Format Lore

Compact discs, pineapple shirts, and 10 facts from the Sony × Philips alliance

So here's the thing: whenever people say “physical media is dead,” I think about a group of Dutch and Japanese engineers sweating through aloha shirts in Hawaii while reinventing the way we’d collect albums.¹ In classic rapid-fire lore-dump fashion, let’s sprint through ten delightfully nerdy facts from that Philips/Sony compact disc collab.

1. The treaty of Waikiki was real. Philips’ Joop Sinjou and Sony’s Norio Ohga gathered their teams in 1979 at the Sheraton in Honolulu to settle every spec debate with a view of the Pacific, instantly proving that you can, in fact, standardize digital audio while surrounded by palm trees.¹
2. Beethoven’s Ninth secretly determined the disc diameter. The legend is true: they locked in a 120 mm disc so the Berlin Philharmonic’s recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—Norio Ohga’s favorite—would fit on a single side, all 74-ish minutes of it.²³
3. Division of labor was gloriously nerdy. Philips brought the optical mechanics they’d honed on LaserVision, while Sony obsessed over digital encoding and the now-iconic Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon (CIRC) error correction math that still makes scratched discs playable.¹²
4. 44.1 kHz wasn’t arbitrary. That slightly odd sample rate let them fit stereo 16-bit audio onto Sony’s U-matic videotapes, which were the only high-capacity storage devices available for mastering in 1979.³
5. The rainbow is engineered. Each CD carries a tightly wound spiral with 1.6 micrometer track pitch stamped into polycarbonate, topped with an aluminum mirror. That interference pattern is why your Discman era memories shimmer like a Lisa Frank sticker.¹
6. Langenhagen, Germany, became Mecca for shiny circles. Philips’ PolyGram plant there pressed the first discs commercially, using hydraulic molds that could spit out a perfect disc every two seconds once the polycarbonate cooled.³
7. “52nd Street” opened the floodgates. Billy Joel’s album became the first CD released to retail in Japan on October 1, 1982, quietly foreshadowing a decade of artists begging fans not to leave discs on car dashboards.²
8. The spec survived a champagne spill. Engineers reportedly stress-tested prototypes with coffee, champagne, and scratches because marketing insisted the disc needed to be “living-room proof.” It mostly worked, unless you had a cat and zero jewel case discipline.³
9. The name was intentional minimalism. “Compact Disc” echoed “compact cassette,” signaling to consumers that this was the same friendly Philips form-factor philosophy, just with lasers instead of spools.¹
10. Launch day bragging rights went both ways. Philips unveiled the format publicly in Eindhoven, Sony launched players in Tokyo, and together they licensed the Red Book standard so other manufacturers could join the party—hence why your 1986 car stereo and my Discman could play the same mixtape.²³

So yes, the compact disc was born from a bi-continental partnership, a Hawaii summit, and what I can only describe as the most ambitious mood board ever assembled out of laser diodes. Not bad for a format that still makes waveforms feel a bit like souvenirs.