In the rare case we listen to an audio CD these days, we typically rely on off-the-shelf hardware to decode the 1s and 0s into the dulcet tones of Weird Al Yankovic for our listening pleasure. [Lukas] ...

On October 1, 1982, Sony ignited a digital audio revolution with the release of the world’s first commercial compact disc player, the CDP-101 (above), in Japan. It signaled the dawn of a new audio ...

When it comes to music consumption, streaming continues to be the music industry's biggest earner. Sales of physical formats like CD and vinyl are declining overall, though the latter has been clawing ...

The following story ran in the first-ever issue of SPIN in May 1985. Compact discs and compact disc players are the hottest things to hit the audio market since cassette tapes and players. However, ...

The appeal to consumers was supposed to be better and more lifelike sound quality. The appeal to music companies was supposed to be a new digital format that consumers couldn't Napster-ize or cheaply ...

Just as compact discs began replacing audiocassette tapes some 20 years ago, Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) or Digital Video Disc-Audio (DVD-A) or both of the relatively new formats should commence ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. It has now been more than 25 years since the compact disc was introduced to the world. We might ...

On October 1, 1982, the first commercial compact disc, Billy Joel’s “52nd Street,” was released in Japan. In the 30 years since, hundreds of billions of CDs have been sold, Joel has stopped recording ...

Thirty-five years after the format was introduced as one of the greatest audio advancements since the birth of recorded music — and unwittingly unleashed digitized music into the wild — the once ...

Memorializing the Compact Disc. Once upon a time, the CD was the ubiquitous music platform. Our story outlines how the disc-based music technology was adopted, loved and eventually abandoned by a ...