The year 1983 witnessed the introduction of one of the most successful consumer products of all time – the Compact Disc (CD) digital audio system. It was engineering on the grand scale – the use of new material for the optical discs, a solid state laser to read digital information, optical servomechanisms for tracking, and electronics for error correction – all packed into a single unit. Most people who have had an opportunity to listen to this sound medium, acknowledge the vast improvement in sound quality over that available with previous systems. The improved sound quality is, in essence, obtained by accurate waveform coding and decoding of the audio signals. In addition, the coded audio information is protected against disc errors by the use of a Cross Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code (CIRC). Reed– Solomon codes were discovered by Irving Reed and Gus Solomon in 1960. While the codes were notable because of their elegant mathematical structure, their practical versatility became apparent only after the discovery in 1966, of an efficient decoding algorithm.