The following story ran in the first-ever issue of SPIN in May 1985. Compact discs and compact disc players are the hottest things to hit the audio market since cassette tapes and players. However, ...

Memorializing the Compact Disc. Once upon a time, the CD was the ubiquitous music platform. Our story outlines how the disc-based music technology was adopted, loved and eventually abandoned by a ...

On October 1, 1982, the first commercial compact disc, Billy Joel’s “52nd Street,” was released in Japan. In the 30 years since, hundreds of billions of CDs have been sold, Joel has stopped recording ...

In the rare case we listen to an audio CD these days, we typically rely on off-the-shelf hardware to decode the 1s and 0s into the dulcet tones of Weird Al Yankovic for our listening pleasure. [Lukas] ...

When the Compact Disc Digital Audio standard came out in 1980, there was a curious fact about it: It was 74 minutes long. Not 60 minutes. Or an even 70 minutes. Seventy-four. And it was all one deaf ...

Compact discs weren’t always impromptu drink coasters. Once, in the not-so-distant past, they played music, contained pictures, and let people play video games with tacked-on FMV sequences. And today, ...