The CD celebrates its 30th anniversary – cdfreaks must read!

Myce was called CDFreaks and by far the biggest optical storage community until someone decided to rename it to Myce. So if it’s time to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Compact Disc (CD), then we should cover it. The first CD player was released in  Japan on the 1st of October 1982. The player went by the name CDP-101 and came with the first commercially available CD,  Billy Joel’s 52nd street. The CD was already under development in 1977 in the Philips labs in the Netherlands. At the same time Sony engineers in Japan were developing a similar disc, with different specifications, and fortunately for us they didn’t get in format war but instead joined forces.

The actual size of the CD is also an interesting fact, it’s 12 cm and that’s because the engineers working on the disc insisted that it should be able to contain Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Since the longest version of the 9th in the Philips-owned record company catalogue – Furtwangler’s 1951 Bayreuth Festival recording – was 74 minutes, that became the standard. Interested in more facts and history? Then check out this page on Whathifi.com