Word: sound
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This more activist judiciary has been chipping away at the powers the government assumed when it imposed emergency regulations on June 12. The first challenge concerned a detained black television sound man. A Transvaal Supreme Court ruled in July that the sound man had been arrested in bad faith, and ordered his release. A week later a three-judge Supreme Court panel in Durban set aside parts of the emergency regulations, charging that the sections dealing with "subversive statements" were a "lot of nonsense." Then came last week's ruling invalidating all detentions in parts of Natal province...
...easily relegated to obsolescence, and lately its defenders have been striking back at the shiny aluminum-and-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...
...debate over compact discs goes to the heart of the new medium. In analog recording, sound waves are transcribed as grooves onto a vinyl disc. The grooves are then traced by a diamond-tipped stylus in the tone arm of the turntable to re-create the sound. In digital recording, the music is sampled by a microchip at the rate of 44,100 times a second and expressed as a series of ones and zeros. Encoded in invisible "pits," the numbers are read by a player equipped with a laser beam, which relays the information to a microcomputer that converts...
Digital recordings, the critics contend, are devoid of the warmth and ambience that marks the best analog recordings when played on the finest equipment. Further, they say, the arbitrary sampling rate of a CD results in an incomplete snapshot of any given moment of sound. "The woodwinds all sound alike," claims Pearson. "You can't tell the difference between one string or the other, and you can't tell if what you're hearing is a horn or a trumpet. Digital audio is like McDonald's hamburgers. It's all alike...
...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 though they are recorded on only...