ONE IF BY LAND,TWO IF BY CD
It is about time now for some direct thoughts in this space on that absolutely remarkable phenomenon, the CD. No--not the Certificate of Deposit! I mean the Compact Disc, so named originally by Philips to parallel the Compact Cassette.
The CD is, well, almost here. Though not yet quite in a practical way, so you can go out and buy it in any old place where you happen to live. But the noise of its coming, like Paul Revere's warning about the British, is over whelming. You will find descriptions and tests in the most exquisite detail in every mag around, including this one.
Still, I find it hard to believe. At last, the New Technology in its total audio fulfillment! Almost too much to grasp.
Actually, I haven't heard a CD in the flesh, myself, since the new system was first announced more than four years ago. Four years? You thought it was the latest? Not exactly. I was at the premier demo, way back then, and I was instantly bowled over. Astounding, no less. Thereafter I have considered the matter closed, from the technical viewpoint. You couldn't buy a CD, after all, nor any player to play it on, so why bother. Leave the CD to the experts, and that's where it has been. It was testing-testing time.
I find myself perversely practical-minded in this respect. Interest soars in my breast on two occasions: (a) The launching of some really radical new product idea and (b) the concrete embodiments of same. There is apt to be a large gap between these, and some times, alas, it extends to infinity. Nice idea, but . . . Remember the bird in the hand? Well, the bushes around here are increasingly full of discus compactus lately, and a handful-soon maybe a flood?-are actually visible and audible. The time has come! On my graph of response you may now see that second peak rising. After four years, plus or minus flat.
Great promise, even greater promises-what now? Let us look at the ball-point pen. We always look at the ball-point pen when something revolutionary starts going practical.
On October 29, 1945, only weeks after the end of the Big War, the pen was launched for all & sundry at Gimbel's in New York. At a price that made us gasp, as I can easily remember. I did a bit of calculating: In our little dollars I figure it came to maybe 80 or 100 bucks for each and every pen.
That's exactly the way it felt. And yet at the end of the very first day, some 10,000 pens had been sold. No time wasted on promises; it was bang-bang, launch it, sell it. To be sure, the ball point had an advantage over our CD--it created its own software, soft gear.
Then, the aftermath. I don't remember, speaking of price, whether the ball-point pen actually got down to the 10 level, but it came awfully close. Five cents apiece? It remains bottom cheap today, right in with the old lead pencil, and those early thousands have become many millions. Price? Does it matter? Is this to be the approximate shape, in proportion, for the CD's coming fu ture? Is it to move from the top towards the bottom of the market, mushrooming in reverse, hundreds into millions? Is it technically capable of it? A potent question, but at this point not easy to answer. Surely it will replace, eventually, ALL analog discs now on the market, but with what? Wholly new formats, more than likely. Keep in mind the transistor radio, the pocket calculator; look at the digital watch-month, date, hours, minutes, seconds, special price $3.93. (That's from an actual ad.) For a few more dollars, stopwatches, games, weather reports, the works.
The CD system looks dreadfully complex and expensive right now, and costs it. But who knows? Remember the room-size ENIAC-and Be Pre pared. Can we even begin to imagine what the CD may do in its fullest development? It's our first wholly modern disc (not counting the floppy sort), and it's a natural--unimaginably able.
Just remember that the original disc, back before 1900, had in its way this same sort of potential and has had it ever since. Low cost and wide diversity, through its inherent ease of mass production. Emile Berliner, whose idea it was, knew perfectly well that the cylinder sounded better, but it was inherently un-adaptable, clumsy in mass production even with much ingenuity.
The disc was a better bet, and so it happened. It isn't far-fetched to sup pose that the CD developers have that sort of future-aptitude in mind, for all the complications of the system.
Right now, the only thing that is factually positive about the CD is its emerging hardware, first-generation.
It's being tested-you've been reading about it for months. It is all it ever was supposed to be (four years ago) and more. Nor is there the slightest doubt about the absolutely enormous technical gap between this all-digital (up to the final D/A element) system and the once state-of-the-art LP and 45. No need for argument! Granted. So let's start moving on.
We're still talking performance. That's the beginning, but we are past the beginning. Now it is: What will it play, where will it fit, what will it re place, and, more important, what will it NOT replace? What new areas will it create, at least for starters? Is this CD to be mainly an audiophile device for a good while, restricted to the upper crust? And if so, how thick a crust? Or will it swallow the whole pie, deep-dish included? Phew, that's a lot of questions and you won't find many answers to them yet.
Needless to say, we'll be keeping tabs here on player and disc performance via ongoing tests. Unless by some unlikely chance the CD just disappears. But indeed it is time for additional thoughts and speculations. It's a wide open field. Your guess might be as good (or bad) as mine-or even that of the CD promoters'.
