[acomjean]

I remember seeing my friends dad’s first cd player. Huge jazz fan and it did sound great. Especially the quiet parts (No tape hiss or record pops) and easy to use. He bought a couple of cds of rock and man they sounded good.

Every other media at the time required some maintenance to sound good. Records would scratch, those tape pinch rollers would need to be cleaned. Nothing was easy, cds were (skip forward with a button push). Cassettes still were the only way to record, better for portability and sounded pretty good (we did some a:b testing cd vs cassette as kids).

Late 80s, cds were everywhere. I stopped buying records. At my highschool radio station someone got a ton of great records from his neighbor who was replacing with cds.

My friends dad who liked jazz did lament that a lot of the jazz he had in record form would never be re-released as cds. Not digital so a lot of music lost to time and a format change.

[WillAdams]

Early CDs were labeled as to the processes used, a 3 letter code As and Ds, so:

AAD == Analog recording, Analog mastering, Digital media

ADD == Analog recording, Digitally re-mastered, Digital Media

DDD == Digital recording, Digitally re-mastered, Digital Media

This is known as a SPARS Code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code

Your dad's friends should have imported from Japan --- they were big on Jazz, and a lot of my Jazz CDs have spines labeled in Japanese on one side and English on the other.

[steve1977]

Close, but not quite.

The first letter was the recorder used for initial recording, say a Studer A800 as an example of an analog multitrack or DASH as an example of a digital one).

The second letter was the recorder for the mixdown, i.e. usually some 2-channel system like an analog ATR-102 or Studer A80 or a digital DAT.

The third letter was the recorder for the master, which for CD by definition was always digital. In the early days usually a Sony U-matic, which funnily enough was an analog video tape format which got reused for digital audio (and is the reason for the odd 44.1 kHz sampling rate of the CD).

Edit:

The code was actually always considered a bit meaningless.

For example, you could record on a digital DASH, but mix on an analog SSL console and print the mix to a digital recorder. That would have been a DDD CD.

On the other hand, you could record on an analog A820, mix on a digital Studer desk, print the mix on an analog A80 and that would have been a AAD CD.

So, two codes indicating "pure" digital or "pure" analog, even though both processes used both technologies.

Or record on a ADAT and mix on a Yamaha 02/R, which would have been DDD but probably sounded worse than the AAD recorded on a Studer analog tape ;)

[Projectiboga]

Late 80s or early 90s there was also a DAD type, which often sounded really good.

From that Wiki link-

In practice, DAD was very rare, as many companies (especially the well-known classical music labels) used digital tape recorders (which were not prohibitively more expensive than analog tape recorders) during the editing or mixing stage.

[BoingBoomTschak]

Why did you write "re-mastered" instead of simply "mastered" for ADD/DDD?

[jcynix]

> At my highschool radio station someone got a ton of great records from his neighbor who was replacing with cds.

History repeats itself: right now you can now buy loads of CDs for cheap on eBay.