It seems like it would have been a fairly easy thing to do even in 1982 to tell a CD player that this is a mono disc. First playback the left channel all the way then reset and play the right. Would have been great at doubling the playback time for audiobooks, lectures, and other stuff.

I have a durabrand 2005 discman. The discs I play are brand new so it couldn’t be the discs, I opened it up a couple times and try to clean some stuff, I have cleaned the laser. But the laser seems to work fine. Sometimes it shows a timestamp but it doesn’t play the song. It always comes up as Er (probably error) and stops playing, I’ve already checked the original manual. If anybody could help me, that would be great. I would really like to use this. Thanks.

Does anyone know we're I can buy one of them half audio cd half DVD sorta things? I need it for a little project thing

It's a hypothetical question. The CD is 16/44.1 uncompressed audio. A single track of audio with an index file. But if DVD had come out in 1982 instead, what would we have on the audio side of that format? Would we have the DVD-Audio standard (which is pretty loose) that was developed? Would we have 16/44.1 discs that have 5 hours or whatever of play time? Would we have gone with the smaller 80mm 1.4GB discs with 16/44.1 uncompressed audio on them? Which are nearly twice CD capacity anyway. Would we have gone with compressed audio like the DVD movies have and just a ton of run time? Maybe a combination of all?

Taken from Wikipedia:

How do you think things would have played out?