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The compact disc was invented in the 1980s and can most definitely be held up as a bit of a world changing invention, even if it might not have been an overnight revolution.
The CD has changed the way in which we listen to music, store data on computer systems and even watch movies, first with the ill fated Video CD and then with DVD and Blu-Ray discs, both of which are really little more than compact discs which just allow a heck of a lot more data to be stored.
Do you remember when you first got a CD player? In our house my sister was the first to get a CD player, which would probably have been in the mid to late Eighties. I was never a big music fan so it wasn’t until the early Nineties that I got my first CD enabled device, and that was a CD-ROM drive for my Amiga!
So, to this weeks question, which is…
21st birthday present. I still have it.
Never planned on getting one at all, but an ex boyfriend wanted to drag me out of the stone age and bought me one christmas 1994. I still have it, as it cnnected to my midi system (also still fully functional).
the boyfriend is long gone though!
My parents got their first CD player in 1989 very soon after we moved to Australia because they needed a new sound system for the dining room since they had opted not to bring their old one across from Britain.
The new sound system has (they still use it now) a record player on the top, a CD drive under that with a double cassette deck to the right of it, and of course a radio.
i first heard the first phillips top-loader as well as sony’s front-loading cdp-101 in october 1983 at [long defunct] Pacific Stereo, playing the first 2 CDs i ever heard, a cbs disc of the 1812 overture [can’t remember which orchestra/conductor] and a michael jackson CD, both played over a top-of-the-line infinity tower speaker system- i remember being impressed over the lack of surface noise as well as improved dynamics and deeper cleaner bass. i wasn’t able to get a CD player for myself until april 1985 when i went to International Hifi in san antonio texas to get the first sony discman portable player, along with the famous telarc CD of the 1812 overture, the one with the woofer-shredding cannonfire. at the time, i didn’t own a pair of headphones which could reproduce those cannon shots without severe distortion, even at low volume levels. i didn’t get to actually hear the cannonfire reproduced cleanly until i got to audition a pair of snell type A speakers, which actually made the cannons sound utterly clean and deep but somehow perfunctory/anticlimactic [like they were far in the background], compared with what i was expecting to hear.