Oct. 1, 1982: Portable Music Enters the Spin Zone
1982: Sony starts selling the first CD players to the public. Change is in the air.
Once upon a time cassettes were the preferred method of storing music. These mighty rectangles of plastic and magnetic tape allowed for easy recording, flaunted ample capacities, and were effortlessly portable. (If you weren’t worried about portability, there was still the reliable LP vinyl phonograph disc.)
And yet cassettes sucked.
Tapes easily wore out after repeated use, they were prone to kraken-like tangles, and audio fidelity was about as sharp as a bowling ball. By the mid ’70s electronics behemoth Sony was eager to replace cassettes with a high-quality digital format.
The firm demoed an optical digital-audio disc in 1978 that could hold 2½ hours of music with 16-bit linear resolution and cross-interleaved error-correction code. Sony used this optical disc as a template, and four years later released the very first commercial compact disc player.
The CDP-101 did not come cheap nor did it come svelte. Early adopters had to part ways with the equivalent of $2,200 in today’s ducats for a single 14 x 5 x 12½-inch unit. Worse yet, the CD player’s media library was pathetic. At launch a mere 113 albums were available for purchase.
Compact discs themselves were not exactly inexpensive either. A single album sold for around $33 to $45 in today’s currency.
ut that didn’t stop folks from buying in. Classical music snobs and serious audiophiles went gaga for the stratospheric increase in sonic quality that came with the compact disc.
Mozart and Beethoven were some of the first artists on CD, and the ability to fit Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on a single disc at least partly determined the CD’s capacity. Some classical fans complained of tinniness or excessive crispness in the sound mix, but that eventually faded away as audio engineers learned how to optimize quality in the new medium.
Sony sold 20,000 CDP-101s by the end of 1982. Less than a year later digital music exploded like a Michael Bay film. CBS records issued 16 new titles on CD in March of 1983.
In 1985, the Dire Straights album, Brothers in Arms would be the first CD to sell over a million copies. More than 400 million CDs were produced in 1988 by some 50 factories scattered around the world.
Compact discs were thought of as the heir apparent to both cassettes and vinyl. It turns out the format would also pave a binary-coded road for almost all forms of digital media we use today. Everything from CD-ROMs to Blu-rays to USB sticks to MP3s — which in their own turn essentially killed the CD format — can all trace their lineage back to the success of the CDP-101.