Retro Tech: Philips CD100

Published by djmick on November 21st, 2009

Philips CD100

In the early and mid-1970s, Philips and Sony scrapped it out for dominance in the video format war – remember Betamax versus Video 2000 versus the eventual winner, VHS?

By the end of the decade, though, the two competitors had done the unthinkable and teamed up to design a new digital audio disc. The result was the Compact Disc, which was initially popular among serious audiophiles but would take another five or six years to become widely used.

The catalyst was the design of Philips’s CD100, the first domestic music system that could play the new Compact Discs.

Even by today’s standards it was a real beauty – surely inspired by Dieter Rams’s pared-down creations for Braun in the 1950s and 60s.

While the format withstood its challengers in the 1990s (most notably the less successful Minidisc), the rise of the MP3 and iTunes in the Noughties may well spell the end of the CD and its now myriad players.

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