Today’s a significant anniversary in the history of recorded music, writes Andrew Everard: the world's first CD players were announced in Japan on October 1st, 1982. 

And despite the rearguard action fought by some record companies – and some audiophile reviewers who went into full, barricade-manning denial at the time – it’s still with us as a highly successful medium for recorded music, the antecedent of modern DVDs and Blu-rays and the precursor of today’s digital download trend.

By Autumn 1982 the CD momentum had been building for a while, but it was on October 1st that Sony launched its first player, the CDP-101, along with the first album available on the new format – Billy Joel's 52nd Street.

Eight years in the making
However, the project to store music on an optical disc was founded by Philips as far back as 1974, and the suggestion that a 20cm disc be used. In turn, that was based on an even earlier Philips idea, Audio Long Play, using laser technology.

By 1977 the format for players and discs was beginning to come together, with the Philips engineers taking the 'Compact Disc' name from their last success, the compact cassette, and suggesting a disc with an 11.5cm diameter - the diagonal measurement of a cassette – to give a running time of one hour.

By now, some original ideas about making the format quadrophonic rather than stereo had been dropped: to do that would have meant going for that 20cm disc, and the 'compact' idea was taking hold.

Almost a format war
Meanwhile, in what could have been the makings of a format war, Sony engineers had shown an optical audio format in September 1976, and by 1978 had a disc giving a playing time of 150 minutes using a 44.1kHz - well actually 44.056kHz - sampling rate and 16-bit resolution.

They presented this at the 1979 Audio Engineering Society convention, which was held in Belgium. And – in typical format war style – a week before Philips had held an event called 'Philips Introduce Compact Disc'.

Driven by Sony executive Norio Ohga, a keen musician, friend of the conductor Herbert von Karajan and head of CBS/Sony Records by the relatively young age of 40 – he'd later go on to become Sony president, CEO and eventually succeed founder Akio Morita as chairman – Sony and Philips (thankfully) joined forces to co-develop the format.

A joint conference, with Karajan taking centre stage between Joop Sinjou of Philips and Sony's Akio Morita, was held to announce the venture, and the brought together the two companies' technologies, and came up with the Red Book standard – despite the colour, the blueprint for the format – in 1980.

A 12cm disc for Beethoven's 9th...?
And no doubt influenced by both the conductor and his friend Ohga, the CD format changed again, growing to 12cm. Why? Simply because Sony insisted that the running time should be sufficient to hold the whole of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

And given that the longest-running version of the Ninth in the Philips-owned Polygram catalogue – Furtwangler's 1951 Bayreuth Festival recording – was 74 minutes, that became the standard. 12cm – rather than the previous 11.5cm, designed to hold an hour of music, or the 10cm disc Sony had been proposing – was what we got.

... Or a matter of competitive advantage?
Well, that's one version of the story: the other is that Philips was already set up to press the 11.5cm discs, and so had an advantage over Sony, which didn't have a plant up and running yet. By forcing the switch to 12cm, it's claimed, Ohga was able to level the playing-field again.

Whatever the truth, surprisingly the first classical disc pressed on the new format wasn't the Ninth, but a Karajan recording with the Berlin Philharmonic of Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie.

'The record player is obsolete'
Though Sony was first to market with hardware, Philips had shown a production player in April 1982, the company's Lou Ottens, technical director of the audio division, announcing that 'From now on, the conventional record player is obsolete.'

Gramophone's CD special
The first players were based around the drawer-loading Sony CDP-101 technology, and soon the top-loading wedge-fronted Philips CD100.

And by the time the format was officially rolled out worldwide, in March 1983, Gramophone was able to publish a special section reviewing not only the discs available, but no fewer than four CD players.

The original Philips and Sony machines were in there, along with Hitachi's DA-1000, in which the disc was clamped vertically in the manner of a cassette player, and the drawer-loading Marantz CD-73, the company's follow-up to the Philips CD100-derived CD-63.

The CD-73 had a clear panel in the top-plate, through which the green-illuminated disc could be seen spinning.

The price for these players? From £450 for the Philips to £549 for the Sony, with the Marantz and Hitachi both around the £500 mark. And it's worth bearing in mind how expensive those players were: £500 in 1983 was the equivalent of around £1400 today.

The best thing since Harry Lauder
The Gramophone reviewers gave their opinions of their first encounters with CD, William A Chislett saying that the arrival of CD made his previous audio landmarks – including first hearing a recording of Harry Lauder singing Roaming in the gloaming when it was released in 1905! – pale into insignificance.

