side-up would have been part of the standard for manufacturing players, no?

 

Yup. I still have a Pioneer Elite PD-65 that takes the CDs data side up. It's the only player I've owned like that.

I've seen some promotional pictures of other CD players from the '80s that showed a blank silver side of a CD facing up. Either these players took the disc upside down like those Pioneer players or they wanted to avoid showing a label design for copyright/licensing purposes. Besides, the shiny side looked good for the pictures. They also could have been using "dummy discs" with no label for these promo shots.

 

I also bought CDs before I had a player. I worked at a Musicland in a mall near Cleveland, and there was a stereo store in the mall with these "new" CD players, along with a small selection of CDs (this was 1985). Later that year, they decided to just focus on the equipment, and sold off their remaining CDs for about $9.99. Sensing a bargain, I bought Phantoms by The Fixx and Steeltown by Big Country. I went back and got The Hurting by Tears For Fears. I would take them to the May Company in the mall and "test" out the CD players there. I would then sit at home and just look at the discs (I was still a teenager). My mom got the hint and got me a player for Xmas that year. I never looked back!!

At the time, the record store had 1 bin of CDs, almost all in blister packs. It didn't take long for the selection to increase to 2 bins, then 3, etc. But, as others have noted, it often took a few weeks after the album/cassette release date before a CD was available, if at all.

I'm not really into astrology anymore, but I was as a kid, and I once read a description of my sign paired with my rising sign, and it said "Loves gadgets. Probably the first on the block with a CD player." And I was.

Dude in that YouTube video had some great records/discs in his collection!!!

 

This is the one I had. Single tray and cost $275 at the Base Exchange on Crete Greece. I was stationed there from 84-86 while in the Air Force. I should have a picture around the house where one of my friends and I are playing with slot cars with music playing in the background so you can see my old setup. I'll try and locate it. This was probably one of the first players to be priced under $500.

 

Thanks. Cool player. It may have been made before Pioneer used the Elite name on their top models. Not to get caught up in semantics, but you referred to it as the "PD-70", which is in the form of Elite players made in the '80s into the '90s. There was a PD-75 in the Elite line, and I have an Elite PD-65. I thought at first that your "PD-70" was in that line, but now I see that it is actually labeled "P-D70", which marcel did mention above.

It seems like you got a good deal on that P-D70 back in the day.

 

An errors were always happen...

 

An interesting article in the Guardian today..

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jul/29/how-we-made-the-compact-disc-cd?CMP=fb_gu