Comments by "Rob Fraser" (@krashd) on "1983: The COMPACT DISC and EMI | Newsnight | Retro Tech | BBC Archive" video.

SD cards were the futuristic thing for me, I remember when someone in the early 90's said you could fit an entire encyclopaedia on a CD (which Encarta later did), well now you can fit half a library on a 128GB microSD card smaller than a fingernail. A million or so books on an object small enough to get lost in your pocket or wallet.
5
He meant decoding the music from digital to analogue audio for playback uses (what was at that time) immense computational power, it was 1983 after all. The £500 price tag of the player was likely for the digital-to-analogue convertor (DAC) alone, a very specialised audio chip that reads 1s and 0s and turns them into sound.
2
@TinLeadHammer That's a good one, I wrote it down.
2
@mhmrules Lucky for some, in my city the Virgin Megastore has long since closed down, HMV only seems to sell video games now, and the second-hand music shop that used to have every band under the sun was forced to close during the pandemic.
1