The Recordable CD makes its debut in 1991

I thought I would share a little piece of back history about the Recordable Compact Disc and what we did with it at Coastal Mastering/Sonrise Audio Duplication.

In 1991, Studer released one of the very first CD recorders, the D740 to the studio & broadcast markets. It was a companion piece to the same era Studer D780 DAT recorder of which we had one of each.

Back then, the CD-R was brand new and individual blanks were $35 apiece, yup, a box of ten for $350.00. No one in the city was burning these discs except us and we burned through a lot of them to learn the correct methods to do it well.

Radio stations ate them up as did retail clothing stores because it now allowed for custom playlists to be created for various purposes. I even had a local fashion designer commision a number of discs for Runway music.

Spotify did not launch until 2008 and I was doing this 17 years before that.
I charged good money for each custom disc and within 18 months we grossed over $60,000.00 creating custom discs. This was the front of an enormous wave and it was me that did all of this.

Further to that, I was one of, if not THE first Canadian mastering engineer to utilize the CD-R as a mastering format for CD replication and it became so popular that in time it replaced the standard of the day, the Sony 1630 3/4″ Umatic video tape cartridge.