There I was just walking down the street, singing to what did he dumbly do?

Hey, it's Ajay.

And this is a special archive episode of The Kimbo.

In the year 2000, Sony had a problem.

The problem was that the patents that they owned with Phillips for the CD format were running out.

And those patents had been very, very good to them.

Every year, they made between 60 and 80 million dollars in profit.

Because every CD, every CD player, every CD mastering machine had to pay them a royalty.

But the patents were running out.

Also, there were problems with the CD format that the people at Sony and the music industry could see coming.

First of all, CDs didn't sound nearly as good as the industry had promised everyone they actually sounded.

Second, digital was coming.

The CD didn't hold that much data, actually, and it was pretty easy to rip it.

And once you ripped it, it was really easy to share the files.

The music industry hated this idea.

So Sony, working overtime, created a new format, a format they called SACD.

And what they tried to do was something that would be good for everyone.

Good for Sony, because they'd have a new patent, and they'd be able to charge everyone in the industry attacks every day for the next 17 years.

And good for the music industry, because it would give them a chance to sell all the music lovers yet another format.

Maybe it might be good for some listeners, because it would hold four times or more as much data as a regular CD.

That meant if you could hear the difference, an SACD would make you happier.

Music

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