Twenty-five years ago, on 17 August 1982, Royal Philips Electronics manufactured the world’s first Compact Disc at a Philips factory in Langenhagen, outside of Hanover, Germany. The invention of the CD ushered in a technological revolution in the music industry as CDs – with their superior sound quality and scratch free durability – marked the beginning of the shift from analogue to digital music technology.

The Philips factory in Germany belonged to Polygram – the recording company, which Philips owned at the time. The first CD to be manufactured at the plant was The Visitors by ABBA. By the time CDs were introduced on the market in November 1982, a catalogue of around 150 titles – mainly classical music – had been produced.

The first CDs and CD players – including Philips’ CD100 – were introduced in Japan in November, followed by a US and European market introduction in March of 1983.

As early as 1979, Philips and Sony set up a joint task force of engineers to design the new digital audio disc. Many decisions were made in the year to follow – such as the disc diameter. The original target storage capacity for a CD was one hour of audio content, and a disc diameter of 115 mm was sufficient for this, however both parties extended the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate a complete performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

In June 1980, the new standard was proposed by Philips and Sony as the “Red Book” containing all the technical specification for all CD and CD-Rom standards.

As music industry sales of CDs started to take off in 1983, more than 1000 different titles were on the market. In 1985, one of the most famous bands in the world, Dire Straits, adopted the CD. The infamous album Brothers in Arms, as one of the first fully digital recording (DDD) to be brought to market, went on to become the top selling CD at the time, and the third greatest selling CD of the decade.

The joint collaboration with Philips entailed Philips and Dire Straits jointly promoting the sound quality of the CD to consumers, making Brothers in Arms the first album to sell over one million copies in this new format, marking the success of the CD as the emerging format of choice for music quality.

The Compact Disc is the forefather of today’s extensive family of optical discs for a wide range of applications such as CD-Rom, CD-R and CD-RW, DVD, DVD R, DVD RW and Blu-ray. Philips estimates that over the past 25 years, since the first CD was pressed at its German factory, over 200 billion CDs have been sold worldwide. Even though a single CD is only 1.2 mm thick, if all CDs ever produced were piled up, the stack of CDs would circle the earth six times.

Story filed 20.08.07