From the compact disc catalogue 1983. Shame that ideal seemed to be forgotten from the mid 90s onwards. For decades, the recording industry and audio manufacturers the world over have striven to realize their goal of re-creating in your living room the sound of a live performance...the sound of the concert hall. That goal has been elusive, until now. The Compact Disc Digital Audio System opens the door to concert hall sound in the home, bringing to the music listener’s ears a standard of sound reproduction sparkling with clarity, offering the breath-taking dynamic range heard until now only in the concert hall, and undisturbed by noise and distortion. Pure, Perfect Sound, Forever.
Undisturbed by noise and distortion? Yet In some cases cds made noise and distortion even more audible from the "original analog tapes" original CDs of Rolling Stones sticky fingers, the who By Numbers, yes fragile
The CD had to contain Beethoven's 9th Symphony without break AND it had to fit in the DIN dashboard cutout then standard in cars. Thus the 5.25" size and sampling rate.
i always thought it was to make all the boomers re-buy their entire record collection they had amassed since childhood. so artists and record companies could make more money without doing anything. kind of like anniversary re-issues and live CD's being released today.
No need to overthink it. The CD had a number of obvious advantages over vinyl and tape for the casual music consumer.
respectfully disagree.......the lack of quality control of CD's is the crime. the biggest crime against humanity of all time was the release of the cellular telephone.
Avoidance of the typical vinyl pitfalls...skips, vinyl wear, groove distortion, snaps, crackles and pops, etc. The notes on certain cd releases did specify "this compact disc contains program transferred from analog tape and therefore may contain some tape hiss and other anomalies that exist with analog recordings". I always enjoyed that transparency. If the anomalies are on the tape itself, I'm ok with those. But, as we all know...many times tape copies were used...and those tapes may have contained anomalies not on the 1st generation master mixdown tapes.
When the CD was introduced it was considered, I think, as an answer to a lot of the problems brought in by low quality vinyl. Think regrind, warpage, thinner Lps, the gas crunch etc., and with a lot of big sellers it just wasn't as easy to get great sounding copies as it was in the 50's and 60's. A lot harder to get a stone mint copy off the shelf, as it were. All I wanted out of the Cd was for it to sound like a mint copy of my favorite records. Of course the button pushers went overboard with their new toys and blew things up and overdid it. Hence taking a decent, though not perfect idea, and , in many cases ruining it.
possibly, but did they envision the horrible monster that it would become? or the ungodly amount of money it would generate?
By this point vinyl technology was essentially the same for many decades so looking for something better was a noble thing. The problems with it are people abusing it.
Like DVD playback will be able to be set for different ages from one disc. A DVD of an R-rated movie could be played as PG with the simple push of one button.
One of the compact disc manufacturing videos posted here from 1982 or so emphasized the dynamic range part, being able to put in bass etc. that otherwise would’ve caused needles to jump. It was surprising that there really wasn’t a lot of back-and-forth on that, except some comments seemingly to the effect that the format appears to have been underutilized.
That is an issue with any audio format, not just CD. A lousy master will result in a lousy release, period. I agree. CD is basically a non-labor intensive format. No need to clean the CD before playing, no components (stylus) to replace, no equipment to maintain (demagnetizing playback head). In one of my magazines about the history of CD, the phrase was actually (IIRC) "The fifth row forever." My own opinion on CD is that CD is perfect within its standards...but it is limited by its standards.
