from 1982, the first commercially released
CD player for
consumers from 1983, the first commercially released CD player in the USA and Europe American inventor
James T. Russell is known for inventing the first system to record digital video information on an optical
transparent foil that is lit from behind by a high-power halogen lamp. Russell's patent application was first filed in 1966, and he was granted a patent in 1970. Following litigation, Sony and Philips licensed Russell's recording patents (then held by a Canadian company, Optical Recording Corp.) in the 1980s. The compact disc is not based on Russell's invention; it is an evolution of
LaserDisc technology, where a focused
laser beam is used that enables the high information density required for high-quality digital audio signals. Prototypes were developed by
Philips and
Sony independently in the late 1970s. In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the
Red Book CD-DA standard was published in 1980. After their commercial release in 1982, compact discs and their players were extremely popular. Despite costing up to $1,000, over 400,000 CD players were sold in the United States between 1983 and 1984. The success of the compact disc has been credited to the cooperation between Philips and Sony, who came together to agree upon and develop compatible hardware. The unified design of the compact disc allowed consumers to purchase any disc or player from any company and allowed the CD to dominate the at-home music market unchallenged. The
Sony CDP-101, released in 1982, was the world's first commercially released compact disc player. It was originally sold only in Japan. Unlike early
LaserDisc players, first CD players already used
laser diodes instead of larger
helium-neon lasers.
Digital audio laser-disc prototypes In 1974, Lou Ottens, director of the audio division of Philips, started a small group with the aim to develop an analog optical audio disc with a diameter of and a sound quality superior to that of the vinyl record. However, due to the unsatisfactory performance of the analog format, two Philips research engineers recommended a digital format in March 1974.
Heitaro Nakajima, who developed an early digital audio recorder within Japan's national public broadcasting organization
NHK in 1970, became general manager of
Sony's audio department in 1971. His team developed a digital
PCM adaptor audio tape recorder using a
Betamax video recorder in 1973. After this, in 1974, the leap to storing digital audio on an optical disc was easily made.
Sony first publicly demonstrated an optical digital audio disc in September 1976. A year later, in September 1977, Sony showed the press a disc that could play 60 minutes of digital audio (44,100 Hz sampling rate and 16-bit resolution) using
MFM modulation. In September 1978, the company demonstrated an optical digital audio disc with a 150-minute playing time, 44,056 Hz sampling rate, 16-bit linear resolution, and
cross-interleaved error correction code—specifications similar to those later settled upon for the standard compact disc format in 1980. Technical details of Sony's digital audio disc were presented during the 62nd
AES Convention, held on 13–16 March 1979, in
Brussels. in
Eindhoven,
Netherlands.
Collaboration and standardization . The error correction cannot correct all errors. Two minutes can be played, however. Sony executive
Norio Ohga, later CEO and chairman of Sony, and
Heitaro Nakajima were convinced of the format's commercial potential and pushed further development despite widespread skepticism. As a result, in 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. Led by engineers
Kees Schouhamer Immink and
Toshitada Doi, the research pushed forward
laser and
optical disc technology. though according to Philips, the compact disc was "invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team."
First Red Book CDs and players Red Book was the first standard in the
Rainbow Books series of standards. Philips established the Polydor Pressing Operations plant in
Langenhagen near
Hannover,
Germany, and quickly passed a series of milestones. • The first
test pressing was of a recording of
Richard Strauss's
Eine Alpensinfonie (
An Alpine Symphony) played by the
Berlin Philharmonic and conducted by
Herbert von Karajan, who had been enlisted as an ambassador for the format in 1979. • The first
public demonstration was on the
BBC television program ''
Tomorrow's World'' in 1981, when the
Bee Gees' album
Living Eyes (1981) was played. • The first
commercial compact disc was produced on 17 August 1982. It was a recording from 1979 of
Claudio Arrau performing Chopin waltzes (Philips 400 025-2). Arrau was invited to the Langenhagen plant to press the start button. • The first
popular music CD produced at the new factory was
The Visitors (1981) by
ABBA. • The first 50 titles were
released in Japan on 1 October 1982, with the first-cataloged CD in this wave being a reissue of
Billy Joel's
52nd Street. The Japanese launch was followed in March 1983 by the introduction of CD players and discs to Europe and North America (where CBS Records released 16 titles). This event is often seen as the "Big Bang" of the digital audio revolution. The new audio disc was enthusiastically received, especially in the early-adopting
classical music and
audiophile communities, and its handling quality received particular praise. As the price of players gradually came down, and with the introduction of the portable
Walkman, the CD began to gain popularity in the larger popular and rock music markets. The first artist to sell a million copies on CD was
Dire Straits, with their 1985 album
Brothers in Arms. The first major artist to have his entire catalog converted to CD was
David Bowie, whose 15 studio albums were made available by
RCA Records in February 1985, along with four greatest hits albums. In 1988, 400 million CDs were manufactured by 50 pressing plants around the world.
Further development and decline FS-SD5R CD player from the 1990s with a transparent plastic cover and blue backlight The CD was planned to be the successor of the
gramophone record for playing music, rather than primarily as a data storage medium, but from its origins as a format for music, its use has grown to encompass other applications. In 1983, following the CD's introduction,
Immink and
Braat presented the first experiments with erasable compact discs during the 73rd
AES Convention. In June 1985, the computer-readable
CD-ROM (read-only memory) was introduced and, in 1990, the
CD-Recordable, also developed by both Sony and Philips. Recordable CDs were a new alternative to tape for recording music and copying music albums without the defects introduced in the compression used in other
digital recording methods. Other newer video formats such as
DVD and
Blu-ray use the same physical geometry as CD, and most DVD and Blu-ray players are
backward compatible with audio CD. By the early 2000s, the CD player had largely replaced the
audio cassette player as standard equipment in new automobiles, with 2010 being the final model year for any car in the US to have a factory-equipped cassette player. Currently, with the increasing popularity of portable digital audio players, such as mobile phones, and solid state music storage, CD players are being phased out of automobiles in favor of minijack auxiliary inputs and connections to USB devices. Some CD players incorporate disc changers. Commonly, these can hold 3, 5, 6, or 10 discs at once and change from one disc to the next without user intervention. Disc changers capable of holding up to 400 discs at once were available. Also, the user can manually choose the disc to be played, making it similar to a
jukebox. They were often built into car audio and home stereo systems, although 7 disc CD changers were once made by
NEC and
Nakamichi for PCs. Some could also play DVD and Blu-ray discs. Meanwhile, with the advent and popularity of
Internet-based distribution of files in
lossily-compressed audio formats such as
MP3, sales of CDs began to decline in the 2000s. For example, between 2000 and 2008, despite overall growth in music sales and one anomalous year of increase, major-label CD sales declined overall by 20% – although independent and DIY music sales may be tracking better (according to figures released 30 March 2009), and CDs still continue to sell greatly. As of 2012, CDs and DVDs made up only 34% of music sales in the United States. In Japan, however, over 80% of music was bought on CDs and other physical formats as of 2015. ==Inner workings==