At the time of its launch, Compact Disc Digital Audio – to give it its full name – stretched the technology of the day to its outer limits, at least as far as consumer electronics was concerned. Yet there it was and with it, a new format and a new generation of players that played music in a completely different way to everything that everyone had ever known. And best of all, Philips' advertising claimed for it, “Pure, Perfect Sound. Forever”.

ALL CHANGE

On October 1st 1982, Sony launched its CDP-101 machine in Japan, and along with it the Compact Disc format. Philips, the format's other co-creator, would soon follow, and then the machines began to appear in the USA, Western Europe and the wider world by spring 1983. Speaking to me on CD's thirtieth anniversary back in 2012, the (then) brand ambassador of Marantz – Ken Ishiwata – told me: “What a thrilling period that was! Coming from analogue, it was confusing at first but then realising the potential of the new technology made me so excited!”

Indeed it seemed like almost audiophiles and gadget geeks were thrilled, and there was an overwhelming sense of wanting to move on from LP records – which at the time were thirty-four years old (twenty-four in stereo). At last, the ancient black plastic music format was done with, and the cool kids were thrusting into the future with this laser-powered format! In the UK, the writing was on the wall for the microgroove LP – its sales had declined for seven straight years. In 1975, according to the British Phonographic Institute, sales had notched 91.6 million – thanks in no small part to the sales sensation that was Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. But by 1981, they had dropped to under 60 million, and in 1982 alone, sales were down by another 9%. CD it seemed, hadn't come a moment too soon…

Even myself, a committed record collector who spent almost all my pocket money on the stuff back then, would freely admit that by 1982, vinyl standards were slipping. Many new records were being pressed on thin, 90g recycled vinyl, whereas a decade or so before, records weighed at least 120g and mostly used virgin vinyl. The quality of packaging was disappearing, and the lovely gatefold sleeves of the nineteen seventies were a thing of the past. Most record companies had long since ceased supplying their wares in polythene-lined inner sleeves, too. There were regular complaints about new records being warped or not properly centred. Quality control seemed to be failing fast.

The new Compact Disc, on the other hand, had an air of space-age perfection to it. With no surface noise or end-of-side distortion, it seemed far more robust than LPs. Also, it offered automatic, random track access which was a joyous convenience feature that literally no one had experienced before. CDs could also carry over seventy minutes of music, compared to LPs which managed under forty-five across two sides. The discs were easy to handle and store, and the matching 'jewel cases' were a thing of wonder to use, or so it felt back then. Can you remember learning how to open one to get the CD out? Suddenly, the days of noisy records or unreliable cassettes appeared to be well and truly numbered!

WONDER TECH

At its launch, CD was the absolute state-of-the-art in music reproduction. It worked by cleverly combining two existing technologies in one futuristic package that people could easily use. Optical discs read by lasers weren't new, as LaserDisc – already popular in Japan – had pioneered the technology in the consumer marketplace. Nor was digital audio a new thing, as this had been around for a while – Denon had been making digital recordings for years, which it had previously realised on LP. Yet it took the might of two of the world's (then) largest consumer electronics companies to make the new format happen – Philips and Sony.

Work on using discs to store data had been ongoing for much of the twentieth century, but there was a burst of activity in the nineteen seventies as the technology began to make the idea more practical. Westinghouse Electric, Telefunken, Hitachi, Sony, MCA and Matsushita all tried to make consumer products using optical storage, until LaserDisc – as named by Pioneer – was launched in December 1978. CD used similar optical read technology via a semiconductor laser, albeit on a smaller disc. 

The digital coding system wasn't new either, as there had been various attempts at this. Arguably work on the idea goes as far back as 1841, when Augustin-Louis Cauchy first proposed sampling theory, and Harry Nyquist developed the idea in the nineteen twenties. Alec Reeves conceptualised Pulse Code Modulation in 1937, and all the ingredients were in place. Of course, it wasn't until the advent of the transistor in 1948 that digital circuitry was commercially viable, and theoretical work on error correction in the nineteen sixties was the final piece of the jigsaw. By 1967, Japan's NHK Technical Research Institute was demonstrating a digital audio recorder running 12-bit resolution and a 30kHz sampling rate, and by 1970 Sony had a 13-bit machine running at 47.25kHz.

