CD's B-Day

[bigburner]

no one local carries any decent music selection anymore. (I live in the SF Bay Area..)

That's because you live in a backwater Jon. You need to live somewhere central like New Zealand to get decent music!

Nigel.

[JonMarsh]

I didn't have one until 1983. There were some things CD's did very well compared with most phono rigs back then- but imaging wasn't one of them. :W

It's taken a long time to realize the potential of that digital format, or to come close to it (I'm thinking TotalDAC D1 or Berkeley Alpha RS), and the ironic thing is that that playback is rarely done from a spinning disk at home anymore=- for me, it's become a hard copy way of "downloading" music from online vendors, as lord only knows, no one local carries any decent music selection anymore. (I live in the SF Bay Area..)

[wkhanna]

from today's posting at 'The Writer's Almanac'

On this date in 1982, the first compact discs for commercial release were manufactured in Germany. CDs were originally designed to store and play back sound recordings, but later were modified to store data. The first test disc, which was pressed near Hannover, Germany, contained a recording of Richard Strauss's An Alpine Symphony, played by the Berlin Philharmonic. The first CD commercially produced at the new factory and sold on this date was ABBA's 1981 album The Visitors; the first new album to be released on CD was Billy Joel's 52nd Street, which hit the stores in Japan — alongside the new Sony CD player — on October 1. The event is known as the "Big Bang of digital audio."