Word: compacter
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...hard aficionados of long-playing records, it is nothing less than a Faustian struggle between humanism and technocracy for music's soul. To the growing legion of compact-disc devotees, it is a contest that pits the past against the future of high-fidelity audio recording...
Only three years ago, the laser-read records known as compact discs, or CDs, were an untested and expensive new technology whose acceptance by consumers was the music industry's great imponderable. Today the upstart CD is challenging the decades-old supremacy of the long- playing record. Last year CDs accounted for 8.9% of the sales of the $4.4 billion recording industry, which also includes LPs and tapes. This year analysts expect CD sales of nearly 50 million discs...
...plastic CDs. "Metallic, gritty, grainy and unnatural," declares Harry Pearson, editor and publisher of the Absolute Sound, a journal devoted to the glories of old- fashioned analog recording. Claims for the superiority of CDs, say LP partisans, are hype. "Many of the people who were initially impressed by compact discs have been disappointed," asserts Gene Rubin, a Los Angeles-area audio retailer. "There is no way that LPs are going to vanish...
Hand in hand with commerce goes technology, and the tools of technology were mostly baptized in the U.S. The French still cling to ordinateur instead of computer, but in Italy even schoolchildren call it by its American name. Also floppy disks, lasers, compact disks, software. Germans buy Tapes, not Magnetbander. In fact, they call the whole field hitec...
...fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier and it makes me free to say anything I want." As that self-analysis suggests, Sondheim's lyrics consistently reach past charm and wordplay (in which he delights) to become compact, emotive playlets. He composes not just songs but complexly interwoven suites. The tales his shows tell are almost all about loneliness, obsession and disillusionment--there is scarcely a happy love story in the lot --yet their honest grasp of human nature brings unexpected emotional satisfaction. Watching and hearing a Sondheim show is not always easy...