Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 20, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
On August 17, 1982, the industrial manufacture of silver discs twelve centimetres in size and 1.1 millimetres thin began in near Hanover for the first time in Europe. A laser beam races at low altitude over the six-kilometre-long running track and optically reads more than a billion pieces of information per CD.
The CD promised digital sound quality without annoying turning over, as well as freedom from noise and crackling. Dust and dirt can simply be wiped away. This was a promise above all for friends of classical music. Nevertheless, in the first years the CD could establish itself only with difficulty against the established long-playing vinyl record. Music experts criticised its sterile sound, and many DJs still prefer to reach for vinyl today. The first silver discs were also significantly more expensive than the LP – quite apart from the first generation of CD players, which came onto the market in October 1982. Thus the CD initially eked out a niche existence in record shops, presented as music of the future in locked glass cases.
As late as 1984, music publishers were very pessimistic about the future of the new sound carrier. That the CD would achieve a market share of 50 percent was probably wishful thinking on the part of its inventors, their association scoffed. But the criticism soon fell silent and the great rearranging began in record shops. In 1990 – eight years after its launch – the CD had already overtaken the top dogs LP, single and music cassette. In 1994, twice as many CDs were sold as all other sound carriers combined. Prices for CD players fell through the floor and were soon cheaper than conventional record players. To date, around 100 billion CDs have been sold.
The Compact Disc was developed by the electronics giants Philips and Sony – the basic material, a polycarbonate, came from chemical group Bayer’s plant in Krefeld-Uerdingen. The industrial giants won an advocate for their new product from the very beginning: Star conductor Herbert von Karajan wanted to see his work digitally preserved and brought to market as quickly as possible. There is a legend with several variants about how the CD came to have its diameter of twelve centimetres: Ludwig van Beethoven’s «Ninth» was to fit completely on the new sound carrier – in its longest version of 74 minutes this corresponds to twelve centimetres – although ten centimetres had actually been planned, which would have fit better in trouser and jacket pockets.
Opinions differ as to which Beethoven lover prevailed with his wish: Sometimes it is said to have been Maestro von Karajan himself, then the Sony boss – several sources, on the other hand, say it was the Japanese man’s wife who defined the world standard of the CD in this way. There is agreement on another dimension of the CD: For its hole in the centre, the tinkerers at Philips simply used the Dutch ten-cent coin as a benchmark. Years late, the CD also achieved an impressive triumph as a mobile data carrier for personal computers, until it was finally the undisputed number-one mobile sound and data carrier. There is now also its rewritable variant and the DVD also appears externally as a CD with significantly more data.
While the world was still in order for the CD’s 20th anniversary and its position seemed unassailable, its throne is now wobbling considerably. With the MP3 file format, music is emancipating itself from its storage medium and can be loaded onto recordable CDs as well as hard drives – from the Internet and without a CD. With the iPod, the CD is finally challenged to a fight – hard drive against CD. Many young people today dispense with the ageing silver discs for their music collection – they need them at most for backup copies of their computer programmes.
