An update on a lost piece of stereo system tech

Earlier this month, I wrote a column for GlobalNews.ca on the forgotten world of weird old stereo system accessories. On the list was a weirdly-encoded version of Talking Heads’ 1988 album, Naked. I’d only heard of this particular tech but never seen it in action. Reader Dave has come to the rescue.

“Toward the end of the article, you mentioned the Talking Heads album, Naked, which had hidden lyrics and instrumentation, and you mentioned not knowing about this and never having seen it.

“The technology was called ‘CD+G,’ and there were a small number of CDs which encoded extra content this way; as you mentioned, the catch was that you needed a special player. Several videogame consoles in the early 1990s were able to play this – Sega CD, TurboGrafx-16 CD, and a few others.

“For North American (and possibly European) discs, there is a website which lists which discs had the content (and which pressings of those discs, since some regional pressings and some re-pressings didn’t contain the information). In Japan, the CD+G standard was much more popular for karaoke discs – and is still in limited use, though it seems to be disappearing now.”

Dave also provided this video of CD+G in action. (And there’s more here!)