1983: The COMPACT DISC and EMI | Newsnight | Retro Tech | BBC Archive 

its been almost 40yrs since this article, im still waiting for banana leaf player to come into the market

It can not be understated how important these Mini documentaries will become in the future.

I saw the first CD player on a relative house, back on the first 80s. I got shocked by the price of the player, the equivalent to 3000€ back them. It was on a large room and with good audio equipment. For some years, it was just a dream for me... Now people almost throw away audio CDs. I bought a high quality piano music collection for less than 0.25€ each CD. And they sound awesome!

To this day I still find it very impressive that a CD player extracts jumbled data blocks from a spinning disc via a laser, also containing numerous parody bytes to correct errors, and reorganize all the data blocks in order to play audio from an onboard DAC - and it was all done so incredibly fast. Simply amazing that they had this tech in the late 70s, early 80s.

Well he was right to say it wouldn’t instantly replace the audio formats available. If anything cassettes were yet to peak. I think EMI probably didn’t want to be lodged into a multi-year contract they couldn’t get out of. After all, many formats had dropped out in living memory. Their presence in the market also probably wouldn’t have fast forwarded the key steps necessary to make CD huge. All in all, an interesting video and a very interesting time capsule.

Little did EMI know that CD's were going to be the biggest thing the music industry has ever seen.

I’m 26 and I still lovvveee CDs. Still buy them as well

Just looking at my 1980's Pioneer midi system which is sitting quietly in the corner playing an LP. I worked in WH Smiths back when CDs came out, on the music counter. They weren't an overnight success; the LP remained the medium of choice for many. Some early CDs lacked the warmth of sound you got from vinyl and the players and discs were expensive in comparison.

"You can bend it, or scratch it, it won't mat-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-er" ^___^

Well played EMI, there was indeed no rush to jump into it. It wouldn't replace cassettes and vinyl until the mid 90s.

5:57 If only EMI developed their new audio technology on banana leaves, they could have dominated the compact disc.

0:30 Even in 1983 there were people that touched the surface with their thumbs to hold the disc?? No! 😀 I hate this smudging on the discs so hard.

It's interesting that the guy said they can be scratched and still be ok, but I had many CDs and game discs ruined by scratches. Also, they snap quite easily so I don't know why he said they can be bent.

Please upload these archive videos in 50fps instead of ugly 25fps deinterlaced

500 quid ! That’s like the equivalent to a million in today’s money

I see that you couldn't easily put a disc into this early, expensive player without touching it and dropping it because the lid was in the way. His disc is covered in fingerprints. They showed a laser disk with pictures and a computer program in another documentary and it was diry too.

I was the first person I knew who had a CD player. My brother worked for a retailer and was able to purchase one at a discount. So my parents bought me a Phillips model for Christmas 1985 for about $140. My first 2 discs were Rush/Moving Pictures and U2/War, and they cost $17-18 each. That was about double the price of an LP. I can still remember being astonished at hearing Rush and Neil Peart's drums in incredible clarity through headphones. And those discs, still in kept in a CD folio, sound just as incredible today as they did 37 years ago.

It's amazing to realize these older executives talking about digital computers and sound were born in the 20s and 30s. They grew up on Edison phonographs and by the end of their lives, they saw the birth of digital music. That to me is really mind blowing.

Funny postscript to this video: the EMI exec Brian Southwell ended up writing a book about EMI collapsing years later called ‘The Rise and Fall of EMI Records’.

All my CDs from the early 1990's still work. Try owning music on a cloud service for 30+ years.

Vinyl was horrendous to begin with and it never improved simply because its a terrible way of storing music, CD's are still awesome, more so on a good hifi

“Doesn’t matter if you finger it, bend it or scratch it” that turned out to be the ultimate lie....

Probably one of my most prized possessions is a signed banana leaf edition of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells

Vinyl LPs suffer from wow, flutter and above all, dust, so why they're making a comeback is absolutely baffling to me.

