When the companies Sony and Philips came together in the late 1970s to create an optical medium for storing music, the capacity of the medium was one of the first decisions to be made. The initial plan was to make a record 11.5 cm in diameter and capable of holding sixty minutes of music , the usual on magnetic tapes.
But the Japanese Norio Ohga, then president of Sony, decided to change the figure in 1980. A lover of classical music, the executive requested to extend the capacity to 74 minutes and 33 seconds to be able to store the longest performance recorded until then , which was none other than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony performed under the direction of the German Wilhelm Furtwängler, in 1951. With this new extension, the disc would be 12.7 cm in diameter. In the end, both firms agreed on a digital compression standard that in a 12 cm diameter would contain 74 minutes and 33 seconds of music.
Some say that Norio Ohga's request was actually a commercial strategy. Philips was more advanced in making compact discs than Sony, and the Japanese wanted to buy time to catch up.
The fact is that those 74 minutes and 33 seconds, which were established as a worldwide standard, are still valid today . And all this supposedly due to Beethoven and the last complete symphony that the German musician composed, one of the most important in the history of music.
