Masak_aer,
Thanks for the links. From what I can see, Snopes said it best by saying it was undetermined. In other words, it's an urban legend and has not been proven to be correct. In the Compact Disc Story pdf off of the Wikipedia entry:
http://www.exp-math.uni-essen.de/~immink/pdf/cdstory.pdf
It mentions on page 3, right in the middle, "There were all sorts of stories about it having something to do with the length of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and so on, but you should not believe them." (Kees A. Schouhamer Immink, AES Fellow, Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
That answers the question for me. Pure Urban Legend, no more, no less.
However, this is interesting. I searched for the version of the CD that they are talking about, the Herbert von Karajan version, with him conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker orchestra, and here it is:
http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?z=y&EAN=028944740127&itm=49
Guess how long it is? 1:15:58 minutes. Almost
76 minutes! Not 74. How interesting...
-capT