Word: cds
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Light is about to assume tremendous importance as a data-storage tool. The most visible example of that capacity is the audio compact disc, introduced commercially in 1983. More than 50 million CDs and 1.8 million players will be sold this year, generating total revenues of more than $1 billion. CD sales have been increasing fourfold each year, helping to send LP record sales into decline. A CD stores music in digital form in some 15 billion microscopic pits on its aluminum surface. As the CD spins inside its player at up to 500 r.p.m., a laser scans the pits...
...shopping styles also vary with a student's wealth and interest. "The rich kids who come in with credit cards buy cds," says Pezzati...
...Linn Sondek turntable, a $1,200 tone arm and an $850 rosewood cartridge, among other so-called high-end components. But it seems unlikely that the ordinary music lover will want to shell out $10,000 or more to experience the hidden delights of LPs. Despite their imperfections, CDs have overwhelming advantages. The sound is clear and bright. There is no surface noise, no turntable rumble, no pitch fluctuation. Says Leonard Feldman, who runs an audio laboratory on New York's Long Island: "I'll trade a metallic sound for the clicks, pops and hisses of LPs any day." Even...
Worries about a vanishing repertory are more legitimate. The LP catalog has found a place for both the most familiar Beethoven symphonies and the most obscure baroque fugues. For now, classical and pop CDs run to the best-known artists and material. Yet some major classical labels, including RCA, CBS and the giant PolyGram complex (Deutsche Grammophon, Philips and London), have begun issuing their huge catalogs of conventionally recorded LPs as CDs...
Without gainsaying the emotional appeal of LPs, it is clear that CDs are here to stay. Good-quality players are available for $350 to $500, and the price of the discs has fallen from an average $20 to around $14. High-end enthusiasts are likely to be the last holdouts in a war that has already been lost. "CDs may not be perfect," says Feldman. "But they are the best thing to come along since Edison invented the phonograph...