I remember being in a record store about 1984 timeframe, and the salesperson was trying to sell me on CDs. I told her something like: This is just a bunch of 1d and 0s. Why should I buy some special piece of equipment to read music 1s and 0s, when sometime in the near future everything will be 1s and 0s and all I’ll need is a universal 1s and 0s reader for EVERYTHING!!!
I’m not convinced that “time limitation” was an issue; a CD can hold considerably more music than a single vinyl LP can.
A CD can hold about 74 to 80 minutes of music. The Wikipedia article repeats a story that I’d heard many times, that this capacity was chosen so that a CD could hold the entirety of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on one disc.
Most vinyl LPs, IME (at least rock and pop albums), held between 35 and 40 minutes of music. I don’t recall ever running into a vinyl LP that I couldn’t fit onto one side of a 90-minute tape cassette.
Edit: the Wikipedia article on LPs notes that the standard length was 45 minutes; there were examples of longer formats, but they were the exceptions to the rule.
First heard about them in '85, from the DJ on the radio station I listened to when I was in Norfolk. First saw one in '86, when I was in Hawai`i. And bought my first couple*, along with a player – mail-rer from a Spiegel catalogue – in '91.
- “Greatest hits” albums of the Monkees and the Partridge Family.
So I definitely did not actually have a CD of my own until after 1993, as I’d never even heard of the long boxes. I know I got a computer with a CD drive around 1995-96, so it had to have been before then, as I had CDs I played on it when I got it.
Since I apparently missed this, I wonder about another piece of history: when did they stop selling music where they would mention both getting the cassette or the CD when advertising on TV? And did they ever reach the point where the cassette was actually more expensive, or did they stop selling cassettes by then?
Certainly for single albums it was not a problem, but at the time when double CDs cost about twice as much as single CDs, a lot of records that had been double LP sets on vinyl (total running time approx 80 minutes) were shrunk down to single CDs at the expense of chopping a track off. I have a couple of Rush live albums that dropped a track each. My friends used to call them ‘penalty tracks’, to contrast missing songs, with the extra music that came as ‘bonus tracks’. (Funnily enough, I’ve seen ‘Penalty Tracks’ used more recently to describe worthless extra program on CDs that don’t add any value to the experience).
I figure the people who saw them early were technophiles, or friends of a technophile, and read about them in magazines or at their fancy electronics store. They would’ve been touted as the next big thing, but in the same way as DAT tapes or laserdisc, only a few people would have them and there was a high risk they wouldn’t take off. NZ, and especially small-town NZ, was likely being cautious before wide adoption.
Actually, it was around that time that New Zealand felt like it was catching up to the rest of the world at last, no longer five years behind on trends. TV and movies were arriving sooner, fashion was up to date, and big pop stars and stage shows were visiting more frequently.
They could make them longer simply by having narrower, shallower grooves. One example of such an album, which I bought in high school is A Wizard, a True Star by Todd Rundgren, which is 55:56. I listened to the whole thing (the original vinyl record I bought new, which I did not overplay) recently. It sounded truly terrible. He no doubt intended it to be a double album but crammed it onto one disc when (I would surmise) the record company wouldn’t let go double again.
I still have my original copy of Learning To Crawl by The Pretenders, so 1984.
Hence the note on the cover of the original release of Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!!.
Nice retro article
The latest I can find on YouTube is Kidz Bop 6 from 2004. I wonder if cassettes held on a little longer for children’s music the same way VHS held out against DVD a little longer for kid’s movies (or so I was told). The latest non-kid’s music ad I could find was “Monsta Jamz”, 2002.
And replaced with plastic. :smack:
I first heard of them when they came out in the early 1980s, and was working at Target at the time. One reason they didn’t catch on as quickly as many people thought they would was because they were very expensive at first - $20 or more, in early 1980s dollars.
I’m not sure. In 1987 there was a short-lived show called The Charmings, and the prince Charming character held up a CD to his ear, expecting to hear it. I don’t know that I’d seen a CD before then, but I got the joke, so I’d obviously at least heard about their existence by then.
Target always sold cassettes in a plastic “box” that looked like one of those ladder things that you use to wind extension cords around. It made them much harder to shoplift.
So what Nick was saying is you’ve gotta be cruel to the record in the right measure to be kind to the listener, and the fact that it’s a long-play is a very good sign.
My first two CDs bought for Christmas presents along with a CD player: Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten.That says it all…
Not sure what exactly this says about the prevalence of CDs at the time, but the door prize at my senior prom (spring 1991) was a Sylvania CD player for a component stereo system. One CD at a time- it had a little sliding tray just like a computer. Even at the time, it was distinctly middle of the road to lower-end.
A few years later (1992-ish), you could get models that would interface with your tape deck and let you make a really good cassette tape of the CD- mine (some Technics model) would actually do several things to accomplish this- auto-adjust recording levels, divide the songs up onto the two sides of the CD, and control the tape deck to make sure that everything made it onto the tape properly. (basically it would put say… 6 songs on the first side of the tape, fast-forward to the end, and (I don’t recall) either prompt you to flip the tape, or just start recording the songs for the other side as it ran in the opposite direction.
Or, for about the same price, you could get a multi-disc model that had this massive carousel and could swap about 6 CDs in and out.
CDs took off like a rocket, but they fell from grace nearly as fast.
I have a 60 disc CD changer that records onto cassette like that. I can que up enough tracks to fill a cassette tape. It automatically records the tracks in sequence. It has autoreverse so that when it reaches side one of the tape it reverses, goes back to the beginning of the last track it was recording, and starts recording on side two.
It’s been in the garage for several years, as I exclusively listen to mp3s now, and don’t have to handle discs.
Early 80’s as an adolescent when I accompanied my Dad to an electronics store while he was stereo shopping. The salesman said that they had the best selection of CDs in Vermont, which, IIRC, consisted of about 50 titles targeted towards middle class/aged consumers.