Digital Treasure Hunt

Chasing Rainbow Discs

I and a batch of other audio journalists were in Holland late in April, visiting Polygram and Philips (more on that in a later column) and trying to buy Compact Discs at Amsterdam's record stores. The latter turned out to be a problem: The discs are still in short supply, and while most record stores had some titles on display, finding any particular title turned into a treasure hunt.

Amsterdam's CD dealers run the gamut from large and small record stores to department stores. (Few of the stores which sell the players also sell the discs, and those that do reserve those discs for customers who buy the players.) The stores that do sell discs show them in revolving or wall-hung display racks, but the jackets on display are usually empty.

Sometimes they're dummies, for which the dealers have no discs (the nicer dealers mark these "out of stock" in Dutch); more often, the discs are piled in a cabinet behind the counter (a technique that wouldn't work with the more fragile LPs).

I started with a wish-list of about 24 records; I actually picked up about half that many, in trips to about seven stores-but my dozen included one or two impulse purchases not on my original list. A pamphlet handed out at all the record stores listed 209 presumably available offerings from the companies for whom Polygram presses CDs, including Decca ( London, here), Erato, Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, Verve, RCA and others. I'd say that perhaps half of those titles were actually in the stores, though no one store had more than a small percentage of them. On the other hand, the stores also had some CBS-Sony discs; these had not been included in the printed list, as Polygram doesn't press them, and the stores had no handouts listing these or other imports from Japan.

At the time of my visit, Polygram's Hannover plant was producing about 23,000 Compact Discs per day, compared to 70,000 music cassettes and 70,000 45-rpm singles daily.

Their nearby LP factory presses 170,000 discs per day. By the end of this year, though, Polygram hopes to be making 35,000 to 40,000 CDs daily.

Even that may not be enough. Only a few European countries were receiving CDs when I visited.

Between now and the year's end, all of Europe and the U.S. will start getting CDs. More plants are opening, here and in Europe, but I suspect the discs may be in short supply well into next year and perhaps beyond.

One reason for the tight supply is that sales are running ahead of expectations. "At the Compact Disc marketing meeting," a record dealer told me, "they said their research showed that people who bought players would buy an average of seven discs apiece. A dealer asked, 'What about those who don't have players?' and the Polygram man said 'Get out of here!' But people without players are buying." He's right. I bought 12 discs, and I don't yet have a player, either.

Emergency Microphone

Ever need a microphone in an emergency? The odds are that a pair of headphones will work--not as frequency-flat or sensitive as real mikes, and with odd directional patterns, but still usable. Don't try the opposite, though: Mikes aren't built to handle the power levels fed to earphones, and are liable to burn out.

Tandy Abroad

The Radio Shack stores in this country have a counterpart in the Tandy stores abroad. I recently got my hands on Tandy's French and Dutch catalogs.

The stereo components looked about like Radio Shack's here. But there were some novelties: A quadraphonic synthesizer (39 francs separately, 239 francs with a pair of speakers), some nicely styled speaker stands (195 francs per pair), an electronic rhythm generator (595 francs), and a gooseneck turntable lamp (149 francs). Figure about 6.8 francs per dollar (or 140 per franc) for rough price conversions. The Dutch catalog had only the rhythm generator; I didn't get the price.

(adapted from Audio magazine, Jul. 1983)

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