On October 1, 1982, Sony ignited a digital audio revolution with the release of the world’s first commercial compact disc player, the CDP-101 (above), in Japan. It signaled the dawn of a new audio ...

After more than a decade of work, building on an idea first posited in 1931 for a device known as the “optophone,” Sony of Japan and Philips of The Netherlands, finally arrived at a new music storage ...