Beethoven's 9th Symphony and Compact Disc (CD)

This is a very informative site where you can find a historical account of the invention of CD. Although it is compiled by Philips, the information is reasonably objective. Philips' commercial failure in developing the vedio disc, the predecessor of the CD, is gracefully admitted.

There were all sorts of stories about the original target storage capacity for a CD being one hour of audio content, but Sony's vice-president Norio Ohga having suggested extending the capacity to accommodate a complete performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony on a single disk.

According to Philips' official account published on the site, the story is true. Philips engineers accepted Sony's proposal. They found that the performance by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, lasted for 66 minutes. Just to be abbsolutely sure, a check was made with Philips' subsidiary, PolyGram, to ascertain what other recordings there were. The longest known performance lasted 74 minutes, which was made during the Bayreuther Festspiele in 1951 and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. That became the playing time of a CD, and the engineers extended the diameter of a CD to 12 centimeters to accommodate the extra 14 minutes of data.

However, Kees Immink, research fellow of Philips Research Laboratories refutes the story in his article "The Compact Disc Story".