The CD turns 40: Inside the meteoric rise and fall of the shiny disc.......

Did NOT seen a CD until the movie soundtrack of 1984 "Footloose" late that year on plastic (later on box). The second week of July of 1986 was when I got my Technics CD player at the old Highland Appliance in Saginaw, MI & I hated it because the songs skipped!! Wasn't until my birthday on May 5, 1995 when I turned 30 years old that I finally got a DENON CD player & it worked but I had to go to Saginaw, MI to pick it up. I have a Marantz CD player which the CD show the title, artist & song it is playing!!! Had that since November of 2015 as well as the DENON blu-ray player on my Vizio TV!!
 
The first pop CDs I had were Genesis's self-titled album, and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. They were quite the cool thing to demonstrate to customers in our stereo store.

Another good one was Madonna's Like a Virgin, which was one of the first albums "recorded digitally" to appear on CD. It was quite cool to give customers a pair of headphones and watch them jump when that first kick-drum in "Material Girl" hit.

Another great demo disk was Phil Collins' Face Value. If you listen to the song "Hand in Hand," which is an instrumental, it starts off with all keyboards and then about a minute in, you hear the very distinctive Phil Collins drums, and if you have it turned up loud enough, it sounds like he's right there in the room with you.

I also used In The Digital Mood, by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. It was a current recording, not a reissue, so it sounded terrific. I'd use that to demo for older people and sold more than one CD player that way.

Our first CD player was made by Akai - I forget the model number but I remember we had it priced at $799.99, which we were making next to nothing on it. We later had one by Technics, which was a little cheaper, and also one by Sharp, which was shoplifted out of the store. It wasn't long until prices started coming down and we started carrying a lot more players. It'd be fun to know how many CDs we sold over the years. A lot of them are probably still gathering dust in "storage cabinets" around town, like the ones I have at home are.
 
My first player was a Sony CDP-302. First Compact Disc was either Carpenters SINGLES 69-73 or the soundtrack to SOMEWHERE IN TIME.

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I remember thinking I'd probably just re-buy the albums I "liked most" on CD. Of course I wound up re-buying the majority of my library.

Then I thought to myself, I'm never going to buy a comedy album on CD, because what's the point? But here I am today with complete collections of George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Jerry Seinfeld, Jack Benny and a host of others. Many of which are NOT available on any form of streaming so I guess there is a point after all.
 
he first pop CDs I had were Genesis's self-titled album, and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. They were quite the cool thing to demonstrate to customers in our stereo store.

Another good one was Madonna's Like a Virgin, which was one of the first albums "recorded digitally" to appear on CD. It was quite cool to give customers a pair of headphones and watch them jump when that first kick-drum in "Material Girl" hit.

Another great demo disk was Phil Collins' Face Value. If you listen to the song "Hand in Hand," which is an instrumental, it starts off with all keyboards and then about a minute in, you hear the very distinctive Phil Collins drums, and if you have it turned up loud enough, it sounds like he's right there in the room with you.

I also used In The Digital Mood, by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. It was a current recording, not a reissue, so it sounded terrific. I'd use that to demo for older people and sold more than one CD player that way.
I am trying to remember my first three CDs. I know that Earth Wind & Fire's Powerlight was one of them, and I think George Benson's Give Me The Night and Phil Collins' Hello I Must Be Going were the other two. Fourth, fifth and sixth were, I think, Police Synchronicity and I got the import Virgin release of the first Phil Collins album, Face Value, along with the "bad" version of Donald Fagen's The Nightfly (the "-2" matrix version mistakenly made from an analog copy made for LP cutting). Other early CDs were the Genesis Three Sides Live and I got the self-titled when it was first released, as I had to buy the import since it wasn't released in the US right away. Peter Gabriel's fourth album (titled Security only in the US, self-titled everywhere else in the world) was another early one, as was the abbreviated Plays Live.

One of the most notorious, and the first million-selling CD, was Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms. It had a lot of good press, and it was also difficult to find, as I think it took a few weeks to more than a month to eventually find one in stock. It wasn't long before I found myself buying Love Over Gold. (And just a couple of years ago, I learned that "Telegraph Road" was actually written for the road that travels through our metro area--I guess the tour bus had taken US-24 and Knopfler was inspired to write the lengthy tale based on what the road's name suggested.)

Wayne Green's Digital Audio magazine (which became CD Review) was the ultimate guide for a lot of us buying CDs back then. It's where I learned of so many of the good titles I still like to this day, and shined some light on artists and labels I wouldn't otherwise have paid attention to. I'm still not an oldies fan, yet the great review of the Bill Haley & The Comets CD urged me to buy it, and I couldn't get over how clean and "new" those tapes from the 1950s sounded, when care was taken in mastering.

I remember thinking I'd probably just re-buy the albums I "liked most" on CD. Of course I wound up re-buying the majority of my library.
I unfortunately did this also, and lived to regret it--very many titles on CD back in those early days sounded a lot worse than their vinyl counterparts, because the labels saw their new cash cow and were grabbing any tape imaginable. There are some who covet the Warner "target" CDs (based on their design) but I personally thought they sounded like ass, and my opinion hasn't changed almost 40 years.

I've found myself repurchasing sealed copies of favorite albums, sealed, of those early CDs. Finding a holy grail like a first pressing Synchronicity was very rewarding (finding one sealed with the "KC-600" hype sticker).

Still...I have a lot of good memories of hunting CDs back in the mid 80s. Especially when our great local record store was bringing in import titles that the US would take months if not years to see a release here. Wham's compilation The Final was never released here, far as I know. Sting's live 2-CD set Bring On The Night took, what, a couple of decades (?) before it was ever released here, yet I had it the week after release date.

Good times.
 
