When did radio stations switch to CD?

[Oldie919]

Didn't those things have about 15 lbs of pressure? Or it there a counterweight/anti-skate I'm missing in this pic. They look awfully heavy.

One station I worked for had 2 of these monsters working with Gates turntables, built into a plywood frame, along with a 4-channel audio console.....The whole thing had handles and a hinged cover.
The "casket" (it really DID look like one.....!!!) was used for MANY remotes -- even survived a couple of drops off the back of a truck!

 

[John Gallagher]

I worked at K104 in Erie PA and seem to remember switching to CD's in 1985 or so.

 

[sack]

I was at a tiny station in North Carolina and we played our first CD in 1986. I’ll never forget the intern asking “How do you rewind it”. Oh how times have changed.

 

[firepoint525]

My very first station was a tiny 500-watt daytimer, playing country and gospel music. Even when I worked there (1990-91), they STILL did not have a CD player yet. Not really that big of a deal for the late afternoon hours when we were dayparted gospel, but almost every day, we were receiving new CDs that we obviously couldn't play. Add to that, it was in March 1991 when the CDXs first started coming out. Record companies discontinued sending out 45s. I left that station that month, so I don't know how they handled it. But a couple of years later when I passed through there, I tuned them in, and they were STILL playing the same handful of songs that they had been playing when I was there a couple of years earlier! So that told me that they STILL did not have a CD player yet, and by this time, it was about 1992 or 1993. So I am guessing that they did not switch over until a few years after that, by which time they were under new ownership.

 

[boombox4]

I worked at a company that serviced radio stations with music. CD's had already kicked in at some stations by the mid to late 1980's, but they weren't the standard at the time. A lot of music was still on carts. The stations where I interned and volunteered from 1987-1990 or so used carts (LPs at the college station).

When I started working at the company I mentioned earlier, in 1991, we got service from record companies on both CD single and 45 (for some formats), and there were also the HitDiscs and GoldDiscs. Within a year or two CD had become the standard.

By 1992 or '93 a majority of our clients used banks of Pioneer CD players, all run by automation. So from my experience, the transformation to CD occurred somewhere around 1991 or so. MOHD kicked in about 6-7 years later, especially once the technology to play computer files on the air was perfected, and the costs of the hard drives came down low enough for stations to invest in them.