CD is 25 years old today! The very first album off the prduction line being ABBA The Visitors.
The convenience of the format was arguably it's best feature as in the beginning, the sound produced was a very poor relation to vinyl and even the best Cassette decks of the time, most agree vinyl still reigns supreme although the sound quality of modern CD playback is of a different order to those early machines.
Philips and Sony had an instant success on their hands, I remember the hype bandied about at it's release including one hilarious demonstration on a now defunct famous British TV show about new and emerging technologies called Tomorrow’s World where the hapless presenter proceeded to prove how reliable CD was by smearing it with Jam and then failing to get the player to read it!
Like most people CD was far too expensive in the early years of the format especially on my pocket money, and I didn’t get my first proper separate CD player until 1989 when the prices had fallen low enough to match my tiny budget.
CD is still the dominant format for music despite the unstoppable rise of mp3.
Over the years I have become quite fond of the flawed from the start ‘perfect music forever’ format, despite it’s sonic shortcomings the sheer convenience and futuristic look of the small discs undoubtedly helped it’s rise to dominance despite it’s less than perfect sound quality.
The obvious downside to CD was that we took a distinct step backwards in quality, while taking a highly attractive step forwards into the realm of convenience while rushing into a brave new digital world as the inherently superior sound of pure analogue insists on reminding us.
Any thought’s on CD’s birthday? Was CD a mistake? Should the world have waited until CD was good enough to properly challenge analogue? If so would we all still be waiting for it? The evidence of poor SACD and DVD audio sales seems to suggest we would!
Does anybody even care?
