Compact disc: how October 1982 began the era of digital sound

On 1 October 1982, sales of the first compact discs began in Japan: 50 titles were released that day. The format was developed jointly by Philips and Sony. The Dutch company contributed the overall production process and EFM modulation, while the Japanese one provided the CIRC error-correction system. The CD-DA standard, known as Red Book, had already been published back in 1980. The first disc sold in Japan was a reissue of Billy Joel's 1978 album 52nd Street.

Sound on a compact disc is stored digitally: it is a two-channel 16-bit stereo signal with a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, read by a laser with a wavelength of 780 nm. The Red Book standard allowed four-channel sound as an option, but in practice it was never implemented.

A standard 120 mm disc held up to 74 minutes of sound or about 650 MiB of data. The first production compact disc was manufactured on 17 August 1982; it was a recording of Chopin waltzes performed by Claudio Arrau. The first mass-produced player for consumers, the Sony CDP-101, appeared the same year.

On 14 March 1983, discs and players arrived in Europe and North America, where CBS Records released sixteen titles. Prices for the equipment gradually fell, the portable Discman appeared, and the new format began to displace cassettes.

In 1991, compact discs overtook vinyl records and cassettes in US sales, and by 2000 they accounted for 92.3% of the American music market. In total, more than 200 billion discs were sold worldwide by 2007, including audio CDs, CD-ROMs and CD-Rs.

Computer applications grew out of the audio format. The CD-ROM standard for data was finalized in 1988, and recordable CD-R discs appeared in 1990. Later, rewritable and multimedia variants were added to the family.

From the mid-2000s, disc sales declined because of MP3 and streaming. But the format did not disappear: in Japan it remained dominant for a long time, and in 2021 CD sales in the US rose for the first time since 2004.

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Translation editor: Ловушкин А.