Compact Discs Likely to Stay Around

Question: It seems as if we’ve spent half our married life buying audio equipment for our three teen-agers. Now the big pressure is for a compact disc player. It seems to me that we’ve been through these fads before, and a lot of expensive electronic stuff ends up on the back of closet shelves. Why should we think this is any different--especially with the records costing an arm and a leg? Also, what do we do with a 25-year collection of LPs?--W.G.

Answer: The Hula-Hoop and the Pet Rock were fads. Whatever you may think of the compact disc player, it’s way past the fad stage.

Developed jointly by Sony and Philips of the Netherlands in 1982, the compact disc (and player) approaches the whole business of music recording (and playback) entirely differently from the old analog process. The music and entertainment industries almost immediately found the new process revolutionary, earthshaking and on a rough par with the invention of gunpowder. But, even for an industry that lives and breathes hyperbole (where “stupendous” translates in anyone else’s vocabulary as “above average”), it may almost be understating the case with the compact disc.

Initially, of course--good or not--the whole thing seemed like a moot point in ’82 because the price tag restricted the market to the true, dedicated audiophile. Players sold in the $750-to-$1,000 range, and records were between $18 and $20. Heady stuff even by Beverly Hills teen-ager standards.

Prices Are Lower

Today, however, perfectly adequate players (although not the top brand names) start at about $140, “excellent” players fall in the $200-$300 range and top-of-the-line players such as the Denon DCD 1500 and the Sony CDP 302 rarely exceed $600.

Whatever the price range, the quality of the sound reproduction is almost invariably excellent, and, as the price rises, the consumer is simply stacking up optional features that may or may not be important to him. And the list of features available is nothing if not impressive--things such as pause capability, remote control, display of elapsed time, display of time remaining, selection index, programmability, skip forward, skip backward, repeat a track, repeat a section, headphone jack, headphone control--and on and on.

Rarely, if ever, has the normally skeptical Consumer Reports magazine (June 1985) ever given such an unqualified rave review of an entirely new technology: “In theory, a CD system is inherently capable of delivering high-quality sound reproduction. But we were simply not prepared for the uniformly excellent performance of these players. By every criterion we used, the players were far superior to any sound-reproduction device we have ever tested.”

So, what’s the difference between the analog process, which has dominated the sound-recording industry since Thomas Edison’s invention of the concept, and the compact disc?

From Edison’s scratchy wax cone, through development of long-playing records in the 1940s, stereo in the 1950s, and linear tracking turntables in the ‘60s, the principle has remained the same: A wiggly groove is cut into the surface of a record and the sound is electronically embedded. The sound is recovered by dragging a stylus (and everything from cactus needles to steel to diamonds have been used) along the groove. Despite dramatic improvements in both record surfaces and styluses, distortions have never been entirely eliminated, and the more a record is played, the more the grooves break down.

CD’s Differences

How is the compact disc player different? Well, instead of starting with the standard-LP slab of vinyl, you start with a much smaller (about 4 3/4 inches in diameter) disc of clear, molten plastic.

The technique? Since it would be folly for a man who still considers the incandescent light bulb as the ultimate in high tech to explain this, we refer you again to Consumer Reports: “The high quality of CD sound starts with the ‘digital’ recording method. The signals representing sound waves are not converted into wiggles inscribed on the walls of a record groove, as with analog recording. Instead, sounds picked up by the microphone are electronically ‘sampled’ and transformed into numbers--a train of ones and zeroes, the binary digits or ‘bits’ that a computer can read. The digits describe these sound waves accurately and precisely. As long as the digits don’t get lost or jumbled, the original signal can be reconstructed accurately enough to sound flawless to the listener. The recording and playback equipment need only follow the switching between ones and zeroes, which neatly avoids much of the sound distortion, pops, crackles and hiss that creep into other forms of recorded music.”

Pits Represent Digits

And so the compact disc is one-sided, and this is impressed with a fine spiral of tiny pits that represent the digits. This side is then coated with a shiny aluminum film and a thin layer of plastic. And, because the “stylus” is a low-powered laser beam--a pinpoint of light--there’s absolutely no wear to the disc. The 1,000th playing of Bruce Springsteen (good grief!) should be just as flawless as the first playing.

Interestingly, too, the compact disc plays from the inside to the outside edge of the record, spins much faster than an LP, and the laser beam can “read” those microscopic pits on the surface of the disc at the rate of about 15 billion per hour.

As the parents of teen-agers, you should be forewarned, however, that a compact disc can also be played at a volume capable of dropping songbirds in their flight without the distortion that results when a conventional stylus, literally, gets blown out of its groove when this is tried. We have heard (no kidding) of windows being cracked by a revved-up compact disc, but you might also point out to your teen-agers that at extremely high volume the player can also blow your speakers right into the middle of the street.

