Why the CD Is 74 Minutes Long? [Audio]

When the Compact Disc Digital Audio standard came out in 1980, there was a curious fact about it: It was 74 minutes long. Not 60 minutes. Or a good 70 minutes. No, 74. And it was all one deaf man’s fault.

The fault of a deaf man and the best musical compositions ever written-person who gives me goosebumps each time I take heed to it on my big honking Denon reference headphones: The Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, the general great work of a Herr Ludwig van Beethoven, of Bonn, Germany.

But how?

Picture this. The top of the 70s, the greatest rock era of them all. Plus, disco. It was 1979, the year the Rolling Stones recorded Emotional Rescue, Debby Harry rocked everyone with Heart of Glass, and stylish made the realm dance with Good Times. It was also the year through which Philips and Sony were working on the first audio CD standard.

Philips wanted a 11.5-centimeter disc, while Sony wanted a 10-centimeter format. Both were enough to fit any of those vinyls, the smaller size capable of storing 60 minutes of 16-bit 44,056 Hz stereo music.

But that wasn’t enough. Norio Ohga said so. Ohga was a man mad about audio. He trained as an opera singer and, after listening to Sony’s tape recorder for the first time, he sent a letter criticizing its audio quality. He was offered a role at the company, and his influence was so big that he became president of Sony within the 80s. But back then, he was just overseeing the project and he demanded that the CD format need to be ready to play back the entire Ninth Symphony.

According to Philips, the ” longest known performance lasted 74 minutes [...] a mono recording made throughout the Bayreuther Festspiele in 1951 and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.” 60 minutes wouldn’t cut it, and so it became 74 minutes-12 centimeters.

At least, that’s what some people say. Others say that it was famed Austrian orchestra and opera conductor Von Karajan who wanted the format to hold the whole Ninth. Von Karajan was instrumental in making the format big some of the audio connoisseurs, and put that as a condition for supporting it.

In line with Wikipedia , however, Philips’ chief engineer Kees Immink says that 12 centimeters was the overall length because it was a neutral size. Not Sony’s neither Philips’. But that, my friends, I don’t need to believe. I like to believe that it were the crazy German and the mad Japanese that made it 74 minutes.

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This post is tagged: bayreuther festspiele, emotional rescue, ludwig van beethoven, musical compositions, wilhelm furtwängler