Melbguy1
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Hi guys, here is Part 2 re-posted with permission from DCS :audiophile:..
From its raw beginnings to the future as it is being made – in the second instalment of this four-part feature we look at the early days of CD…
When the world’s first Compact Disc was manufactured at a Philips factory in Germany, on August 17, 1982, the world would never be the same again. The album was ABBA’s The Visitors, an understandably unadventurous choice – but by the time that the format was officially launched in November 1982, a catalogue of around 150 titles – mainly classical music – had been produced. At the same time, the first CD players went on sale in Japan, including Sony’s CDP-101 and Philips’ CD100, although US and European audiences had to wait until March 1983 to get their taste of tomorrow.
By 1983, over one thousand titles were available, costing around £15 each in the UK. Record companies worked closely with the hardware providers to celebrate the joys of digital sound, with Dire Straits’ new album Brothers in Arms becoming one of the first all-digital (DDD – digitally recorded, digitally mastered and digitally delivered) releases, and the first to sell over a million copies. This became the automatic choice for any new hardware purchaser, and the third greatest selling silver disc of the nineteen eighties. Back in the day, it seemed that everyone who had a CD player had a copy!
Although touted as ‘perfect’, technically Compact Disc was far from it. dCS Director of Design Andy McHarg points out that CD’s real compromise was its 44.1kHz sampling frequency, rather than the number of bits. “For the original digital converters inside CD players, they had to build these complicated analogue filters and you only had one or two kilohertz above the audio band to transition. At that time those filters were next-to impossible to make. If you have an analogue filter that cuts off so sharply so close to where human hearing reaches, you have a problem. And worse still, they were analogue so not exactly the same on each channel – and that’s one thing the human ear is very sensitive to. When Digital Audio Tape came along with its 48kHz sampling frequency, it was noticeably cleaner sounding – thanks to that extra bandwidth you have to play with.”
Initial sales of CD in the UK were slow, due to the high hardware prices – Sony’s CDP-101 sold for over £800. The British hi-fi press praised CD’s clarity, dynamics and lack of surface noise. What really caught the public’s imagination however, was its convenience – it was a format that people wanted to have in their lives. “If you are being completely honest about the market at the time, that was the thing that sold it,” says Andy. It was the ease of use rather than the sound quality, and also the robustness. Those were the days of everyone owning a cheap record deck and scratching everything, or having a cheap cassette deck which chewed up tapes!”
By the late nineteen eighties, it wasn’t CD that was Britain’s best selling music format, but Compact Cassette. Some might think it odd that a fragile dictation tape designed in 1963 was the format of choice twenty five years later, but it showed that music fans had fallen out of love with vinyl, but couldn’t yet afford CD. According to the British Phonographic Institute, in 1988, 83 million prerecorded cassettes were sold, compared to 41.7 million digital discs. It’s significant that vinyl fell behind CD for the first time, selling 37.9 million LPs. CD’s time nearly here – three years later it knocked tape off the top spot.
By the early nineties, almost every audiophile had a CD player, and some were on their second models. The pace of change was fast, as we witnessed different ways of doing digital-to-analogue converters. The first Philips machines had 14-bit DACs, four times oversampled; the second generation that arrived in the mid-eighties had full 16-bit DACs, also four times oversampled. Then in 1989, Philips invented Bitstream, which proved something of a milestone in digital audio – if not in Compact Disc per se. The new converter chips were more linear, had better consistency and were cheaper to build. The result was a new generation of digital audio portables and in-car players, and prices tumbled. In the hi-fi realm, many players now came with S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital InterFace) outputs, allowing the use of a separate digital converter. For the first time, existing CD players could be upgraded by a black box…
In 1993, a relatively new British company launched its first standalone DAC. It immediately caused a sensation, both in the professional recording world at which it was aimed, and in the high end hi-fi world which was intrigued by it. Designed and built in the UK by dCS, the world’s first 24-bit, 96kHz-capable digital-to-analogue converter was the beginning of today’s high resolution music movement.