I can't say that the demise of the CD has surprised me at all. Most new releases are coming out in high-res digital, so why would I buy a lesser sounding copy on CD? I'm over that. The music industry saw to it that DVD-Audio and SACD were killed off for the mass market; either or both would have been good formats for the improved resolution of digital audio in the modern era (especially SACD, as even today, it takes a specialized setup to "rip" the files from an SACD). Boutique labels use CD these days because they are so cheap to produce and easy to distribute. Same with independent musicians and labels, although many (most?) of these have turned to downloads instead.

It's also no surprise that vinyl has been slowly growing over the past dozen or more years--those who want something tactile (and collectable) get a nicely produced package of art along with the music. Those who don't will purchase their music and download it, or stream it. CDs really don't have a place in new music systems these days, as there are so many ways to listen to digital audio that don't involve physical media. CD packaging has always been a compromise at best, and clumsy/unusable at its worst. That I will not miss.

But CDs served their purpose as a mainstream format for 30 years. If you look at the history of other physical disc formats, the 78 RPM record had its mainstream popularity from the 1920s to the 1950s. LPs/vinyl lasted from the mid 1950s to the mid 1980s. And CDs heyday was from the mid 80s to the mid 2010s, when it began tapering off for streaming. All have lasted 30 years.

I had predicted about 20 years ago that our next major format would involve no moving parts but instead, be a solid state format like a copy-protected memory chip (like an SD card or similar). I didn't foresee having broadband in our homes, to where we could stream 4K video to several devices in the house simultaneously...and I also never imagined we could purchase music as downloads without having to use lossy formats like MP3, WMA, AAC, etc. which compromised fidelity, and have them downloaded in our homes within seconds.

CDs had a great run, though, and they still serve niche purposes. Supplies of used CDs are available dirt cheap for those who want to get into the hobby. Some import titles are still available only on CD. Boutique reissue labels also have a use for them, and they are great takeaways from live concerts where they are sold, and often signed by the artist(s). New CD players can still be purchased, although you will not find them in big box stores anymore. But, they are out there. CDs have long since lost mainstream popularity, but they're still with us just like vinyl. 👍
 
My first 2 CD's in July 1986, Pink Floyd "The Dark Side Of The Moon" & Rod Stewart "Every Picture Tells A Story" BUT the last 20 seconds of "I Know I'm Losing You", you can hear the master tape is ruin. The first 2 new CD's that I bought in August of 1986, The Fabulous Thunderbirds "Tuff Enuff" & Peter Gabriel "So".
 
CDs remain my primary choice (just upgraded my CD player in 2022). I've been downloading Qobuz files for CDs and LPs beyond my budget (all of which are transcribed onto CD-Rs).

My first CD was in 1984 -- it was Miles Davis / Kind Of Blue (I still have it: the CD is stamped "made in the USA" while the packaging states "Manufactured in Japan by CBS / Sony, Tokyo, Japan. / Distributed by CBS Records...New York, NY".) I recall it was about $14. At the time, three of us in college pulled our resources into a multi-CD order to Japan as no record store in town was yet carrying CDs. Interestingly, I hadn't yet purchased a player.
 
It took me several months to find a player, and I was looking at all sorts of grey market players at the time. I finally settled on a Hitachi which essentially was the basis for the nearly identical looking player from Denon. Others I had chosen, had their delivery dates pushed out a few times.

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Wasn't made too well as, after a year or so, seeking tracks or even starting playback took ages. I ended up buying Sony's first portable player (D-5) to hold me over until I found a decent player.

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Mine ended up falling off of a desktop and broke a couple of the gears inside. Tried replacing the laser assembly but the ribbon cable inside also tore, so that never worked. I still have my mother's player, same one but made a year or two later--it had a better dock for AC power. I don't even know if it still works, given how these things deteriorate over time.
 
The late Jeff Beck "Blow By Blow" (1975) when it was reissued on CD in 1985 or 1986 did NOT sound great because of pops!! The remaster (which has the Epic orange label, same for "Wired" in 1976) sounds better. I have not download the album on Apple iTunes though.
 
I’m from the era where the only dedicated CD players I’ve owned have been in portable stereos that also included radio & cassette. Otherwise I’ve used a LG DVD player from 2001 for a long time to play CD’s, first over the analog RCA jacks and then over optical TOSLINK. Then, and I’m still using it now, I’ve been using a PlayStation 3 since 2011 to play my CD’s over TOSLINK. Actually CD playback was what kept me from buying a PlayStation 4 for a long time, since I use my PlayStation 3 for CD, DVD and Blu-Ray playback as well as gaming. And from what I see online from people who have studied the laser assemblies in both the PlayStation 4 & 5, the laser (and overall chipset) is designed to play CD’s (and PlayStation 1 games), but for whatever reason Sony has refused to release the necessary software for the systems to decode CDA audio or play PlayStation 1 CD-ROM’s, even though their Microsoft Xbox competitors still have CD playback enabled in the Xbox Series X console that has the optical UHD Blu-Ray drive (from what I understand Microsoft doesn’t have the CD playback enabled out of the box, however there is software that you download from the Xbox store and once that’s installed you can play CD’s.)
 
Like others I replaced all my vinyl with CDs I still own my onkyo CD changer and DVD changer respectively bought well over a decade ago replacing a pioneer 100 disc changer which served me very well for most of the 2000s until it finally stopped working completely and my handful of leftover vinyl as well as all cassettes were needle dropped and digitized long ago are still very much useful it would not be financially practical or realistic to buy everything again in a different format ( not to mention impossible because of the many titles I own that are now unavailable for various reasons) CDs did have a great run and I'm still enjoying my investments and the Digital Downloads I reserve for those titles I never had in any other form and or can't get any other way. Everything serves its purpose here.
 
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