Word: cd
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...have been snapping up compact disk players, which reproduce music with near perfection, at a rate that is overwhelming both retailers and manufacturers. Annual sales of the newest high-tech wonder, which came on the U.S. market in 1983, should reach 1 million next year. That will make the CD player the fastest-selling machine in home-electronics history. The videocassette recorder took six years (from 1975 to 1981) to reach the same milestone. "We're selling every single CD we can get our hands on," says Donald Swallen, vice president of the eight-store Swallen's retail chain...
...CD players are transforming the way people listen to music. With their sweet sound, easy operation and virtually indestructible disks, they represent a technological leap beyond records and tapes (see box). Manufacturers confidently predict that CD machines will become the standard music player, overtaking sales of turntables and cassette decks as early as next year. At stores in some wealthy neighborhoods, CD players are already outselling turntables...
Faster than anyone had predicted, digital compact disks are revolutionizing the classical record industry. From nothing just two years ago, sales grew to 5.2 million disks last year; in recent months, the Polygram complex of classical labels (Deutsche Grammophon, Philips and London) took in about as much money in CD sales in the U.S. as it did from LPs and tapes combined. Superior in almost every respect to conventional records, CDs will send the LP the way of the 78 within the next decade, possibly sooner...
...however, is the piano. Wow, flutter and tape hiss--ills that LPs are heir to --are all magnified in piano music, but they are drastically reduced, if not entirely eliminated, with CDs. And while flat-earthers may still decry what they hear as a clinical, metallic quality in digital CD recordings, such reservations will disappear as recording engineers adapt their techniques to the demands of the new medium. The best of the current CD piano releases...
Digital sound, recorded by a computer and played back with a laser beam, offers brighter highs and truer lows than conventional analog recording techniques, and eliminates compression and distortion as well. The CD medium has several other practical advantages: most players can be programmed to select cuts in any sequence or repeat a favorite indefinitely; the discs never wear out, since only light touches their surface, and with up to 74 minutes of music on the one usable side, they never have to be flipped over. Finally, they are as easily stored as tapes, yet offer amenities (liner notes, opera...