Compact Disc

The compact disc is a digital optical disc format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. The two companies developed separate prototypes in the late 1970s before forming a joint engineering task force in 1979, which produced the Red Book compact disc digital audio standard in 1980; Philips contributed the manufacturing process and modulation encoding, while Sony contributed the error-correction system that made the disc resistant to scratches and fingerprints. The format launched commercially in Japan in October 1982, followed by North America and Europe in March 1983, and had surpassed vinyl records and cassette tapes as the dominant recorded-music format in the United States by the early 1990s.