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Misty
Origins
Understanding that success
in the marketplace required the participation
of at least one other major manufacturer, Philips
invited Sony to join it in the development of
the compact disc player. By the time Sony came
on board, Philips had refined the disc to allow
sixty minutes to be encoded on one side. The maximum
encoding time was soon raised to 68 minutes, satisfying
Herbert Von Karajan's requirement that the disc
be long enough to play back Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony in its entirety.
Imagine, a conductor dictating
the length of a sound carrier. Then again, PolyGram
was Philips' prinipal client: The idea behind
the CD was that it would cut back on the number
of returns for defective records, and additionally,
and in some respects more importantly, it would
replace vinyl with another carrier material. As
a petroleum product, vinyl suffered the same fate
as any other oil derivative during the 1970's.
Let us not forget as well: Karajan was indeed
a maestro. Everywhere. Including the PolyGram
HQ in Hannover. Rumor has it they were terrified
of him. It is widely rumored that Peter Erdmann
stopped riding a motorcycle to work during his
tenure as Group president, so terrified was he
that Von K. would speed along beside him on the
Autobahn, and cut him off.
By 1979 the format arrived in its penultimate
form, with a larger disk size than that desired
by Philips and the European car stereo business
which sought a disk that would fit into the existing
dimension of car stereos in Europe. The larger
diameter raised the playback time to 74 minutes,
sixteen seconds.
First is the last of its kind
Apart from their adherence
to a common standard, Philips and Sony chose different
paths to the design of CD players. Sony aimed
for a bit-for-bit assembly that was sixteen bits
long, Philips retained the design that it had
developed for its first prototype in 1978. By
1980, the 14 bit decoder had been refined to the
point where it easily outperformed what was feasible
using a sixteen bit word length at the time. In
the original Philips design, the playback unit
ignores the two least significant bits, adding
them at the assembly stage, during error correction.
Fourteen bits of retrieval
obviously worked better than sixteen, and it allowed
Philips to develop a robust error correction system
that was more capable of playing damaged or imperfect
discs. Philips introduced sixteen bit players
in late 1983 that had all of the error correction
capabilities of the CDP-101. The top of the line
model, the CDP-303 had a sliding tray that brought
the entire transport out to permit a disc to be
more conveniently loaded.
The CDP-303 was my first
CD player, and I was immediately impressed by
its open, non-fatiguing sound. Years later, I
had a chance to listen to a CDP-101, which I took
to be inferior back in 1984 for its truncated
playback, and discovered that all of the qualities
that had impressed me with the 303 were present
in the 101.
Quality
Control
The CDP-101 was put into
production in late 1981. The format's launched
was planned for August, 1982, and Philips wanted
to ensure that the CD player would be available
in sufficient quantity to meet the expected demand
by both consumers and the music industry itself.
PolyGram companies would
each receive several units prior to the launch
to permit quality control checks to be made in
each market where CDs were to be distributed.
At the time, 'QC' was practiced by all PolyGram
companies. Many did not manufacture records, using
local pressing plants for this purpose. QC was
applied in all markets to both locally manufactured
records, and to those made in Europe by PolyGram
in Hannover. By 1984, most PolyGram QC departments
had sizable collections of commercially available
CD players, routinely testing the playback success
of the machines against their own reference, a
Philips CD player. Most initial players were incapable
of playing a damaged disc.
Sonic quality issues aside, the average non-Philips
player did a passable job with a defect free disc.
Toshiba's 16 bit player was the first to match
the performance of Sony's first machine. Long
term enthusiasts will recall the player: Barely.
The first stab that Toshiba took at digital was
presented in a black box with a disk that spun
vertically. Dual liked Toshiba's unit, and used
the design minus its dreadful display, which they
replaced with one that is among the prettiest
that I have seen.
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