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, ...

In the rare case we listen to an audio CD these days, we typically rely on off-the-shelf hardware to decode the 1s and 0s into the dulcet tones of Weird Al Yankovic for our listening pleasure. [Lukas] ...

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 ...

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, ...

CD sales saw a modest increase in 2023, with 36.83 million units sold, briefly reversing years of decline. Gen Z is now buying more CDs than older generations, driving renewed interest in physical ...

Sunday (March 6) is the 30th anniversary of the demonstration of the first CD prototype, code-named “Pinkeltje” at the time after a character in Dutch children’s literature. Royal Philips Electronics ...

During the 1990s, music was almost invariably stored on CDs or cassette tapes. When the new millennium came around, physical formats became obsolete as music moved first to MP3 files, and later to ...

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 ...

If you thought the compact disc had quietly slipped into retirement (or streaming redundancy), it might be worth taking a ...

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 ...