The Compact disc is 30 years old today

The CD is 30 years old today

 

You obviously have never been DJing at a party.

 

I still love the CD. Happy Birthday!!!

 

Happy Birthday!

I still remember my 1st 2 CDs I ever purchased...Gen X "Kiss Me Deadly" and The Beatles "Revolver". What was that like 1987??? I had a 2nd hand 2 year old sony cd walkman that slid into a base for interfacing it to your stereo. It was magical!

 

Hip hop has been in existence even longer than CDs, I suppose on the basis of the bolded paragraph, you're going to claim that that has similarly had an irrecoverable detrimental effect on popular music?

 

Huh? How does that even follow?

 

Obviously you're overlooking the many quality issues with vinyl at the time (war page,off center,noisy pressings) and having to schlep them back to where you bought them from.In fact while turntables and vinyl hardware in general has improved by leaps and bounds vinyl records really haven't-in fact one could argue vinyl quality has actually gone down in 2012 compared to the 70s...

 

Well, on the basis of his comment about popular music having been a sick puppy for twenty years, his post smacked of the ramblings of a premature fuddy-duddy who is still unable to accept technological (and probably stylistic) innovation in music thirty years on, regarding what still remains a very viable recording medium and still the most popular even in this current age of downloads and YouTube - pretty sad for someone who was only 25 when the CD came out.

It may be an unfair assumption, but that's the impression I got based on his post and the general trend regarding the musical tastes of those on here who have expressed similarly conservative views.

 

Remember when the only CD recordings of Beatles material commonly available in the US was on George Harrison's Best-Of disc?

Then a coupled more trickled out on the IMAGINE soundtrack?

Harry

 

I bought my first player in March of 1984 (a Yamaha CD-X1) right off the boat in Long Beach. It was $700+, and this was at a time I was making $18K a year working for the City of Burbank. I still remember the first 5 CD's I bought at Music Plus in Glendale.

 

I am buying a lot of CDs....finally starting to buy CDs to go along with (not replace) my records so I can rip them to my jukebox. With diving prices it's like buying records in the late 90's.

with a 30th Anniversary I start to wonder how long of a shelf life these silver discs will have. When I bought my first MFSL gold CD in the 80's the stereo store rep told me my "Aja" gold CD would last longer (he never mentioned it would sound better).

CDs are segmenting into over produced big selling discount rack fodder and lower volume collectibles potentially not available for streaming. I would hate for my big dollar collectible CDs to one day not be readable.


My first CD was "Brilliant Trees" by David Sylvian.

 

Neil Diamonds 12 Greatest Hits and Dan Fogelbergs Nether Lands. I had them for months before I had a player. I was very familiar with the Fogelberg album but the Neil Diamond music was new to me (other than what I had heard on the radio of course).

My girlfriend at the time (1986) found a CD copy of The Beatles Live in Hamburg, on the K-Tel label. Not exactly the best recording to show off the new format, but I still have the disk. It felt like forever until the actual catalog came out (I know it was 1987 but A LOT of releases came out before the Beatles albums).

 

I bought my first CD player in 1985.



It proclaims:

"Yamaha Natural Sound Compact Disc Player CD-X2", "Original Music Processing LSIs", "Double Resolution Digital Filter". Which means 2X oversampling.

My favorite feature with this CD player was the splitting of an album into two parts, if you wanted to make a copy to tape (45, 60, or 90 minutes). Basically, it was an early version of scrambling the album.

 

It seems to me his comments were all about the format and some possible business reasons for its introduction (i.e., the problem in trying to raise record prices). I don't know if it's entirely factual, but it does have the ring of truth to it. It certainly was a convenient way to raise the average price of an album to $18.99, wasn't it?

I don't see any way that you can read all this stuff about "fuddy-duddy", "unable to accept stylistic innovation", etc into his post. It seems you've just decided that anyone who doesn't go rah-rah for 30-year old technology is just some kind of luddite. Which is more of a head-scratcher than the notion that the CD was more of a way to sell music for twice the price than it was the best possible method of sound reproduction.

Anyway, I just find the whole thought process here confusing - ls35a doesn't like the CD, the CD is 30 years old, hip-hop is older, ls35a is a "conservative fuddy-duddy" because he doesn't like a 30-year old technology, ls35a must not like hip hip because it's older than the CD, because "fuddy-duddys" hate old stuff, what?

 

The CD to me was and is a fantastic format. My first cd was Motley Crue's "Decade of Decadence" compilation in '91. Second was Nirvana's "Nevermind" and third was The Four Horseman's "Nobody Said it was Easy".

