EINDHOVEN, Netherlands – It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. An engineering marvel at the time, ...

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, ...

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 ...

Since we last looked into the ongoing resurrection of the classic digital disc, even more CD playing devices have caught our eye. Here’s an update featuring the latest in standalones and separates, ...

What is a compact disc (CD)? A Compact Disc (CD) is an optical disc used to store digital data. CD-ROMs and CD-Rs remain widely used technologies in the computer industry.CD-ROM drives employ a ...

The Compact Disc (CD) or Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) – as the official but little-used name – was launched on August 17, 1982: from then on, up to 74 minutes of music could be stored on a sound ...

When the Compact Disc Digital Audio standard came out in 1980, there was a curious fact about it: It was 74 minutes long. Not 60 minutes. Or an even 70 minutes. Seventy-four. And it was all one deaf ...

Compact discs weren’t always impromptu drink coasters. Once, in the not-so-distant past, they played music, contained pictures, and let people play video games with tacked-on FMV sequences. And today, ...

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 ...