Lionel Salter commented that 'The pure silence against which the music can unfold is itself startling', while Edward Greenfield noted that, aside from the trickiness of fast-fowarding to find a desired passage of the music, CD brought 'a sense of presence comparable with that of quadrophonic at its best'. He looked forward to one day having a CD system in his car.

'The silence is deafening'
Robert Layton, meanwhile, said of the lack of background noise that 'the silence is positively deafening', and while other critics mentioned the focus the new format could throw on any failings in production or recording, Layton concluded 'I am sure there is no turning back'.

In the audio press, the arrival of CD met a mixed reception.

What Hi-Fi? (as it was then) kept its readers abreast of developments as the launch of CD approached and then as more players began to appear.

The magazine brought us news of the first all-in-one CD-playing system from Hitachi, the move of companies such as Meridian into the format, and the eventual arrival of the in-car player from companies such as Sony, Philips and Pioneer.

Meanwhile those magazines catering for the more 'serious' audiophile seemed decidedly detached from the whole CD thing.

'Review CD players? Never! I resign!'
For many years the 'vinyl is best' mantra was preached. Let's face it, in some quarters it still is, despite three decades in which the CD player has been refined and developed.

In fact, I gather from a friend working on one of Haymarket’s hi-fi magazines at the time that the resistance to CD was not only deep, but determined. indeed, such was the intensity of the negative feeling that one staff member actually resigned rather than bow to the pressure to review CD players!

However, despite the best efforts of the resistance, CD caught on pretty rapidly, although some companies held firm for as long as they could, in the belief that CD performance couldn't match what was available from vinyl. In contrast with early adopters such as Mission and Meridian, Naim didn't make a CD player until 1991, when it introduced the CDS, and Linn held out until 1993, finally launching the Karik that year.

CD for a variety of uses
Since the arrival of the CD, which all along had promised the potential for extra content such as lyrics or even pictures, we've also had various spin-offs from the original standard, designed to add functionality.

There was the Video CD, launched as a more durable alternative to the prerecorded video cassette and still popular in some markets, and CDi (below), an interactive system launched by Philips to deliver both games and movies through modified players but overtaken by the arrival of DVD, which of course also uses that 12cm disc format.

We've also had CD recorders for audio, much loved in the hi-fi community as a means of making sampler discs to carry around for demonstrations or testing, but these days all but displaced by computer storage, USB sticks and hard drives, and iPods and the like, while just about every computer still has a CD/DVD rewriter built-in.

Collectible CD players
The very early CD players –  the first Philips top-loaders, and derivatives such as the original Marantz CD63 – are now sought-after collectibles, not least among mainland European retro-audio enthusiasts, and the best I could find was around €1500 for an original model in working condition.

But I found an early Philips player, the CD104 from 1984, as part of a job-lot of three machines I purchased for £30 from audio recycling company Green Home Electronics. The first drawer-loading Philips machine, it was was boxed in slightly tatty original cardboard packaging and came complete with its original manual.

Compared with the later machines in the trio – a 1985 CD150 and a 1986 CD160 – the CD104 feels hefty: anything inside this player that could be made of metal, is made of metal, meaning it has a substantial transport mechanism and an overall feel of solidity somewhat lacking in its featherweight descendants.

There's also a massive heatsink on the back to keep the power supply section regulators cool and performing as they should.

And aside from a recalcitrant loading-drawer – probably only needing a new belt to fix it – the CD104 still works very well, as do all three machines I bought. True, it sounds a bit vague by comparison with the very latest hardware, and indeed the most recent of our trio, the CD160 – but then both it and the CD150 are using the original 14-bit DAC technology with which CD was launched.

The balance here is smooth, but fairly dynamic, but what’s missing is the presence and sparkle that makes the best of modern CD players sound so involving. By comparison with the latest hardware, the CD104 sounds a bit like a high-bitrate MP3 file – the music’s all there, but some of the magic and vitality is missing.

However, it’s not hard to hear just what appealed so much to early CD buyers, used to the crackles and pops of LPs or the almost inevitable hiss of cassette: there’s nothing to get in the way of the music, even if it’s clear with the benefit of hindsight that recordings still have much more to give.

CD may have been launched with that promise of 'perfect sound forever', but fortunately things have continued to improve since those early days of the silver disc.