Compact disc

The compact disc emerged from the unlikely alliance of two fierce competitors who recognized that neither could establish a new audio format alone. Philips had the optical disc expertise from LaserDisc; Sony had pioneered digital audio. When they combined forces in 1979, they created not just a product but a standard that would dominate recorded music for two decades and establish the template for optical data storage.

The adjacent possible had crystallized through parallel developments in laser technology and digital signal processing. Philips began optical disc research in 1969, demonstrating analog LaserDisc technology in 1972. Meanwhile, digital audio recording had progressed from experimental curiosity to practical possibility. By 1974, Philips engineers recognized that optical discs and digital encoding could combine—the disc would store ones and zeros as microscopic pits, read by laser without physical contact, preserving audio quality indefinitely.

The technical breakthrough came from an unexpected direction. Lou Ottens, director of Philips' audio division, initially pursued analog optical audio. But in March 1974, two Philips research engineers recommended switching to digital encoding due to analog's unsatisfactory performance. By 1977, Philips had established a dedicated laboratory for digital audio disc development.

Sony's parallel work proceeded from the digital audio side. When Sony demonstrated digital audio technology in 1977 and published a technical paper in March 1979, the two companies' trajectories converged. Eight days after Sony's paper appeared, Philips publicly demonstrated a digital optical audio disc prototype in Eindhoven. Rather than wage a format war that might kill the technology entirely—as Betamax versus VHS would soon demonstrate—the rivals formed a joint task force.

The collaboration between engineers Kees Schouhamer Immink (Philips) and Toshitada Doi (Sony) produced the Red Book standard, first published in 1980. Key decisions shaped the format: 44.1 kHz sampling rate (matching professional digital audio tape), 16-bit depth (65,536 amplitude levels), and—legendarily—a 12-centimeter diameter chosen so the disc could hold Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in its entirety, about 74 minutes.

The first commercial CD pressing occurred on August 17, 1982, in a Philips facility in Langenhagen, Germany. Sony's CDP-101, the first CD player, launched in Japan on October 1, 1982, at approximately $900. Early adopters were classical music enthusiasts drawn by the format's dynamic range and silence between tracks.

Path dependence locked in the CD standard. Once established, the format's ecosystem of pressing plants, player manufacturers, and retailer infrastructure made competing formats economically unviable. The CD became the first consumer digital storage medium, creating markets for CD-ROM drives, CD-R burners, and eventually DVD technology built on the same optical principles.

Peak CD sales reached 2.4 billion units in 2000—the year Napster began eroding the music industry's assumptions about physical media. By 2024, streaming had reduced CD sales to a fraction of their peak, but the format's influence persists: the sampling rates and encoding principles established in the Red Book standard remain foundations of digital audio.