| | | | | Interestingly, vinyl record sales remained high for |
| The CD available on the market since the eighties | | | | a long time before compact cassettes took over |
| remains the standard medium for commercial | | | | the market of singles. |
| audio recordings even though new mediums are | | | | The compact cassette also called tape is simply a |
| being developed. The audio CDs used are officially | | | | magnetic tape which was originally used for |
| called Compact Disc Digital Audio or simply CD-DA | | | | dictation and not for music recording. All those |
| as we all love abbreviations. | | | | compact cassettes included a write protection |
| The logical format of those CDs is described as a | | | | mechanism to prevent re-recording and accidental |
| two channel sixteen bit PCM encoding at a 44.1 | | | | erasure. |
| kilo Hertz sampling rate per channel. | | | | It was an amazing step forward at the time of |
| The exact sampling rate of around forty four kilo | | | | its launch and was much better than the first |
| Hertz was actually inherited from a basic method | | | | medium developed. |
| of converting digital audio into an analog video | | | | Those compact audio cassettes were first |
| signal for storage on U-matic video tape, which | | | | brought to the market by Philips in Europe and |
| was the most affordable way to transfer data at | | | | the United States at the beginning of the sixties |
| the time the CD specification was being | | | | with the aim of audio storage, with the mass |
| developed for a music recording use. | | | | production of those tapes starting as soon as |
| But before Compact Discs were used, a different | | | | nineteen sixty four. |
| medium was used for audio recording. I know less | | | | Compact cassette duplication, replication and |
| and less people remember that but compact | | | | packaging was used like we use today CDs and |
| cassettes were very popular before the Compact | | | | DVDs for DVD packaging, CD duplication or |
| Disc came in the market. Cassette being a French | | | | replication. But obviously, Compact discs and |
| word meaning little box. It was actually the most | | | | DVDs can store much more data or music than |
| common format used for music between the | | | | the compact cassettes. |
| seventies and the nineties, especially as soon as | | | | But in many markets in the western countries, |
| portable pocket recorders and hi-fi players were | | | | the sales of tapes declined a lot at the beginning |
| introduced in the market. But although the tapes | | | | of the nineties because of the success met by |
| were quite durable, those players needed a lot of | | | | the compact discs. |
| attention and care to be able to work properly. | | | | |