Once a legitimate blog. Now just a collection of memes 'n menz.
I honestly don’t, but it was probably something on the Private Music label. I only say that because they were being sold at the same audio salon where I bought the player. The one CD that left a lasting impression when I first got it (maybe a year later) was Ammonia Avenue by The Alan Parsons Project.
The video’s from 1982, but CDs were first released in the US on this day in 1983.
After stumbling across that Erasure video the other day, I realized that I didn’t have this in my collection—or even in iTunes. I’ve corrected that.
I remember buying this back in ’92 when it came out. At the time I was an ABBA purist at heart and absolutely hated it. But after seeing that video the other day, I realized that over the past thirty years I’ve…mellowed. Now the only thing that disappoints me about this is that this isn’t a full-length album; it’s just an EP, barely clocking in at a bit over 17 minutes total..
When I got my new old Yamaha CD player back in December, I was kind of disappointed to discover it didn’t like playing CDs over 74 minutes in length (the original CD standard) or CDRs of any length.
I wrote it off due to the vintage of the machine. Built in 1990, 80-minute CDs were just starting to show up, and CDRs were still a couple years away. Yamaha can be forgiven, I kept telling myself.
But it nagged me, y’know?
So the other day I pulled out the stack of CDRs I’d burned prior to my MiniDisc obsession to take with me to work. I tried playing one (a different one than I’d tried initially when I got the CD player) and wouldn’t you know…it read the table of contents and played just fine. I threw in another. And another. And yet another—and they all played just fine. It was only that one particular disc that I’d initially tried that had issues.
It was more an experiment than anything else, because I don’t have anything on CDR that I don’t have an original CD copy of—with the exception of that one disc that wouldn’t play (a mix CD sent to me by a friend several years ago).
All this got me thinking about the commercial 80-minute CD issue this afternoon. I don’t have that many; in fact, they’re all from the Euphoria house/dance music series. I threw the original disk I’d tried back in the player, and yeah, it still lost its mind somewhere around track 14 (which pushed it past the 74-minute mark). The same thing happened with Disc 2 from that particular release.
But then I tried a different release: Ibiza Euphoria And wouldn’t you know, both CDs in the set played perfectly from beginning to end. I tried another Euphoria recording, and yup…played perfectly. So it wasn’t the player at all; it was just that particular release and it affected both discs in the set. Factory pressing issue? Who knows.
All I know is that I’m relieved that it’s not hardware, but in this case, the software is what’s at fault.
…how do they reach the discs on the top rows?
By Mark Tyson
Today marks 43 years since the first commercial Compact Disc (CD) pressing. Polygram in Germany is credited with pressing the first copies of Abba’s The Visitors on this date, back in 1982. The CD format would take off in a direction which would have been highly unexpected at the time, ending up as a foundation of the Multimedia PC age. However, CDs didn’t kill the audiophile thirst for vinyl, and, on the flip side, some artists are still releasing CDs, even in the 5G and fiber digital streaming age.
While the first commercial CDs were factory pressed some 43 years ago, the discs were in development for quite some time ahead of this date. According to various sources, Sony and Philips clubbed together in 1979 to create a digital music disc.
Among the first prototype CDs, a format with an 11.5cm diameter which was capable of storing an hour of music was an early front-runner. Philips apparently had a production line ready for such silver coasters. However, the final 12cm diameter and 74 minutes capacity was apparently favored as it was sufficient for a complete recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – Sony president Norio Ohga’s favorite musical opus.
We must note that there are conflicting 74m CD audio origin stories, though. Another credits the desire for this particular uninterrupted audio duration to famed conductor Herbert von Karajan. Similarly, the Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1951 recording of Beethoven’s 9th (74 minutes long) is said to be the reason for this time target.
By June 1980, the CD audio Red Book standard was finalized. Abba’s The Visitors entered production in Aug 1982, though wouldn’t hit retail on its new fangled format until March 1983. Meanwhile, the first CD album released in the U.S. is thought to be Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A., released in September 1984.
According to Statista, CD album sales peaked in the year 2000, with around 943 million sold in the U.S., alone. The format’s fall from grace has been pretty fast since then, but things have recovered a little since the 2020 low.
For computing enthusiasts, like us, the announcement of the CD Yellow Book standard is probably more important than the audio standard. This new standard, which would reach the market in 1985, added binary data to CD storage.
Yet another significant change came in 1988, however. In this year, the ISO 9660 standard came into being, defining a file structure for CD-ROMs. CD burners, which created another huge ripple in the PC pond, began to first become available to the public in 1992. But it would take until the latter half of the 90s, when pricing, interfaces, and software began to democratize CDs as digital storage, archiving, and sharing essentials for everyone.
Reading about people using CDs with computers in 2025, as almost as archaic sounding as the use of floppy disks. Nevertheless, some music fans still prefer physical CDs to digital platforms (and the vinyl) such desires have probably spurred the likes of Taylor Swift to release almost 20 physical variations of her latest release, The Tortured Poets Department – including CDs, LPs, and even cassettes. If you count digital variants, there are 36 editions of this album you could buy.