To me, I thought everything about the cd was better than tapes and records. They were more compact (well, not compared to cassettes), they were durable, easy to skip songs, easy to play, portable, scratches didn't affect the sound, etc. The sound was so much better than cassette (my format of choice up until then).

The only thing that is debatable is the sound compared to vinyl. But to me, the fact that there is so much debate regarding vinyl vs cd, leads me to believe that cds sound pretty darn good. I mean, no one says that MP3s are better than cds?

 

The CD to me was and is a fantastic format. My first cd was Motley Crue's "Decade of Decadence" compilation in '91. Second was Nirvana's "Nevermind" and third was The Four Horseman's "Nobody Said it was Easy".

To me, I thought everything about the cd was better than tapes and records. They were more compact (well, not compared to cassettes), they were durable, easy to skip songs, easy to play, portable, scratches didn't affect the sound, etc. The sound was so much better than cassette (my format of choice up until then).

The only thing that is debatable is the sound compared to vinyl. But to me, the fact that there is so much debate regarding vinyl vs cd, leads me to believe that cds sound pretty darn good. I mean, no one says that MP3s sound better than cds?

 

1st CD was Queen's A Kind Of Magic, along with my first CD player (Sharp) Late '87.

 

The CD had a good run and provided me with a lot of enjoyment in my life.

That being said, bring on high res downloads!

 

Right here. So far, 5 CDs and 1 hybrid SACD (Billy Joel's "The Nylon Curtain") ordered for the day.

 

Not meaning to drag this too far off-topic, but my response was more to the part "I don't think its an accident that popular music has been as Frank Zappa put it a 'sick puppy' for twenty years now" than the rest of his post*.

When people like to state music has been in decline for a long time, it's usually one or more of several reasons: punk, MTV, rap or preponderance of dance pop - I don't like to generalize, but I've seen it here all too often.

I was just using the hip hop genre, as something that still sounds modern and forbidding to many and is not greatly loved on here, as a loose analogy; I didn't explicitly state he must not like hip hop, but given his distaste for the CD I was wondering whether he felt that hip hop was similarly had a bad influence on popular music given that has been around for a similarly long time to the CD.

*Unless his comment was more a general remark about the musical industry, the way popular music has been marketed and distributed thanks to the CD, and sound quality issues, than any recent stylistic trends he doesn't care for.

 

The first 2 CDs I bought were Linda Ronstadt's Greatest Hits and Phil Collins' 'Hello I Must Be Going'. This was in the last few days of December, 1984. I had won a CD player in a radio contest and picked these 2 CDs out of the 100 or so available titles at the local record store. The CD player (AIWA) stopped working after 3 years and was replaced by a Technics that sounded better and lasted almost 20 years.

 

The Audiophiliac's blog on the 30th anniversary of CD's arrival

 

I had followed the development of the CD since 1979.

My first experience in hearing a CD was in 1984 in some stereo shop in a Tucson mall. I was blown away by the clarity and dead-silent gaps. No wear, random access, all on a little shiny disc! I had to have one!

I bought a CD that Christmas, one that spring, and waited for my bonus money from my job to buy a player, plus three more CDs. Oh, I realized that the sound was not perfect, but for the first time, I felt like I heard the master tapes. Tape hiss! I quickly built up a massive CD collection over the years and abandoned the vinyl format for years, even though I kept my turntable hooked up for those cases where I had to tape a record for a comp.

I stuck with my awful-sounding CD player until I desired a CD changer in the early 90s. By then, the converters had greatly improved. I also bought a new receiver with more power which opened up much better, smoother sound. Finally, I heard depth and warmth from my CDs! Before, everything had sounded trebly bright. I thought that's the way the music really sounded until that point. At that point, I became a full-blown audiophile.

Today, with hi-rez, I know CD isn't so great, but it's still not so bad when done right. CD was so cool because no longer did we have to deal with cleaning or tape jams. No more warped media, as manufactured CDs can stand up to somewhere around 270 degrees fahrenheit. All I needed after that was the ability to record onto CDs...


Here is my first CD player:

 

Seeing as every other word of his post was about the way popular music has been marketed and distributed thanks to the CD, I'd say that's a fair bet as to what he meant.

He doesn't like the CD for very specific reasons that he explained in his post and none of them have anything to do with hip hop.

 

WG Blackface Harvest, I presume



btw, Happy B-day CD!



due to age and budget, I started some years late; my first CDs were Tears for fears' The seeds of love and Dire Straits s/t. First CD player arrived some years later (Thanks Daddy ), a made in Belgium Marantz CD 52; now rarely used but still working perfectly and as new cosmetically too (yes, I've been OCD all my life)!