Discman was Sony's brand name for portable CD players. The first Discman, the Sony D-50 or D-5 (depending on region), was launched in 1984. The brand name changed to CD Walkman, initially for Japanese lineups launched between October 1997 and March 1998, [1] and then entirely in 2000. Discman and CD Walkman players are no longer produced.
Prior to the development of the Compact Disc, cassette tapes were the dominant form of audio storage in the then-fledgling portable audio industry. In 1979 Sony introduced the Walkman in Japan. [2] When Sony realized the potential of the CD, the Walkman was promoted to mainstream buyers.
Sony improved the design of the CDP-101 CD player which was launched in 1982, reducing the power consumption and the number of parts needed and making it smaller. The cost was reduced to between 50,000 and 60,000 yen, in what was called the "CD CD Project", which stood for the 'Compact Disc Cost Down' Project. By August 1983 the company was able to produce a CD player which was one-tenth the size of the original, and a portable CD player became a possibility.[ citation needed ] The aim was to create a player that was the same size as four CD cases stacked on top of each other. A piece of wood 13.4 cm across and about 4 cm thick was shown to the staff to illustrate the dimensions.
The final design did not incorporate a power source and had a 9-volt (positive outer) coaxial jack on the rear. This allowed the use of an EBP-9LC wall adapter, a carrying sleeve which held six primary C cells, or rechargeable cells which could be charged in situ. The AC-D50 AC adapter was also available, which attached to the rear of the D-50/D-5 and allowed it to be powered from AC input at 110, 120, 220, or 240 V, 50 or 60 Hz, 9 W with a DC output of up to 500 mA. The AC-D50 also offered line level audio out, presented as two RCA jacks.[ citation needed ]
The D-50/D-5 was launched in November 1984, two years after mass production of CDs began. The unit offered the same functions as the full-size CDP-101 player, but came without a remote control and the repeat function of the full-size unit. The D-50/D-5 retailed for 49,800 yen [3] (US$350 in 1984), approximately half the price of the CDP-101. The D-50/D-5 sparked public interest in CDs, boosting their popularity, and within a year and a half had become profitable.[ citation needed ]
Early production units of the D-50/D-5 did not carry the Discman brand and were instead referred to as "CD Compact Player". [4] The Discman brand was applied later because of the unit's portability and similarity to the cassette Walkman. This brand name was used for Sony's portable CD players until 2000.
The release of the D-50/D-5 sparked public interest in CDs as an audio format, and in the audio industry in general. A portable CD market was created and the price of competing CD players from other manufacturers dropped. The CD industry experienced sudden growth, with the number of CD titles available dramatically increasing.[ citation needed ]
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The ATRAC CD Walkman played ATRAC CDs in addition to audio CDs. The ATRAC CD contained audio encoded in ATRAC3 or ATRAC3plus. Most if not all models also played MP3s. The D-NE1 from 2003 was one of the earliest models. [5]
Video CD Discman, later rebranded as VCD Walkman, was a line of portable Video CD players. They were able to output the audio from video CDs as usual, but were also equipped with an additional 3.5mm audio/video-to-RCA connector output. [6] [7] [8]
The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in October 1982 in Japan and branded as Digital Audio Compact Disc. It was released on March 2, 1983 in North America and Europe.
The Compact Disc-Interactive is a digital optical disc data storage format that was mostly developed and marketed by Dutch company Philips. It was created as an extension of CDDA and CD-ROM and specified in the Green Book specifications, co-developed by Philips and Sony, to combine audio, text and graphics. The two companies initially expected to impact the education/training, point of sale, and home entertainment industries, but CD-i eventually became best known for its video games.
Walkman, stylised as WALKMAN (ウォークマン), was a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese technology company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman was a portable cassette player and its popularity made "walkman" an unofficial term for personal stereos of any producer or brand. By 2010, when production stopped, Sony had built about 200 million cassette-based Walkmans.