This technology was brought together in the official document produced in 1980 by the format's co-creators, the so-called Philips and Sony' Red Book'. It specified a digital audiostream of 16-bit resolution at 44.1kHz sampling frequency, on a compact disc of 120mm in diameter. This squeezed 650MB onto a single disc, a single-sided, polycarbonate lacquer-coated aluminium (or occasionally gold) item with 12mm deep pits. This permitted up to 79.8 minutes of uncompressed stereo digital music at a bitrate of 1,411.2kbps. A 780nm semiconductor laser read the disc, which gave up to 99 tracks, with 99 index points – and minimum track duration was four seconds. 

Compact Disc's specification also included a highly ingenious and complex error correction called cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon coding. Lest we forget, the error correction system in CD players of 1982 required the machines themselves to be more technologically advanced than commercially available microcomputers. These error correction chips were arguably the most advanced piece of technology that a normal person could own, at that time.

There are various stories about CD's rite of passage to become a living, breathing format. One concerns the original target for storing music being specified as one hour, but Sony president Norio Ohga was said to have intervened as he wanted to put all of Beethoven's 9th Symphony on one disc, and fit that disc into his suit pocket. The story goes that the proposed size of 115mm had to be changed at the last minute to 120mm, which squeezed in 74 minutes of Red Book digital audio. This is now disputed, but what we do know for sure is that Philips wasn't expecting a 16-bit system until quite late in the day, so together with Sony, didn't finalise the precise size of the disc for a long time.

CD's 44.1kHz sampling frequency meant that its theoretical audio bandwidth was 20Hz to 22.05kHz (i.e. one half of its sampling frequency), and its 16-bit word length delivered a dynamic range of 96dB. The reason CD's sampling rate is 44.1kHz and not the 48kHz that was popular in professional applications, reportedly comes from the coding system's early development work being done using video recorders to store digital data – it turned out that the NTSC and PAL video formats could only store a maximum 44,100 samples per second, which was carried over to Compact Disc. 

SILVER DREAMS

In August 1982, the world's first Compact Disc was manufactured at a Philips/Polygram plant in Langenhagen, Germany, and from then on the music industry's challenge was to meet the anticipated demand. Prices of early discs were very expensive, roughly twice as much as a full-price LP or more; this was, of course, justified due to the (arguably) superior sound and (unarguably) better convenience. 

To catch the widest possible audience of music fans, the first titles were highly mainstream – ABBA's (then) new album The Visitors was said to be the very first. There were also a great many classical music titles, reflecting the anticipated age demographic of the early adopters, who were unlikely to be teeny-bopping Duran Duran fans! Around 150 titles were available at launch, retailing for around a third more than the equivalent vinyl LP. “As there were so many classical digital recordings that Deutsche Grammophon had done in the nineteen seventies, it was very easy for them to come up with many classical titles, but the key seller was rock and adult pop music,” Ken Ishiwata once told me. “So Dire Straits was needed to get CD to take off. It helped a lot, I must say!”

American and European customers had to wait until February 1983 to experience CD, even though Philips CD100 and Sony's CDP-101 had been on sale in Japan for nearly half a year. By this time, over 1,000 discs were available, and these sold for around £15 in the UK. Along with obvious classical music standards, early titles included albums by Status Quo, Roxy Music, Phil Collins and Dire Straits. Indeed the latter's digitally recorded and digitally mastered (DDD) Brothers in Arms album went on to be the first silver disc to sell over a million copies. 

It might seem odd to audiophiles today, but for much of its early life CD was widely regarded as an aspirational style statement – in British popular culture, it was used by suave young professionals touting Rayban sunglasses and Filofax personal organisers, likely driving a trendy VW Golf GTi or Porsche 924. Needless to say, this didn't raise its stock in purist audiophile circles, and there was surprisingly high resistance to the new format in the UK specialist hi-fi press. With its cool fashion cachet, it was easy to characterise Compact Disc as a lifestyle gimmick.

