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It all started with ABBA
It is small and round, provides enjoyable, crackle-free, crystal-clear sound, and it set off an acoustic revolution 25 years ago: the first pop CD to be made from Bayer’s high-tech material Makrolon® was ABBA’s album “The Visitors” in 1982. The compact disc produced the songs of the Swedish cult band in a sound quality that was totally new at the time, so that this shiny object totally changed the international music industry. It also changed the way people listened to music – for ever. What is more, it heralded the global conquest of optical data storage.
The era of the compact disc had begun: over the next few years this technology gradually ousted all analog recordings on records and magnetic tape. In 1996 it was followed by the DVD. Today the first HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs have reached the shelves, offering up to 80 times the capacity of a CD and producing razor-sharp images on the widescreen TV monitors of our sitting rooms, in a quality that is totally unprecedented. Better and better materials and technologies are permitting the use of increasingly larger data volumes. The future belongs to holographic media, with the storage of several hundreds of gigabytes. As before, materials from Bayer MaterialScience are well to the fore.
The audio CD: the initial spark that set off optical data storage
For the last quarter of a century the basic material for the storage of digital data on CDs and suchlike has been the high-tech plastic Makrolon® from Bayer. Working together with Philips and PolyGram, Bayer developed compact disc technology in the early eighties. The production of these discs was based on a specially tailored type of polycarbonate which still serves as the material for many optical recording media, although it has undergone a number of modifications since the early days. “I still remember the guys from Philips approaching us with a gleaming metal disc and announcing: ‘We’re going to put music on this thing soon’. We soon understood that we were helping to create a totally new technology. However, we didn’t have the slightest idea that this small disc would actually change the world one day,” says Dr. Hartmut Löwer, now head of Global Innovations in the Polycarbonates Business Unit (PCS) at Bayer MaterialScience.
The Bayer researchers set to work on Makrolon® and succeeded in modifying it for the special requirements of manufacturing processes in the music industry. The aim was to achieve the highest possible optical quality and transparency in the substrate, so that a laser head could read the digital code of a CD without any errors. Dr. Dieter Freitag was among the early pioneers. The former head of Central Materials Research at Bayer had already developed polycarbonates with an extraordinary level of flowability. This is vital for the production of CDs, because the plastic has to spread quickly and evenly within the mold. “What I didn’t know, however, was that, with this product, we would be able to split a Beethoven symphony into four billion pits and then press them onto a disc with a diameter of 12 centimeters.” Now he knows that with Makrolon® Bayer MaterialScience gave the industry a specially tailored material that would meet – and indeed still meets – the highest requirements with respect to storage capacity, data readability and stability. “The cradle for the mass production of CDs,” says Freitag with a smile, “was the Bayer facility in Krefeld-Uerdingen. And we were the midwives of this digital baby.”
Herbert von Karajan sets the tone
“What, you mean you can turn them over and then play the other side?!” says junior with amazement as dad nostalgically gets out the old record player to listen to one of those vinyls. Should be put in a museum. But before the soot-blackened vinyl material was replaced by the crystal-clear Makrolon® and started a digital revolution in music, the “industry giants” first had to agree on common standards for CDs. How many minutes of recording time and thus storage capacity should the new medium have? What should its diameter be ? We might think it was clearly a job for engineers to decide, but it wasn’t. We owe the final decision to Herbert von Karajan, the star conductor and classical music genius. Having correctly understood the digital opportunities of the compact disc at this early stage, von Karajan showed an amazing amount of foresight. He realized that it might be possible to store his music and therefore his life’s work for all eternity, and so he clearly defined the parameters for this new sound medium by insisting that it should have enough capacity to store his favorite piece, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The maestro had spoken. Michael Lang, CEO of Deutsche Grammophon, commented: “So you see from this example how classical music actually did influence the birth of the compact disc. But of course, classical music benefited greatly from the compact disc with its brilliant sound, ease of handling, ease of storage, no scrapes, no warps. And perhaps for maestro Karajan one of the benefits was not having to get up and turn the LP over every 15 minutes.”
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