The Creation of the Compact Disc

Experienced audio professional Larry Ryckman serves as the president and CEO of AfterMaster Audio in California. Throughout his more than 30-year career, Larry Ryckman has mastered and produced numerous hit songs and albums, including Lady Gaga’s Telephone, Alice Cooper’s Madhouse Rock Tour, and Aerosmith’s We All Fall Down.

Compact discs, or CDs, have become a standard for storing music and audio. They have been in use for more than 30 years, but the path to their creation started in the 1950s, and Italian- born Antonio Rubbiani created an extremely rudimentary video disc system in 1957. Although this system was far from what is recognized today, it inspired industry-wide research into the video disc starting in 1969. This research eventually culminated in the Philips ALP, an audio disc system that used laser technology. Through the 1970s, the company worked on developing an audio format that was smaller than a vinyl record and could hold at least one hour of music.

By 1979 Philips reached success in this endeavor, and they made an agreement with Sony to create an audio disc that could hold at least 74 minutes of music – the entire length of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Despite its existence, the CD did not go out to market right away. Sony and Philips produced a Red Book that laid out all compact disc standards for the industry in 1980, and Philips created the first CD player by 1982. This same year, CDs hit the market with 150 available titles and soon began gaining traction around the world.