How strange, to be adding a reply to this thread some 11 or 12 years later. Between 2007 and now, 2019, the Future that Blade Runner could not even guess at. From the rise of the cellular phone, and the mobile everything, to the rise and fall of the Soft Media on the Hard Mediums. The Compact disc ... being perhaps a center point, a soon-to-be emerging media technology, just barely a couple of years beyond the vanishing point of event horizon. Off World colonies and artificial/synthetic cognition are still just as much far distant future unknowns today as they were in 1982, while Video Tape Rental shops were just Taking Off (and, not without some irony, 8 Track Cassette Tape Cartridges and Players, designed by Bill Lear for use in airplanes, were “circling the drain”).
But things followed peculiar lifespans ... the rise of the Compact Disc [and decline to the present state of a prolonged “circling the drain”] is a strange and twisted history and Pandora’s box of stories, personal, professional, and industrial alike.
When I came into “working” on the retail side of music, it was still in an age when “we” were the people “in the know.” Not in selling records (which were then no longer really “selling” in the major Record Stores, having been displaced almost entirely by Compact Discs), but in Instruments, and “Pro Audio,” which my own unknowing contribution would transform that market into “Pro Sound & Stage Lighting,” merging together the technologies behind music recording and performance PRODUCTION.
1996, and the shift was in place, but the machinery wasn’t moving. Literally. The reckoning of the fusion between previously disparate technologies and skills, separating recording producers & engineers from live venue sound techs & Sound reinforcement guys, from DJs, from Squints, was already a done deal. The problem was that nobody who knew about anything and everything related to Sound worked, actually knew even in the slightest how lights worked.
Guitar Center wanted to be First On The Scene, and integrate technologies. Fresh out of three years of academia in Scenic Technology for Theater, I wanted to get on board with the future of that and live & recorded Sound. So-Called Intelligent lighting. A mere inquiry about the languishing showroom equipment put me on a fast-track crash course in “floor sales,” to put me in place for learning and schooling the rest of the soon-to-transform “department” on how to operate what they were trying to sell.
So I was behind the counter when new storage Media were breaking into retail for professionals. The short-lived Zip and even shorter loved Jaz drives were making the scene. But the CD (really CD-R) burner was already on the horizon. The types which would get busted down to a “prosumer” level had been sort of the locked up and exclusive domain of professionals who worked only in the sectors which did business as or with production, distribution or duplication companies & “houses.” For indie & unsigned bands, “Professional” duplication of record or tape demos was still near-mandatory, while wanting to put out an “indie” (self-press) “record” (on CD) meant submitting to the special secret processes of [pre] mastering and “glass mastering” for replication. A whole lot of the behind-closed-doors mystification of CD production mastering & pre-mastering (along with the costs) was teetering on getting blown away. Once a CD burner for a Recording Studio System and Budget could get onto the “Pro Audio” retail shelves.
It was just about a decade after the “invention” of the CD-R, that the CD-R Drive, capable of Burning an Audio CD [R], that could be played on any (class compliant) CD player hit that level of the Market. That roughly-a-year span, centering on 1997, and spilling into ‘98. Such that by early ‘99, modest (but serious-minded) independent and small recording/production studios could get a hold of one ... for maybe less than six hundred bucks (if you had “connections”).
Funny to think, 1999 was the year predicted in Wim Wenders “Until The End Of The World,” (1991) which still could not foresee the massive swerve which the mobile phone & media player would take culture onto the ride for. But it may well have predicted the hard media which would spell out the limit on even Blue Ray Disc longevity by the time the “HD War” had been won. The “SD” card & Flash Storage.
Performance of the “affordable” external CD-R burners (2X Speed! Wow! In 1999) was abysmal. (Meaning, to burn a full Audio CD, which gave you a whole 64 Minutes of Music) had to still be done at 1X in order to prevent erroring out. (And even at that, about 1 in every 10 would fail anyway).
That was the “state of things” at the end of 1999. When I first put the CD-R Burner acquired for my recording studio to a new use: Burning multiple copies of a live recorded DJ set of newly acquired tracks for Holiday Gifts to friends in “the scene” at the turn of the millennium. (With a loving spoof on sincere efforts made by V-Cinema toward accurately translating titles into English, only to produce articulate “Engrish”).
