Matchstick wrote:Heh, reminds me of a casual argument I had with my father years ago. He insisted he bought a few CDs when they were "brand new" back when he was in college in the 70s, even though he hadn't yet bought a CD player at the time. When I questioned him on this (not that I was alive back then to fact check, or anything) he showed me the earliest CD in his collection, the debut album from Dire Straits, with a date stamp of 1978. It stood out to me at the time as the disc was very thick, much more so than CDs I was used to, and had no center ridge / raised ring area. It was simply silverish-gold, with a simple black silkscreen text, and flat all the way across. I took his word for it.
Very early CDs (Discogs lists CD releases of this album from 1983) can be heavy compared to later ones, and tons of '80s CDs have flat center hubs like you describe. Nothing too unusual here, although collectors will sometimes pay absurd prices for disks from those first few years.
Matchstick wrote:Was it produced at a later date? Based on what you said, probably. Wouldn't be the first time my old man stretched the truth a bit, but given all the drugs and heavy drinking he did in his younger years, I forgive him. But I always wondered why the disc didn't have two dates, one for the original production date of the original album and one for the later production date of the compact disc. I have cassette tapes like that, with multiple copyright dates. Do the same standards not apply to CDs?
The Dire Straits debut has a copyright date of 1978, but that has nothing to do with its physical medium. The multiple dates, assuming that you're referring to ones like this, can be on CDs too and are both for the music. The © symbol specifies the copyright on the notes and lyrics, and the ℗ symbol denotes the copyright on the recording itself. (I have no idea why they're sometimes formatted that way; it's very inconsistent.) The only time you'll see multiple different copyright dates is with remasters or other reissues, accounting for updates to the general presentation, but this is still unrelated to the time of manufacture.