For about a century, starting from the 80s of the XIX century, records were used for home listening to music, which, despite numerous improvements, have not fundamentally changed.
The mechanical reading of a signal from a spiral track has been the main way sound equipment worked for decades. Magnetic carriers, coils, and tape cassettes were also widely used, but acetate and vinyl records usually served as the primary source of the signal recorded on them.
The situation changed only when the first laser discs appeared.
In the early eighties, rumors began to circulate in the Soviet Union that some kind of laser players were in use in the West. How they work, almost no one knew for sure. Some people with particularly violent imagination have suggested that instead of the usual head with a needle, a radiation source is installed on the player’s tonearm that reads music from an ordinary long-playing record. Those who traveled abroad, sailors, diplomats and other “traveling”, already knew that such audio equipment is arranged differently.
By the end of the eighties, the first laser discs began to be brought into the country. When these "miracles of technology" appeared, they were very expensive, and were not available to a simple music lover. Most often, they were bought by owners of cooperative recording studios for commercial purposes. Music programs were circulated from them to compact cassettes with unprecedented quality.
When did this revolution in audio technology take place, as a result of which the first laser discs replaced the usual record? When did the technology to make them appear? The very idea of an optical information carrier was patented back in 1958 and was reflected in card readers and punched tapes. The principle is simple. To receive, transmit and store any amount of data, a binary code is sufficient , as in Morse code.
During the second half of the 70s, many technological problems were solved, resulting in the appearance of the first laser discs. The start date for their mass sale - 1982 - marked the displacement of vinyl records from the recording market.
Like any other information, music is subject to encoding. At the same time, the reliability of reproduction depends on the quantization step, which today is called the bitrate. Ultimately, the higher the quality, the greater the number of bytes the digital audio program will occupy. According to this principle, SONY and PHILIPS began to develop the first laser discs. When CD-DAs (digital audio CDs) appeared, they were intended for one purpose - recording music.
Buyers did not know all the technological details, for them the consumer qualities of the new product were important, and they were impressive. The ability to play the programs of your favorite artists an infinite number of times without affecting the sound, small size, excellent quality - all these advantages were combined in records shimmering with rainbow radiance.
Specialists, however, the technical characteristics of a new type of media spoke a lot. Its capacity was then 0.65 GB, which provided the sound of 74 minutes of music in excellent quality.
Immediately, ideas arose about how the first laser discs could be used. When it became possible to encode audio recordings, the idea arose of using technology for recording video signals. The first film released in Video CD format was the famous thriller Jaws. True, according to the main quality indicators, the “picture” approximately corresponded to VHS format magnetic recording on video tapes, but the trouble began ...
Today, laser discs of much larger capacity, Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) and Blue Ray, including multi-layer ones, are widely used. Further improvement of optical-digital media goes in the direction of the development of FMD-ROM technology, which is based on the fluorescent properties of the applied surfaces. The capacity of such disks can reach 140 GB.