EMI…yet another forward thinking British company!🙄😂

What a way to celebrate 40 years of this iconic medium by watching this video. So cool. Great history lesson as well. :)

I grew up in the 90’s, but my parents had bought two expensive CD players in the late 80’s and I grew up as one of the children incredibly fascinated by them and physical media, in general. Our old CD’s are still almost all playable, but none of the players work, for obvious reasons. I saved all their remote controls and their incredibly large size still amuses me. But I miss collecting CD’s, as they were still a big thing by the time I was in my final years of school.

This is really fascinating. When people today talk about music from this period it is often talk about how great the music was & how we would all love to go back. But the part when EMI says that record sales are falling and people don’t have money to buy new music is really interesting. It places things into perspective.

Sorry but I keep getting distracted by yer EMI man's TEETH!

Going out to buy music and owning a mass load of records/tapes/CD's... great days

I still enjoy compact discs. Remove the plastic, pop the cd on, take out the sleeve notes, press ‘Play’ and while listening to the album in the track order it is presented, read the sleeve notes. The Perfect hour.

Loved the vinyl era, loved the tape era. Still love (and buy) cd's and dvd's in 2022, and will do so for eternity, or as long as available. MP3's are the most compact and digital format, but a physical cd (and dvd) are still with us, and here to stay. My fist audio cd from early 80's still sounds are great as on the first day. That, combined with the revolutions in audio sound technology makes them even sound better in 2022.

I'm 30 & have been buying CD's since I was about 13, I use my CD player every single day.

Started buying CD's over 30 years ago and all still play as good as the first time. I still buy CD's now, for this reason but also the cover artwork and the booklet inside. Can't see me changing until the stop producing them. Didn't realise they appeared very nearly 40 years ago though.

I remember sitting in front of a pair of Bose 901s listening to Boston rather loud being played by a CD back in 1983, unreal!

Can't believe how timeless the design is on that Sony CD player!

I have a huge box full of CDs from the 80s. They sound better than later CDs. Vinyl is too much hard work and they don't sound that great after a few yrs.

5:58 My Banana Leaf player has been sat gathering dust. Here's hoping for a resurgence..

EMI= every mistake imaginable.

I can't imagine these new-fangled Cd records taking hold in the market any time soon . . .

I loved CD's. Especially during the days of ripping and burning. I would go down my local library and rent the latest albums and rip the music to my computer and then transfer it to my MP3 player. Those were the days. 😂

2:26 It doesn't matter if you finger it 😂

I am the only one amongst every single person I know that still buys CDs. Streaming is more convenient sure but it will never be the same. I love the ritual of choosing the album I want to listen, taking it out of the CD tower and putting it on the CD player.

4:15 Love the audio engineer stating the obvious, massive superiority of CD sound.

My first CD was BAD from Michael Jackson. I did not have a CD player at that time, but I thought it would be stupid to buy a record. So I went to my neighbour, and copied my cd to a cassette so I could listen to it. I was worried back then that the CD's would oxidize after a couple of years and no longer would be playable. Little did I know how unimportant that would become in the age of spotify and other streaming services. Oh and the CD that is now 35 years old, still works fine :D Yes the quality of spotify is worse than a CD, but also are my ears. My tinnitus makes that I can no longer hear the difference between a good quality stream and a CD. I remember being mesmerized the first time I heard a CD, it sounded so much cleaner than a record. And now the youth is reverting back to records because they think it is cool :D Heck they even buy film for their analogue camera's. Been there, done that :D no need to go back there.

I still buy lots of CD's from charity shops, which cost less than a Mars bar nowadays.

Yeh I want Duran Duran on a banana leaf

Grown up with and still buying and using them. Latest buy: Marillion - One hour before it's dark. Nothing wrong with CDs for 40 years.

While watching the video, I couldn't help but marvel at how far dental care has come along in 40-odd years. 🤭

I own three CD players. Two Sony players and one Cambridge audio. The Sony players are best as the Cambridge player does not play CDs gapless for some strange reason. Sometimes I get the odd disc that plays fine on one machine but not the other. Compact discs and vinyl are still my preferred listening mediums.🎶🎼

Great bit of history. I love how that recording station was using a U-Matic video cassette.

