Cover Picture of the World’s First-Ever Compact Disc
Hey GLOVADIs, the best friend that carries your specially selected music to her, the good ol’ CD, has just turned 25!
In what now looks an incident of another era, the CD had marked its arrival with Abba’s The Visitors, which was the first album to be released in CD format in 1982. That marked the beginning of the end of vynil era and transformed the landscape of musical formats.
“At that time, even experienced engineers told us ‘this will never work’. And we learned one should never say never. We knew that we were working on a completely new, exciting technology. However, we did not know at that time that the CD would grow to that magnitude,” said Hartmut Loewer of Bayer AG recently.
Offering unprecedented sound quality and optimum data capacity, CD not only changed forever the way people listened to music but also marked the beginning of the digital age.
Now, every year, the world produces roughly 90,000 originals on CD, billions of copies of which are sold globally. And today CDs have carved a very important space for themselves in our lives.
Molded plastic disc containing digital data that is scanned by a laser beam for the reproduction of recorded sound or other information. Since its commercial introduction in 1982, the audio CD has become the dominant format for high-fidelity recorded music. Digital audio data can be converted to analog form to reproduce the original audio signal.
Co-invented by Philips Electronics and Sony Corp. in 1980, the compact disc has expanded beyond audio recordings into other storage-and-distribution uses, notably for computers (CD-ROM) and entertainment systems (videodisc and DVD). An audio CD can store just over an hour of music. A CD-ROM can contain up to 680 megabytes of computer data. A DVD, the same size as traditional CDs, is able to store up to 17 gigabytes of data, such as high-definition digital video files.
