Maybe, No happy returns for the CD

On August 17, 1982, the first compact disc rolled off a German production line, paving the way for a generation...

On August 17, 1982, the first compact disc rolled off a German production line, paving the way for a generation of devices that can now cram a thousand hours of hours of music or more into a box the size of a deck of cards. The technology that made the CD possible has also changed the dynamic of the music business8212;including the role of artists, the companies who market their music, and those of us who listen to it.

Ironically, that same technology now threatens to make the CD irrelevant. But 25 years ago, the shiny polycarbonate compact disc and the device that played it were state of the art8212;thanks to a new generation of powerful chips that brought industrial-strength processing power to consumer electronics for the first time. What made the CD truly revolutionary, however, was the way it stored music.

Before the CD, we bought music on vinyl records that held less than 30 minutes of audio per side, using the same basic technology that Thomas Edison pioneered in 1877. Those records had tiny grooves whose wavering internal shapes were directly analogous to the shape of the sound waves that produced them. That8217;s why turntables were known as analog devices.

The alternative to vinyl was magnetic tape, which used fluctuating magnetic fields to approximate the 8220;shape8221; of the musical sound waves they stored.

Although both produced excellent recordings, these analog media had a problem. The very act of playing them, with a turntable needle or magnetic tape head, slowly eroded the quality of the recording. Even with delicate equipment, no vinyl record or tape sounded as good after 100 playings as it did the first time. Although it was possible to copy a vinyl record to tape, or duplicate a cassette, the copy would never be as good as the original.

All that changed in 1979, when two industry giants, Sony and Phillips, put their heads together on a new recording format that would store music on a plastic disc with a protective coating that was far tougher than vinyl or magnetic tape. The new disc would hold 74 minutes of music8212;about 20 percent more than vinyl LPs. According to official accounts, that was enough room for the longest known recording of Beethoven8217;s Ninth Symphony, the favourite of a top Sony executive.

More importantly, CDs would store music digitally, as a series of ones and zeroes that were burned into the plastic, read by a laser beam and ultimately turned back into Beethoven, or Diana Krall or Snoop Dogg.

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Turning audio into digital data, though a process called sampling, was the key to unlocking the music because those ones and zeroes could be stored on a variety of media8212;including a CD, magnetic tape, a computer8217;s hard drive and later, a flash memory card.

As long as the ones and zeroes were intact, a digital tune would sound as good after 1,000 plays as it did the first time. And copies would not be copies 8212; but exact duplicates of the original.

As long as it had a lock on the powerful computers and exotic production equipment necessary to record and produce CDs, the industry prospered. But in the 1990s, a funny thing happened: personal computers got some real muscle. Manufacturers began packaging them with sound cards and CD-ROM drives that could not only play CDs, but even copy or create them from scratch.

So whither the CD? Although its dominance is likely to fade slowly, the odds aren8217;t in the CD8217;s favour. By today8217;s standards, it8217;s just too inefficient for artists and fans alike. The decline of the CD may also give artists a chance to reconsider how they create music. With the ability to deliver tunes directly to their fans, some established performers are asking why they need a big recording company8212;and the CDs it produces8212;as a middleman.
8211; Mike Himowitz LAT-WP