IF01092

CD

A Compact Disc or CD is an optical disc used to store digital data, originally developed for storing digital audio. The CD, available on the market in late 1982, remains the standard physical medium for commercial audio recordings as of 2007. An audio CD consists of one or more stereo tracks stored using 16-bit PCM coding at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. Standard CDs have a diameter of 120 mm and can hold approximately 80 minutes of audio. There are also 80 mm discs, sometimes used for CD singles, which hold approximately 20 minutes of audio.

Compact Disc technology was later adapted for use as a data storage device, known as a CD-ROM, and to include record-once and re-writable media (CD-R and CD-RW respectively). CD-ROMs and CD-Rs remain widely used technologies in the PC industry as of 2007. The CD and its extensions have been extremely successful: in 2004, the annual worldwide sales of CD-Audio, CD-ROM, and CD-R reached about 30 billion discs.

Did this Article Give you the Information You Were Looking For?

If you found this information useful, please