Britains inexorable industrial decline encapsulated in one video. A lack of vision, innate conservatism and complacency with chronic short-term strategising means has led to nearly every leading British company failing or being taken-over with many simply names in history. It’s funny hearing them discuss the US major labels as they’re all still around whereas EMI made the same mistake once again in failing recognise the potential in the internet and missed the boat on digital distribution. EMI collapsed into bankruptcy and this led to its breakup. Philips and Sony on the other hand are still strong independent companies that continue to innovate and back those innovations. Britains ruling class are some of the very worst leaders in the world: look at the series of inept prime ministers it’s had. Add EMI to the long list including the car industry, aero-industry, machine tool industry etc. No wonder the country feels like it’s declining inexorably.

It's interesting to know that even in 2022 - going on 2023 - people can STILL buy NEW CD players and even CD TRANSPORTS (which only READ the CD so you need to have a device to convert the CD's digits into a form our ears can recognize as music - namely, a Digital-to-Analog converter, or 'DAC' for short. The latest, best designs of these CD players and transports make WELL-RECORDED CDs (made in the days before the Loudness Wars' Digital-Compression Craze ruined them) sound amazingly good even today. Some people still prefer the sound of well-recorded-and-mastered CDs played on GOOD present-day audio equipment over the best sound that streaming audio can currently provide - although the sonic divide between the two is narrowing. ANOTHER very interesting thing about CDs today is that back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when CDs were in their prime, Philips and Marantz manufactured some very top-of-the-line CD players (such as the Marantz CD Player CD-94 Mk 2) which sound amazingly good even by today's (late 2022) standards. I was made aware of this Marantz model and found one on eBay sold by a Ukrainian eBayer! (I was amazed that he was still doing business while his country was under siege by Russia!). When I got it, it looked in MINT condition - like it was fresh out of the box in 1991. He, the Ukrainian seller, had had it serviced, lubricated and a fresh set of drive belts for the tray mechanism installed. I had to get a 110-to-220-volt converter to run it here in the U.S. - and it works and sounds beautifully!

I love going down memory lane with content like this , and the video quality wow!

It didn’t take EMI long to get on board with CD, but the hold out bit them in the end when they weren’t able to keep up with the manufacturing demand of CDs in the 1980’s.

Late 90s EMI Bin off huge amounts of its rosta to invest 40 million in Robbie Williams they did well then.....

40 years later and people are returning to CDs because new vinyl is too expensive to produce and purchase.

Milestone of the music distribution. A revolutionary, *compact* optical support which was capable to store many audio files with a 44.1kHz/16-bit @ 1411 kbps quality and reach 96db of amplitude. Thank you for sharing this piece of history, BBC.

What a fascinating historical document. Looking at this from 2022; knowing that CDs were the revolution (and then some) predicted here, that they saw off vinyl and cassette, and that they were themselves seen off by streaming. And when audiophiles pined for physical media again they went back to vinyl and not CDs. Also, all those promises (that I remember) about how they'd last and couldn't be scratched turned out to be untrue. Of all the things invented in my lifetime, CDs were one of the most astonishingly futuristic. They still look like something from a sci-fi movie.

1983. When you could get away with saying "you can finger it..."

I think EMI did the right thing. Maybe they should wait for the Mini-Disk 😊

"The Arabs..." I remember back in 1973/74 how the big record companies were treated with derision when they put up the price of an LP between 50p and a pound. The cost of the oil used in a vinyl LP after Yom Kippur war was less than 5p at the very most proving that the record majors simply wanted to make more money. Twas ever thus.

EMI were always slow with new technology and to meet the challenges of the digital age. Whereas Philips / PolyGram grasped it all and ended up as Universal whilst EMI went under.

Is that Sony the Hedgehog?

I've smoked a bit of a banana leaf, and wouldn't recommend it

Didn’t own a CD player until 1991 when a friend gave me their basic but great sounding Trio player. First CD I owned was Low by David Bowie. It was hard to love the CD in quite the same was as vinyl. It is way better audio but sadly, at least in the pop and rock market sound quality is not what people really care about. I wish they’d adapted laserdisc as a music only medium and we’d’ve had the form factor of vinyl albums with decent sized artwork and a 12’ disc that could hold both analogue and digital audio. Anyway back to the streaming service. People eh? We’re a fickle lot.

