Word: cds
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Compact discs are the latest technological breakthrough, and by all accounts they appear to be here to stay. New recording techniques have allowed engineers to record the sounds instruments make in exact numbers (thus a "digital" recording) and reproduce those sounds more or less exactly. CDs, almost twice as expensive as good-quality records and cassettes, eliminate the static and wear and tear of other sound reproduction media...
Price too has inhibited the spread of the discs. Computer CD drives cost about $800, and software publishers are charging up to $50,000 for CD versions of especially valuable data. But strangely enough, audio CDs may be coming to the rescue. Says David Davies of Minnesota's 3M company, which produces about half of the world's compact discs for computers: "Without the CD music market, data CDs would not exist. The hardware would be too expensive." The intense competition to produce music CDs, he explains, will spill over to the CD data field, forcing down the costs...
...technology takes consumer electronics one step beyond the compact disc. Like CDs, DAT is a product of the digital recording techniques that use computers to sort sound into billions of bits of information before they are put on magnetic tape. While current models of CD players can only play music, however, digital tape machines can also record live music and copy other recorded music...
...Seeburg's jukeboxes are back, playing compact discs instead of 45s. For $1, customers can listen to three selections from CDs (the jukebox accepts no change). Eighteen plays can be heard for $5. One major attraction is that a CD jukebox can play 700 to 1,000 different songs, compared with the 200 or so that are offered by a traditional machine. Seeburg expects to sell 4,500 of its new jukes by next June...
Seeburg faces competition, though. Next month, Rowe International will introduce a model that will play both CDs and 45s. Seeburg also confronts the new video jukeboxes produced by Laser Video Music and Rowe. They play music videotapes on 25-in. color screens. Since video jukeboxes, which charge 50 cents a play, were first introduced three years ago, some 700 have been installed. They typically offer 45 different selections...