jan 15, 1982 - Compact Disc

Description:

The compact disc is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony and released in 1982. The format was originally developed to store and play only sound recordings but was later adapted for storage of data (CD-ROM). The first commercially available audio CD player, the Sony CDP-101 was released October 1982 in Japan. The logical format of an audio CD (officially Compact Disc Digital Audio or CD-DA) is described in a document produced in 1980 by the format’s joint creators Sony and Philips. The document is known as the Red Book CD-DA after the colour of the cover. The format is a two channel 16-bit PCM encoding at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate per channel. Four channel sound was to be an allowable option within the Red Book format, but has never been implemented.

In 1982 when the compact disc was introduced, it could store much more data than a personal computer hard drive, which would typically hold 10 MB. By 2010 hard drives commonly offered as much storage space as a thousand CDs while their prices had plummeted to commodity level. In 2004, worldwide sales of audio CDs, CD-ROMS and CD-Rs reached about 30 billion discs. By 2007, 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide. From the early 2000s CDs were increasingly being replaced by other forms of digital storage and distribution, with the result that by 2010 the number of audio CDs being sold in the U.S had dropped about 50% from their peak; however, they remained one of the primary distribution methods for the music industry.

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