And that is one of the many reasons why EMI went bankrupt almost 30 years later.

0:25

Bought my first cd player in 1986,it was Hinari.My first album I bought was rather embarrassingly Nik Kershaw Human Racing.😁

These old BBC docs are super interesting to me. This one was filmed on my birth year!

Yuck... all those smudgy fingerprints on the CD ... some people just don't take care of things! That is as bad as fingerprints on vinyl! Give me an LP over CD any day!!

took 8 years, when the "bitstream" (single bit) dac chips made it possible for £99 (eventually £79) players sold at say richersounds shops in the early 90s

This will never catch on! Music on a shiny plastic disc, where are the grooves the audio pick up needle runs in? pah⚠️ Vinyl disc with grooves and magnetic audio cassette tape all day long 😊

Now in 2024 is the best time to buy used CD's. This is because the vinyl revival and their exorbitant prices!

I was 10 in 1983. I'd never heard of a CD back then. I didn't buy a CD player until 1998!

Definitely greater signal to noise ratio and less hiss and crackle but I still love listening to my vinyl collection. I was listening to Jennifer Warne's Famous Blue Raincoat a week ago. I have it on vinyl and on CD. The CD player is high end, as is the turntable. I honestly thought the vinyl sounded nicer. More "engaging" Some friends say I'm imagining it. Maybe they're right but I don't think so.

Brian Southall wrote a book about the fall of EMI. I wonder if he dedicated a chapter to himself?

That digital audio editor gadget of Tony Faulkner's cost 17 grand? And it still had horrible membrane buttons?

I love Googling the talking heads in these… Brian Southall is now an author and wrote ‘The Rise & Fall of EMI’ in 2012. 😂

40 years later, still listening to CDs with no intention of changing medium in the near future.

It's mind-boggling to me how so many people these days rate vinyl over CDs (for sound quality). It just makes no sense. Vinyl has so many inherent flaws which are far bigger than the whole analog vs digital debate. Back in 1983 we all knew this and agreed about it! Vinyl enthusiasts are kinda like the vegans of the audio world. Vinyl can sound pretty good, especially 12" 45 rpm singles, but the majority of vinyl pressings are pretty "meh". The dynamic range brickwalling of many CDs is unfortunate, but can't be blamed on the format itself. Anyway...whatever...each to their own, I suppose! 🙂

How English "let's NOT join the world into the future" ! 😂🤣

And now audiophiles are converting music from digital to analog.

"Philips themselves say its going to take 8 to 10 years to take a real hold in the marketplace", says Brian Southall, who seems to have as unerring a knack for predicting what the market wants as British Leyland management did ... 🤔

Oil went up cos America came off the gold standard and printed loads of money history lesson for you

EMI was making great decisions One after another 😂😂😂

@5:54 What is it with Englishmen and teeth? Too much tea and sugar?

2022: the CD isn’t as populair any more but banana leaves are still going strong.

Funny how they talk about vinyl sounding less pure than CD, and that’s one of the reasons people are going back to vinyl now 😂

He was right about 8 to 10 years. We didn't buy our first CD player until early 1992.

Better than any streaming format quality

Charity shops were selling CD's 3 for £1 a few years back, but they've cottoned on to the fact, there's a hardcore of CD users still out there, and the prices have started to go up. They're such parasites....................🖕

My CDs and cassettes collection still on the rack, never spinned almost in 20 years. Today I enjoy music or movies via streaming but CD and cassette keep in my heart cos my young age spent with those things.

They say EMI is busy working on a cassette tape that will replace whatever is being used in the future and may even be able to play up to one hour of music.

And now EMI isn't around anymore to miss out on the next one

the highlight of this episode was at 6:04 when the EMI man said they would publish on banana leaves if the public wants 😆

EMI: Every Mistake Imaginable - Den Dennis, Bad News (Nigel Planer)

I think the guy at the 7:02 mark makes a good point which is probably why Sony eventually ended up buying most of the music producing market. So it ended up that the guys producing the music playing media, such as CDs, were also the guys producing the music.

Love myself a Sorny, second only to Panaphonics

it took like 6 years for CD to took off.... image Blu-ray would only start taking traction in 2012 (or any HD video format)