Who released the first commercial CD??????.......

Miike -

Herbert Von Karajan was a big champion of the CD format and digital recording. Supposedly, it was his influence that helped determine the playing time requirements of CD because he wanted it to be able to hold an entire performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on one disc. That is how the original standard of 74 miuntes was chosen.

I don't know for sure what the first DG CD title was. I don't think it was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony because back then, the early discs only had a maximum playing time of about 60 minutes. These days they can hold more. I have a couple of classical titles that clock in at just over 80!

see this link (scroll down to where it says "Krajan and the compact disc"):

http://www.answers.com/topic/herbert-von-karajan

 

I always thought Flim and the BB's were the first to record digitally.

 

According to Roger Nichols: The Ry Cooder Bop Till You Drop album was the first digitally recorded pop album. It was recorded on the 3M 32-track digital recorder at Amigo studios in North Hollywood California.

Wasn't Fleetwood Mac's TUSK another early digital recording?

 

Stevie Wonder also recorded digitally in the early 1980s with "Secret Life of Plants" and supposedly some of "Hotter Than July" although I am not sure how much of either was totally digital.

 

This is a an urban legend of undetermined truth.
http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.htm

 

Oh yes... they were definitely around that long. I remember the whole big deal about them. A local Hi-Fi shop donated one of the first CD players in Baton Rouge to my high school's radio station at Baton Rouge High, WBRH, in '82. In fact, WBRH was the first station in town to play CD's for about 3 years before one of the local commercial stations started huffing and puffing about being the "First" in Baton Rouge to start broadcasting songs from CD's. Many people called that station to tell them how terribly wrong they were, but they just ignored everyone and kept up the falsehoods. Especially since the LSU college station, KLSU followed only about a year behind WBRH.

Friends of mine were buying CD's by late '83 to '84 (I was in college at LSU during this time). I didn't have a player myself 'til the summer of '85, but I was also still buying LP's through to about '89.

 

He said it, I believe it and that settles it.........saw that on a bumper sticker somewhere.

 

I don't think it is so much a legend. I read many articles in audio magazines and classical music magazines back in the early 1980s that essentially say this same thing about the 74 minute length standard and HVK's championing of the format.

 

Quoted from the link below......

'In August 1982 the real pressing was ready to begin in the new factory, not far from the place where Emil Berliner had produced his first gramophone record 93 years earlier. (Deutsche Grammophon, Berliner’s company, had by now become a part of PolyGram). The first CD that was pressed in Hanover was a recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss. In January 1983, 500 working days after the start of production, half a million CDs had been made. The demand from Japan in particular was overwhelming. In North America a handful of titles were released in 1982, one of the first was Billy Joel's 52nd street.'

http://www.cdman.com/technical/howdocdswork7.html

 

Thanks for the info. I was pretty sure it was one of the first titles CBS released on CD.

 

As for CD singles, I don't know whether this pre-dated Genesis who, also in 1986 released "Land of Confusion" as a CD single. I remember it getting mentioned in the mainstream press as a new form of single. Shortly thereafter, I remember getting a few of those 3-inch CD singles, including Zappa's "Hot Rats" released to promote his remixes of that same time period.

 

According to my copy of Collectible Compact Disc Price Guide 2, Dire Straits' "Brothers In Arms" on the Vertigo label (catalog number 884 285-2) was the world's first CD single when released in 1985.

I believe KeithH has one of these.

 

As far as I remember, the first digitial recording released was Canadian band True North on Warner Bros. Canada. I was in college radio at the time, CJUM-FM, University of Manitoba. I remember the big promo package from Warner, about the first digital LP. IIRC, Ry Cooder's album came out shortly after that.

 

Thanks. I knew Von Karajan was there in the early days.

 

One of the first??
The CBS Sony label alone had already over 100 CDs released in pop music catagory by Sept 82.
Billy Joel, Toto, Asia, Pink Floyd, Simon & Garfunkel, Michael Jackson, Santana, Bruce Springsteen, Boz Scaggs, Journey, Cyndi Lauper, Kenny Loggins, Men at Work, Go Go's, Boston, Wham!, Willie Nelson, Karla Bonoff, Jeff Beck, Miles Davis, Al Di Meola, Herbie Hancock, just to name a few.
And there are so many other record labels too.

