In 1988, while much of the established jukebox industry was focused on the race to launch a compact disc-playing jukebox, Sound Leisure publicly demonstrated something very different: a fully digital audio concept.
The prototype, known as Nimbus, stored music digitally rather than playing it from a physical record or disc. It held approximately ten tracks, and downloading a single song could take twenty minutes or more, long before broadband or compressed digital audio became commonplace.
The idea was bold and controversial. During its unveiling, Alan Black stated:
“We have an international team working on the Digital Audio playback project. I am not saying that the Compact Disc operation isn’t any good, but ours is a very interesting project which has tremendous possibilities for the future of coin-operated music.”
The technology was so unfamiliar that many informed industry experts reportedly believed the machine could not be genuine. Some insisted that Sound Leisure must have hidden a conventional CD player or mechanism out of sight and used it to produce the music, unable to fathom how songs could be stored and played digitally without a physical disc.
The demonstration also attracted the attention of music industry licensing bodies, with Sound Leisure reportedly facing threats of legal action should development of the digital format continue.
At the time, the market was not yet ready for a jukebox without physical media. Nimbus nevertheless offered an early glimpse of a future in which jukeboxes would no longer be limited by the number of records or CDs they could physically hold.
It represented an extraordinarily early attempt to anticipate a fully digitised music economy, almost two decades before downloading and streaming music became commercially widespread.
Alan Remembers
Nimbus was demonstrated at the same time that Sound Leisure was introducing its new generation of CD jukeboxes.
This left Alan Black in an unusual position. On one side of the stand, he was promoting CD technology as the future of the jukebox. On the other, he was demonstrating a system that suggested physical discs might eventually become unnecessary altogether.
While Sound Leisure was trying to sell its brand-new CD machines, Alan sometimes had to play down just how revolutionary Nimbus and digital music could become.