Influential hi-fi manufacturers such as Linn Products fed into this, albeit on technical performance grounds. That company's (then) managing director Ivor Tiefenbrun later told me that: “The CD standard of 16/44.1 was depressing because it clearly was not enough to match, let alone usurp the LP in sonic terms… There was little understanding of how sensitive and discriminating our sense of hearing was and how demanding and challenging the task of equalling let alone surpassing the LP would be.” Surprisingly perhaps, Linn launched a very good CD player in the late eighties, and now makes one of the best DACs in the world!

THE NUMBERS GAME

When the hi-fi press wasn't condemning Compact Disc as some sort of satanic format that stood against the love of music, it was praising it to the rooftops. In short, depending on what magazine you read, CD was either hero or zero. There were a lot of mixed messages, and the confusion was likely down to the fact that not all of the first-generation machines sounded the same. 

It is now widely agreed that the original Philips CD100-based machines and their Marantz-badged cousins – all sporting the Eindhoven company's excellent swing-arm transport and TDA1540 14-bit DAC chips with 4x oversampling – were the cream of the crop sonically. Many had painfully slow track access times and seemed from another generation compared to the likes of Sony's swish, drawer-loading 16-bit CDP-101, but were tonally sweeter and more musical. They have also subsequently proven to be more reliable too. Japanese manufacturer Hitachi also rebadged its first generation DA-1000 model for many other companies; for example, Denon's debut CD spinner was the above machine, with a change of name and a slightly altered front panel.

One key reason for the early CD being thought of as Yuppie fashion accessory was the price of the hardware and software, which was controversially high. For example, the first Sony machine retailed for over £800 in 1983, while the 'entry level' Philips CD100 was £500 – a whole lot of money back then. At this time, the selection of discs was small, with High Street music retailers giving little of their shelf space to the format. There was little sense that the average consumer wanted to spend a significant outlay on this new technology; indeed, it was pre-recorded music cassettes that were soaring up the sales charts. These would peak in 1988, and only after this did CD go on to become the dominant music carrier. 

The high price of CD players and discs played a big part in the slow start of the format, but as it finally began to take off, other numbers became important to sales figures – namely the DAC's bit depth and the oversampling rate. As previously stated, the first generation Philips machines were all 14-bit, 4x oversampling designs, whereas many Japanese rivals were 16-bit, 2x oversampling. But by 1986, Philips was out of the blocks with a new 16-bit, 4x oversampling DAC – and somehow, we all thought, it just had to be better.

Most Compact Disc player buyers didn't understand what this meant, except that 4x something was better than just 2x something. For this reason alone, the new TDA1541 DAC-based Philips machines began to fly off the shelves, and the second-generation silver disc spinners had arrived in earnest. This kick-started a numbers war that fizzed along for the rest of the decade. Through electronic trickery, the use of multiple standard DACs, and so on, we'd reached 16-bit, 16x oversampling with machines like the Cambridge Audio CD3 – using four TDA1541s – while Japanese manufacturers were claiming 18-bit, 8x oversampling by 1989. In truth, it made relatively little difference to the sound and was far more about marketing than performance. 

The reality was that the Philips machines were the best of the early players – Marantz's Ken Ishiwata later told me that this was down to the superior digital filtering of the European machines, which were far more linear from the midband upwards. Certainly, Sony's use of just one DAC in the CDP-101 gave strange phase-related artefacts across the upper frequencies. In contrast, the Philips CD100 sounded balanced, smooth and warm – albeit a little diffuse – by comparison. The TDA1541-based 16x4 machines, such as the Philips flagship CD960 of 1988, achieved extremely good sound quality, even by today's standards – although this was largely because of its excellent audio electronics, transport mechanism and general design rather than just being down to the DAC. Cheap 16x4 machines could sound bright and raucous, by contrast.

In the next part of this feature, we look at the revolutionary technology of Bitstream – launched in 1989 – that made CD players cheaper to make and thus more accessible to the general public. And we examine the developments in CD and digital audio that followed…

Read Part Two