I still maintain access to CDs and DVDs, and the ability to write various optical formats, using a simple external USB optical drive like this one from LG, at $27 on Amazon.com. There are plenty of cheaper, lesser known brand alternatives, too. It is great for looking through old archives and so on, as well as (re) ripping choices from the old music collection.
I’ve loved this stuff since I was a teenager and first got into HiFi. Those shiny manufacturer brochures touting the advantages of their design over the competition, resplendent with cutaway diagrams and photos of the inside of the gear they were selling were an endless source of fascination. When my buddy who got me into this initially would return from the Chicago CES each year, laden with shopping bags full of brochures, we’d sit in his room and pour over all of it for hours, daydreaming that one day we’d own some of it.
I was kind of surprised that a cursory internet search for photos of the inside of my new Tascam deck were nowhere to be found. Fuck it, I thought. I’ll make my own. So I disconnected everything, popped the cover, and snapped a photo worthy of a product brochure.
Even though I already knew (from having the Service Manual) that there was no audiophile-grade CD mechanism in this deck, but instead just a standard Teac (parent company of Tascam) IDE CDROM drive like you’d find in a desktop or tower computer of the era, it was still kind of surprising to actually see it. And the 2015 date stamp on the drive was another surprise, confirming that I’d gotten one of the units from the last year they were in production.
Okay, when I bought this Tascam MD-CD1MKIII deck I knew it looked mint, but until I started digging in the menus I never realized it had so few hours on it as well!
Damn, this thing was hardly touched!
Nostalgia. It’s a hell of.a drug. I’ve said it before.
Randy gets it, and is the first person I’ve seen so succinctly sum up what I feel whenever I put on a CD or rip a new MiniDisc. It just feels good. And as a collector, the dopamine rush of walking into a thrift store or our local Hard-Off, not knowing what I may find lurking on those shelves, or when a new-to-me piece of gear that I probably overpaid for arrives in the mail is exactly as he points out.
I grew up with vinyl as a teenager, spent my 20s and 30s with the arrival and peak market of CDs (I remember to this day the smell when you walked into Tower Records), and ended my 30s and spent my 40s with MiniDiscs. Even though the whole cancer thing occurred when I was deep into MD (I remember having my Sony MZ-S1 at the hospital, listening to whoever was on my radar at the time) I still have so many fond memories associated with the format.
I look at my music collection and think, “That’s me. That’s my vibration.” And even though my tastes have expanded over the years, every one of those recordings is a part of who I am.
And since everything I buy is used from individuals, it gives a stiff middle finger to the orange felon’s tariff madness.
The Hard●Off chain of stores (including Book●Off) are a well known brand in Japan. (Something I learned while researching MiniDisc on YouTube.) They’re expanding into the US market with a handful of stores, the most recent being the one in Phoenix that just opened a few weeks ago.
You can find the CDs new on Amazon, but used copies are much cheaper on Discogs, even when you factor in shipping. I picked up near-mint copies for around $3-4/disc (not including shipping).
Interestingly, when I had these in my collection prior to the purge, I didn’t rip them in their entirety to iTunes—something I now regret (and now has been corrected) since I’ve gotten them back in my collection.
I love the Sony S2 design language.
Discography completed.
I thought that was Rufus Wainwright singing on a few on these!
There isn’t a single Annie Lennox album that I do not absolutely adore, but lately Songs of Mass Destruction has been on hot rotation in my player.
How many of you can hear the first track without even thinking about it?
I’ve been a fan of Enigma since they arrived on the scene thirty four (!) years ago. As I’ve written before, one of my most profound memories of Engima was their debut disc playing in my headphones as I took the 24 Divisadero Bus to The Lion’s Pub on rainy San Francisco night a little over a month after the passing of my first partner in 1991.
Screen Before the Mirror, probably my favorite Enigma release, gives the astronomer geek in me chills from the very first track with the emotionless, disembodied female voice quietly reading off the astrometric statistics of Mars and those chills continue through the remainder of the album.
When I set out to rebuild my CD collection two years ago I really didn’t have a roadmap set out of what to replace. My inventory of what I’d owned was catastrophically out of date, and while it had all been ripped to iTunes, discerning which of those 2200 albums in there had come from my original CD collection, were ripped from vinyl, or had been aquired from “other sources” was impossible to sort out.
My original inventory was a good jumping off point, but as I’ve learned over the past twenty four months or so, there are a lot of discs that I didn’t realize were missing until I saw them on Amazon, eBay, or Discogs…or just out in the wild. So that’s where this latest haul comes from. With the exception of Sympathique and Bare, none of these were in my records, but I knew I’d owned them all at some point.
Well…not really. Try as I might, I was unable to resuscitate the nugget. So I bought another one [tapping forearm to locate a vein] that was already working and I’m not the least bit disappointed.
I sold the D-10—the one that started this whole obsessive journey—at a substantial loss last week, so despite the fact it was at a loss, I’m strangely glad to be rid of it at the same time (so much for “keeping it for many years to come,” eh?). I don’t consider myself a collector, but honestly—but how many of a thing is considered a collection?
You can read the full article here.