And, although not much bigger than the label on a standard LP, the compact disc can store up to 74 minutes of music, or what-have-you, on its one side--or 50% more than the capacity of the standard LP.

No, you aren’t likely, at some future time, to find your kids’ compact disc player shoved back on a closet shelf because of obsolescence. Back in ‘83, the manufacturers of compact disc hardware and software wisely got together and formed an industry-wide group to establish product standards and formats. Any compact disc will play equally well on any player.

This means that you’re not going to have the jumble of conflicting technologies that rose to haunt other breakthroughs. These go all the way back to the battle between 45 rpm and 33 rpm long-playing records, the battle between tape cassettes and the eight-track cartridge, and the still-continuing hassle between videotape recorder manufacturers (VHS and Beta).

The key question: Is the audio industry’s enthusiasm for the technology of the compact disc being translated into hard dollars and cents? You’d better believe it. Even though it was distinctly a novelty last year, it still accounted for about 5% of the audio industry’s sales in ’85 (predominantly around Christmas) and will be twice that this year. For an industry whose sales had been pretty flat for the previous two years, that’s a big jump.

Within five to 15 years, industry observers say confidently, compact discs will have completely replaced the LP market.

“Right now,” according to Bob Lampkin, product manager for compact discs here for the 60-store Federated Group, “sales for both discs and players are climbing faster than they ever did for videocassette recorders and tapes. While the players have come down sharply in price the past couple of years, there hasn’t been that much of a slide in the price of the discs. The trouble is that there are only about 10 disc-pressing plants in the whole world, and only a couple of them are in the United States--and both the yen and the pound have gone up in value sharply against the dollar.”

Thus, Lampkin adds: “While the price of the discs has come down, the costs have actually gone up.

“They started out in the $18-to-$20 range, but the costs last year went down about $1, and so you had a lot of retailers selling them for $11.95 to $12.95. Now, generally, they’ve gone up to $12.99 to $14.99 in California, but in many parts of the country they’re still selling for $16 and $17.”

Hesitant Manufacturers

Hesitancy on the part of domestic manufacturers to get into a still-untested field has not only left disc prices prey to a generally weakened dollar in the international market, Lampkin says, but sharply restricts both the supply and the titles available.

“Excluding imports,” he adds, “there are only about 5,000 titles, in all, listed now (as against at least 60,000 to 100,000 LP titles), and, at any time, maybe only 3,000 or 3,500 of them may really be available. If I order 500 of a title, I’m lucky to get 200. It’s getting better all the time, but right now getting the quantities you want is impossible.”

U.S. Manufacturers

The bright spot here, however, is that the viability of the market is no longer in doubt in anyone’s mind, and domestic manufacturers are tripping all over themselves to climb aboard. The days of top-heavy dependence on Sony and Philips’ pressing plants in Japan, France and England are numbered.

“Sony, in cooperation with CBS, now has a plant in Terre Haute, Ind.,” Lampkin says, “and practically all of the major producers are building their own plants--Warner Brothers, Capitol Records and, on its own, CBS.”

The most ambitious plans so far, however, involve Anaheim-based LaserVideo, which now has a capability of producing 2 million to 3 million CDs a year (it also manufactures video discs and optical memory discs). The firm recently announced the acquisition of a 253,000-square-foot facility at Huntsville, Ala., where it will begin producing compact discs late in ’86. It will have a capacity of 40 million discs a year.

Recalling that in the early days of the VCR, both VHS and Beta tapes were selling in the $15-to-$16 range and can now be picked up for about $5, Lampkin predicts that the same sort of slide will soon impact the compact disc market as supply finally catches up with demand.

Much of the same sort of supply-demand imbalance, another Federated marketing executive who declined to be named said, is evident in the disc players themselves, as steep price cuts have taken them out of the exotic/luxury range and brought them down, sure enough, to the affluent teen-ager’s pocketbook.

“The drop in prices,” he said, “was fairly predictable. Our buyers tell us that in Japan, where, of course, they’ve been readily available for a long time, you can buy a compact disc player for about $85--for about what a turntable would cost. We’ve got a waiting list for some of the more popular models, and these--you know how some people are when they get swept up in something like this--are generally on the high side of the price scale. We can’t get enough of these $600 players--I send 10 of them out to a store for the weekend and by Monday they’re gone.”

Through its 60 stores, the executive estimated, Federated sells about 800 disc players a month in the under-$250 range and about 1,200 a month in the $250-and-up bracket.

“The technology of it,” he said in awe, “is mind-boggling . . . almost eerie. It’s hard to see any limit to the market.”

So, what do you do with a lifetime collection of LP records in the face of this new, impossible-to-ignore technology? Hang onto them. Someday you’re going to get nostalgic for that battered old ’68 recording of “The Pirates of Penzance” that the family cat mistook for a scratching post.

Don G. Campbell cannot answer mail personally but will respond in this column to consumer questions of general interest. Write to Consumer VIEWS, You section, The Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.