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Sony and Philips exchanged opinions and debated on a range of issues in their quest to create a disc with the aim of establishing standards by April 1980 for the DAD Conference in June. Serious discussion between Sony and Philips continued. With the digital audio disc gradually taking shape, technical specifications were nearing completion. Engineers on both sides, however, remained uncompromising.  If we think this out a little more, we can improve this part slightly, they said. I think this is a slightly better proposal than that one, they added. The standards were not completed by the initial target date. With the June deadline approaching, they had to end discussions and finalize standards for the conference.
Prior to presenting the proposal at the conference, Nakajima and the Philips representative, P.W. B els, spoke privately. They agreed to avoid such comments as, We developed this part and that part and to emphasize that the disc's development was a joint effort by saying, Our contributions are equal. They speculated that surely some of the engineers would not like this. For an engineer, to claim credit and gain recognition is a strong motivating force. As an engineer himself, Nakajima could understand this feeling. Somehow, Nakajima and Bels convinced the engineers to put their companies before individual achievements and to get ready to finalize the standards before the DAD Conference. The name they proposed for the system was Compact Disc Digital Audio System.
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The 12-cm digital audio disc jointly developed by Sony and Philips, which replaced the analog LP (foreground). |
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At the DAD Conference, three newly developed systems were assessed. These were the optical disc system proposed by Sony and Philips, a mechanical system proposed by Telefunken, and an electrostatic system proposed by JVC. There was a major difference between the optical system and those proposed by the two other companies. In the Sony-Philips system, a smooth layer of plastic protected audio signals recorded as a series of bits along the disc. The disc's surface was entirely free of grooves. As the system's pickup device was operated using optical technology, it could read the recordings below the protected surface without coming in contact with the disc. As a result, the system did not have the kind of problems that arise from contact between the pickup device and the recording medium, contributing to an extremely long-playing life. Despite a small amount of static, the system had good quality sound reproduction, comparable to a live performance. If we are going to make this disc the next generation LP, it has to be easy to handle, said the Sony engineers. The other two systems read the signal through direct contact with the surface of the disc.
In April 1981, the DAD Conference avoided officially approving just one system. The Conference decided to recognize both the Sony-Philips system and the one developed by JVC.
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