Word: cd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...CD boom, like other electronic crazes before it, has been spurred by plummeting prices. Only two years ago, a machine cost more than $1,000 and a disk about $20. But today retailers sell them for as little as $180, while disks cost $12 to $14. Now that the CD no longer looks like a shameless frill, sales have zoomed. An estimated 600,000 players will be sold this year, compared with 240,000 in 1984 and just 35,000 in 1983. Says Alan Perper, marketing director for the Warner Brothers, Elektra and Atlantic record labels: "The drop in prices...
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...