From its raw beginnings to the future as it is being made – in the second instalment of this four-part feature we look at the early days of CD…
When the world’s first Compact Disc was manufactured at a Philips factory in Germany, on August 17, 1982, the world would never be the same again. The album was ABBA’s The Visitors, an understandably unadventurous choice – but by the time that the format was officially launched in November 1982, a catalogue of around 150 titles – mainly classical music – had been produced. At the same time, the first CD players went on sale in Japan, including Sony’s CDP-101 and Philips’ CD100, although US and European audiences had to wait until March 1983 to get their taste of tomorrow.
By 1983, over one thousand titles were available, costing around £15 each in the UK. Record companies worked closely with the hardware providers to celebrate the joys of digital sound, with Dire Straits’ new album Brothers in Arms becoming one of the first all-digital (DDD – digitally recorded, digitally mastered and digitally delivered) releases, and the first to sell over a million copies. This became the automatic choice for any new hardware purchaser, and the third greatest selling silver disc of the nineteen eighties. Back in the day, it seemed that everyone who had a CD player had a copy!
Although touted as ‘perfect’, technically Compact Disc was far from it. dCS Director of Design Andy McHarg points out that CD’s real compromise was its 44.1kHz sampling frequency, rather than the number of bits. “For the original digital converters inside CD players, they had to build these complicated analogue filters and you only had one or two kilohertz above the audio band to transition. At that time those filters were next-to impossible to make. If you have an analogue filter that cuts off so sharply so close to where human hearing reaches, you have a problem. And worse still, they were analogue so not exactly the same on each channel – and that’s one thing the human ear is very sensitive to. When Digital Audio Tape came along with its 48kHz sampling frequency, it was noticeably cleaner sounding – thanks to that extra bandwidth you have to play with.”
Initial sales of CD in the UK were slow, due to the high hardware prices – Sony’s CDP-101 sold for over £800. The British hi-fi press praised CD’s clarity, dynamics and lack of surface noise. What really caught the public’s imagination however, was its convenience – it was a format that people wanted to have in their lives. “If you are being completely honest about the market at the time, that was the thing that sold it,” says Andy. It was the ease of use rather than the sound quality, and also the robustness. Those were the days of everyone owning a cheap record deck and scratching everything, or having a cheap cassette deck which chewed up tapes!”
By the late nineteen eighties, it wasn’t CD that was Britain’s best selling music format, but Compact Cassette. Some might think it odd that a fragile dictation tape designed in 1963 was the format of choice twenty five years later, but it showed that music fans had fallen out of love with vinyl, but couldn’t yet afford CD. According to the British Phonographic Institute, in 1988, 83 million prerecorded cassettes were sold, compared to 41.7 million digital discs. It’s significant that vinyl fell behind CD for the first time, selling 37.9 million LPs. CD’s time nearly here – three years later it knocked tape off the top spot.
By the early nineties, almost every audiophile had a CD player, and some were on their second models. The pace of change was fast, as we witnessed different ways of doing digital-to-analogue converters. The first Philips machines had 14-bit DACs, four times oversampled; the second generation that arrived in the mid-eighties had full 16-bit DACs, also four times oversampled. Then in 1989, Philips invented Bitstream, which proved something of a milestone in digital audio – if not in Compact Disc per se. The new converter chips were more linear, had better consistency and were cheaper to build. The result was a new generation of digital audio portables and in-car players, and prices tumbled. In the hi-fi realm, many players now came with S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital InterFace) outputs, allowing the use of a separate digital converter. For the first time, existing CD players could be upgraded by a black box…
In 1993, a relatively new British company launched its first standalone DAC. It immediately caused a sensation, both in the professional recording world at which it was aimed, and in the high end hi-fi world which was intrigued by it. Designed and built in the UK by dCS, the world’s first 24-bit, 96kHz-capable digital-to-analogue converter was the beginning of today’s high resolution music movement.