Compact Disc Digital Audio, also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the Red Book, one of a series of Rainbow Books that contain the technical specifications for all CD formats.
Video CD is a home video format and the first format for distributing films on standard 120 mm (4.7 in) optical discs. The format was widely adopted in Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, Hong Kong, Central Asia and the Middle East, superseding the VHS and Betamax systems in the regions until DVD-Video finally became affordable in the first decade of the 21st century.
Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony. MiniDisc was the first commercial product to incorporate ATRAC in 1992. ATRAC allowed a relatively small disc like MiniDisc to have the same running time as CD while storing audio information with minimal loss in perceptible quality. Improvements to the codec in the form of ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus, and ATRAC Advanced Lossless followed in 1999, 2002, and 2006 respectively.
MiniDisc (MD) is an erasable magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74, and later, 80 minutes of digitized audio.
A DVD player is a device that plays DVDs produced under both the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio technical standards, two different and incompatible standards. Some DVD players will also play audio CDs. DVD players are connected to a television to watch the DVD content, which could be a movie, a recorded TV show, or other content.
A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or audiobooks. CD players may be part of home stereo systems, car audio systems, personal computers, or portable CD players such as CD boomboxes. Most CD players produce an output signal via a headphone jack or RCA jacks. To use a CD player in a home stereo system, the user connects an RCA cable from the RCA jacks to a hi-fi and loudspeakers for listening to music. To listen to music using a CD player with a headphone output jack, the user plugs headphones or earphones into the headphone jack.
The White Book refers to a standard of compact disc that stores not only sound but also still pictures and motion video. It was released in 1993 by Sony, Philips, Matsushita, and JVC. These discs, most commonly found in Asia, are usually called "Video CDs" (VCD). In some ways, VCD can be thought of as the successor to the Laserdisc and the predecessor to DVD. Note that Video CD should not be confused with CD Video which was an earlier and entirely different format.
The Data Discman is an electronic book player introduced to the Western market in late 1991 or early 1992 by Sony Corporation. It was marketed in the United States to college students and international travelers, but had little success outside Japan. The Discman product name had originally been applied to Sony's range of portable CD players such as the Sony Discman D-50, first released in 1984.
A portable media player (PMP) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored on a compact disc (CD), Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), Blu-ray Disc (BD), flash memory, microdrive, SD cards or hard drive; most earlier PMPs used physical media, but modern players mostly use flash memory. In contrast, analogue portable audio players play music from non-digital media that use analogue media, such as cassette tapes or vinyl records.
Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. For this to be useful, other artifacts at track boundaries should not be severed either. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed digital audio. The absence of gapless playback is a source of annoyance to listeners of music where tracks are meant to segue into each other, such as some classical music, progressive rock, concept albums, electronic music, and live recordings with audience noise between tracks.
SonicStage is a discontinued software product from Sony that is used for managing portable devices when they are plugged into a computer running Microsoft Windows. It comprises a music player and library manager, similar to iTunes, Windows Media Player and RealPlayer. It is used to manage the library of ATRAC and MP3 recordings on a PC.
Apple PowerCD is a CD player sold by Apple Computer in 1993 and discontinued several years later. It was a re-badged Philips-designed product which was sold in addition to Apple's speakers and also included a remote control. The PowerCD was capable of reading Kodak photo CDs, data CDs and audio CDs. It can connect to Macintosh personal computers through SCSI and also to stereo systems and televisions.
A portable CD player is a portable audio player used to play compact discs. The first audio player released was the Discman D-50 by Sony.
Super Video CD is a digital format for storing video on standard compact discs. SVCD was intended as a successor to Video CD and an alternative to DVD-Video, and falls somewhere between both in terms of technical capability and picture quality.
An ATRAC CD is an optical disc containing compressed digital audio in the ATRAC3 or ATRAC3plus formats, which are part of Sony's ATRAC family of proprietary audio compression algorithms.
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