Hard to believe sometimes just how quickly, erratically and unpredictably the seemingly smallest shifts in technologies and media changed the way the history of the world ... a far cry from any practical effort toward prediction ...actually became written ... and recorded.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-the-cds-rise-and-fall/
But things followed peculiar lifespans ... the rise of the Compact Disc [and decline to the present state of a prolonged “circling the drain”] is a strange and twisted history and Pandora’s box of stories, personal, professional, and industrial alike.
When I came into “working” on the retail side of music, it was still in an age when “we” were the people “in the know.” Not in selling records (which were then no longer really “selling” in the major Record Stores, having been displaced almost entirely by Compact Discs), but in Instruments, and “Pro Audio,” which my own unknowing contribution would transform that market into “Pro Sound & Stage Lighting,” merging together the technologies behind music recording and performance PRODUCTION.
1996, and the shift was in place, but the machinery wasn’t moving. Literally. The reckoning of the fusion between previously disparate technologies and skills, separating recording producers & engineers from live venue sound techs & Sound reinforcement guys, from DJs, from Squints, was already a done deal. The problem was that nobody who knew about anything and everything related to Sound worked, actually knew even in the slightest how lights worked.
Guitar Center wanted to be First On The Scene, and integrate technologies. Fresh out of three years of academia in Scenic Technology for Theater, I wanted to get on board with the future of that and live & recorded Sound. So-Called Intelligent lighting. A mere inquiry about the languishing showroom equipment put me on a fast-track crash course in “floor sales,” to put me in place for learning and schooling the rest of the soon-to-transform “department” on how to operate what they were trying to sell.
So I was behind the counter when new storage Media were breaking into retail for professionals. The short-lived Zip and even shorter loved Jaz drives were making the scene. But the CD (really CD-R) burner was already on the horizon. The types which would get busted down to a “prosumer” level had been sort of the locked up and exclusive domain of professionals who worked only in the sectors which did business as or with production, distribution or duplication companies & “houses.” For indie & unsigned bands, “Professional” duplication of record or tape demos was still near-mandatory, while wanting to put out an “indie” (self-press) “record” (on CD) meant submitting to the special secret processes of [pre] mastering and “glass mastering” for replication. A whole lot of the behind-closed-doors mystification of CD production mastering & pre-mastering (along with the costs) was teetering on getting blown away. Once a CD burner for a Recording Studio System and Budget could get onto the “Pro Audio” retail shelves.
It was just about a decade after the “invention” of the CD-R, that the CD-R Drive, capable of Burning an Audio CD [R], that could be played on any (class compliant) CD player hit that level of the Market. That roughly-a-year span, centering on 1997, and spilling into ‘98. Such that by early ‘99, modest (but serious-minded) independent and small recording/production studios could get a hold of one ... for maybe less than six hundred bucks (if you had “connections”).
Funny to think, 1999 was the year predicted in Wim Wenders “Until The End Of The World,” (1991) which still could not foresee the massive swerve which the mobile phone & media player would take culture onto the ride for. But it may well have predicted the hard media which would spell out the limit on even Blue Ray Disc longevity by the time the “HD War” had been won. The “SD” card & Flash Storage.
Performance of the “affordable” external CD-R burners (2X Speed! Wow! In 1999) was abysmal. (Meaning, to burn a full Audio CD, which gave you a whole 64 Minutes of Music) had to still be done at 1X in order to prevent erroring out. (And even at that, about 1 in every 10 would fail anyway).
That was the “state of things” at the end of 1999. When I first put the CD-R Burner acquired for my recording studio to a new use: Burning multiple copies of a live recorded DJ set of newly acquired tracks for Holiday Gifts to friends in “the scene” at the turn of the millennium. (With a loving spoof on sincere efforts made by V-Cinema toward accurately translating titles into English, only to produce articulate “Engrish”).
Hard to believe sometimes just how quickly, erratically and unpredictably the seemingly smallest shifts in technologies and media changed the way the history of the world ... a far cry from any practical effort toward prediction ...actually became written ... and recorded.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-the-cds-rise-and-fall/
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