Compact Discs

The Sound of Tape team know there's still something special about physical albums on Compact Disc for passionate music fans – nothing compares to having the work of your favourite artists in hand.

Music CDs remain a popular physical format for collectors and audiophiles. Music Compact Discs (CDs) are experiencing a comeback as an affordable, high-quality physical format, offering 16-bit, uncompressed sound. They provide permanent ownership and tangible artwork, with a standard capacity of 74 minutes. Music CDs are currently popular for building affordable collections, acting as a tactile alternative to streaming, and supporting artists.

The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings.

Compact Disc (CD) was first introduced in 1982 by Sony and Philips as a new music format. Unlike analog mediums like LP Records and Audio Compact Cassette Tapes, you can listen to a CD an unlimited number of times without any loss of quality due to wear. CDs also separate audio into distinct audio tracks that you can jump directly to or skip over. All audio CDs use the same audio encoding format, known as the Red Book specification - two-channel (stereo) 16-bit PCM audio sampled at 44.1 kHz.

A Compact Disc (CD) is a type of optical media for storing digital audio and data. CDs are circular discs, 120 mm (4.7 in) in diameter and 1.2 mm (0.047 in) thick. The underside of a CD consists of protective plastic over a reflective layer containing digital data, encoded as a series of pits and lands read by a laser as the disc spins in an optical drive. A standard CD can store 700 MB of data or up to 80 minutes of digital audio.

Find Music On Compact Disc: Explore the extensive selection of Music CDs available, find the latest releases or something that takes you back to good times, selected by experts in our weekly online sale.