40 Years of the CD

[Jimbo]

Can you believe it has been 40 years since the CD was unleashed on the public? I distinctly remember working in a HIFI business at the time selling Panasonic, Sony, Bang and Olufson and Quad gear when the CD came out and we sold some of the very first CD players including the first Philips CD players one of which I purchased myself along with my first CD - Brothers in Arms.

Those last 40 years were a rollercoaster of digital audio and like many of us on this forum i bought so many CD players over that period I have actually lost both count and memory of all of them. As the technology "improved"?? I moved on believing things were getting better and in many cases the sound did improve as some of the earlier errors were corrected! CD became the main source for me from about 1983 to 2015 and I bought boxes and boxes of those nasty plastic things. I recon 50% of my CD cases broke!

Over those years I felt CD was the tail that wagged the dog as my other HIFI gear was usually considered with the main source being CD and to be honest I tried to ameliorate the sound of CD to make it more pleasant to listen too. This cost me a fortune of those 40 years but in the end I gave up and just accepted CD sounded well like CD. In 2015 I took a 180 degree turn and ended back to where I started with vinyl but that is another story.

I remember standing as I did all day in the Hifi shop listening to all the CD players as they came in and back in 1983 they all had one thing in common, they sounded very clear and very bright. I remember someone telling me that because digital was so perfect I would not be used to the sound and my hearing had to adjust. I believed the bullshit and carried on believing I was listening to a perfect sound no matter how hard it was to actually listen too or enjoy.

As you can imagine selling those early machines back then was one of the biggest jolts of interest the hifi world had ever really known. The technology was amazing and sexy, like something from another universe compared with vinyl! There was almost no comparison apart from both were round discs. CD was shiny and silver, Vinyl was black and boring. CDs could be popped in your pocket and took up way less storage space and they could be spread with marmalade and they still worked. You could open a new vinyl record and cough on it and its quiet days of operation were over!

CD players were electronic marvels, You would go to a shop and just press the drawer opening button for hours and have to eventually be dragged away by the staff. The precision and simplicity of a CD player with remote control was just so nice back then. In your mind you thought of vinyl and that process and equipment and it made you shudder thinking about the effort. So slam dunk, CD was not only the most amazing technology in town it was the future for audio for many years to come and vinyl was going in the skip!

I bought into this big time and remember buying even more copies of hifi mags which covered every twist and turn of the technology. I got my head around lazers and bits ,101010 and brick wall filters and oversampling and error correction and DA convertors and then jitter. Ah this little nugget was to eventually become the achilles heal for CD in my world back in 2014 when I started to understand and put together File Based digital audio - yet another story.

I think ultimately when I look back on my 40 years of CD I came to accept it as a medium for music playback and embraced it fully even though for me there was always a nagging doubt which resulted in lots of alternative systems in my household. The perfect sound of CD was always perfect until the next perfect sound for ever CD player arrived!

Alas this technology for me came to and end in 2015 so 7 years short of its 40th birthday and now it resides collecting dust in the HIFI graveyard in the loft. One day I might get it back down and give it a spin for memories sake and tell my grandchildren this is what we used to play music back in my day. By then they will have some new alien technology that beams perfect sound for ever straight into their brain without any need to buy discs or equipment. Oh yes wake up grandad they already have that, its called streaming!

What were you memories of CD?