 

IIRC, three songs were recorded analogue and mixed digitally (ADD).

1) Little Sister
2) The Very Thing That Makes You Rich...
3) a song on side B, can't remember which one it is

If you listen closely, You can hear more hiss than on the other tracks.

 

When I worked at Record Bar in the 80's, Sony sent us a CD player and a few CDs to play. This is when we first started selling CDs. The samples were U2-War (target of course), Van Halen -1984, and some other one. The first CD I remember selling any amount was Dire Straits-BIA. Funny story. Me and a coworker were always trying to pick up chicks in the mall. He was trying to impress some ladies and was showing them the CDs. He had the Van Halen and told the girls that CDs were unbreakable and then slapped the CD on the counter. It shattered into a million pieces! I was rolling. We got dates with the girls anyway

 

In front of Sony's Japanese HQ, there is a marble obelisk in which 52nd Street is encased & displayed to commemorate it being the first CD ever. A picture & story about this was printed in Digital Audio (it could have been Billboard or Pulse!, my memory fails me on this) magazine back in the day. CDs came out in Japan before Europe, so forget about Herbert Von K!

 

Excellent! Small price to pay for the dates.

Tom

 

If I recall, the entirety of Springsteen's The River was mixed digitally, as well. That would have been 1979-1980.

 

I worked with Stevie when he did 'Secret Life of Plants' and there were no digital recorders to be seen. He just did a bit of work on the record at Lyon Recording in Newport Beach so perhaps he did some parts of it digitally at other studios. What we worked on was 2" analog for sure. Btw, the date that we worked on that one was May 1979.

 

I don't think TUSK was recorded digitally either, though parts of it may have been. I say this because they once 'stole' our 24 track Studer A80. IIRC they were at Village Recorders and both them and us had Studer's who were both having transport troubles. We both had sent our machines to Studer LA for work at the same time. Studer had a guy, Bill Van Doren, who somehow was talked in to letting Village use ours before theirs was ready. I guess they had more clout than us. Of course that didn't sit well with us and when we found out, we went and got it. They were not pleased, but it was our machine.

 

Well I just pulled out my 'Secret Life of Plants' record and it does say that it was digitally recorded and mixed on Sony PCM 1600, so I'm rather confused. I can assure you that we had no digital recorders at Lyon Recording and there were definitely 2" analog masters that we were using when he was there. OTOH, we were only working on a few songs there. So perhaps they had made some transfers to analog so that they could work at studio's that weren't digital.

I have noticed that other's here have mentioned previously that they thought this was a digitally recorded album, so I just don't know what to say. I must admit that I never listened too much to this record but was usually acutely aware when I was listening to early digital technology.

I'd guess the same thing may apply to Tusk. I can see that it claims to have been mixed with Soundstream digital but I know that at least some of it was recorded on the Studer A80. I loved all of their records prior to this one, but didn't listen too much to Tusk. IIRC, the digital mixing was the reason for that.

 

Actually, it was 3M that had built the 2 track recorder that was used. I also remember Flim and The BB's being one of the first cd's I'd ever seen or heard and was totally blown away by the sound. I think that was back in 84 when I was only 12 or 13 years old.

A couple years earlier my dad had brought back from the Chicago C.E.S. ('81 or '82?) show a little glossy paper cutout replica of a cd. Anybody remember those? I remember asking him what it was and he said it was a brand new type of audio disc, that the cutout was the actual size of the disc, all the music was on one side and it was read by a laser that made no physical contact with the disc. I was dumbfounded to say the least.

I was fairly young back when cd's came out so my memory of what was going on at the time isn't as good as some of the others here that are older than me. I do remember that at first cd's were very hard to find (only a few audio shops had them) and that a lot of them were Telarc or Windham Hill releases. Hearing Aeriel Boundaries by Michael Hedges (Windham Hill)the first time on cd is something I'll never forget. I remember the total lack of hiss and the incredible dynamic range gave me goosebumps. It was not long after that I bought my very first cd, Equinoxe by Jean-Michel Jarre, even though I, or anybody in my family, owned a cd player.

 

That would have been 1984. BUT Abba were the subjects of the first pop CD released by Polygram. Their 'The Visitors' album appeared on CD in late 1982. The Cat No was 800 010-2.

Ken