Hey, how about price? Well, you know, prices don't matter much. Prices will take care of themselves, thank you, as other things get sorted out. That's not a thought for slim pocketbooks and wallets, I know. But it is a fact of life that has been digging into my brain these last years. The relation between price and quality doesn't go up and down like the two ends of a seesaw, as we've always thought. (You pays your money and . . .) Not any more. Instead, there is a sort of Index, or Quotient, Price/Quality, which, more and more, seems to come last of all, the result of many other determinants. Crazy, but true. Price itself isn't really important.
(Except in your business account books.) Can we even begin to look ahead? Well, at any price, I do not envision, for instance, a Walkman-type CD player for joggers, bikers, et al. (Though there is, oddly, such a player now on sale for analog standard discs.) For this, the cassette is inherently more natural and how about a digital cassette? On the other hand, I do see a CD car player, even an expensive one, that being reputedly a reason for the CD's somewhat arbitrary size, 4 1/2 inches. It would work okay-no skipping. And we tend to splurge cash on car audio, so why not expensive? After Bose and Delco (and Nakamichi . . .), can CD be far behind? Where Chrysler's car disc failed (way back), the CD should make it fine. Maybe.
Am I implying that the ball-point pen might have generated about the same amount of business at either $1.00 or 10? Yes, I suppose that is what's in the back of my mind. Price is a very flighty thing these days.
A first factor in any product success, you see, is what is best called natural aptitude. Like athletes, like artists, products seem to have inherent natural abilities, you could almost say talents.
As well as inherent areas of, shall I say, reluctance. They go along but aren't entirely happy. Ahead of time, though we often deliberately engineer for talent, we can't be sure. We aim to exploit the talents, whether they are what we intended or purely unexpected. But we often end up working with the reluctant areas instead, and with a lot of success, even when older talents no longer seem to match newer conditions.
The LP, as I've often pointed out, is not really apt for our present automated controls; it was and is basically a manual-type disc. Yes, it works okay with present equipment, thanks to much ingenuity, but it remains clumsy. The CD in this respect is going to be another story-it is a natural for automation. It will fly where the LP crawls! The LP wasn't at all apt for four channels, either, as we sadly discovered. The LP almost made it, the Tate II did, but too late. Again, all that sort of thing is effortlessly taken care of, when desirable, by the CD digital approach. Extra channels right now, not even being used.
And look at the reluctant cassette.
One of the more surprising stories in audio, and not yet finished. Think of the reluctant phono arm and the spiral analog groove, reluctantly hi-fi. Triumphs against natural adversity.
But there are also those spectacular product talents that suddenly appear out of the blue and fit effortlessly into some unforeseen niche. How little we know ahead of time! The VCR? Video games? How unsure we must be, then, as to this astonishing CD with its micro-reading laser, its billions of digital numbers, its continuously varying speed, never fixed (it runs inside to out, turning slower and slower for a constant groove speed), its utterly lavish audio parameters, its wealth of extra channels. What sudden development will come from these? We can just shrug helplessly.
One further theory of mine, pretty obvious to anybody, is that new ideas, new ways of doing things, tend to come long before the ideal equipment is at hand, or even conceivable, to fulfill their promise. Then suddenly-a great blossoming. Tom Edison again acoustic-powered movies with sound, around 1913. Too soon! They worked, but just barely, as the New York section of the AES recently heard. (The sound, from large cylinders, was re stored on tape, the sync worked out by modern methods.) Then suddenly, it all fell together. There were color photo graphs in the 19th century; I took Agfa starch-grain color plates (one-minute exposure in bright sun) in my youth.
Suddenly it was Kodachrome. (I also tried Dufaycolor--remember that?) We tried to fly for centuries and millennia then came the gasoline engine. Very quickly, we flew. Ideas whose time had come. Calculators back centuries ago.
Digital codes from Morse--what else are those dots and dashes? The essential vacuum tube long before the transistor, and that before the IC. And then the chip.
So the CD (the Compact Disc) comes at the top of an enormous wave, in audio surely the highest yet, the most essentially advanced product so far--among so many other miracles that are, even so, encumbered by earlier technology that won't go away. I don't mean to stir up any rivalry. That wave includes too many hundreds and thousands of other product elements, in our field and everywhere else, to bicker over who comes first. But we must understand the sheer enormity of it, this now-blossoming development in so many areas.
So double-cross your fingers, read all about the latest CD promises, keep an eye on the ball-point pen. I expect we'll have a "ball point" CD player be fore too long, if all goes well, and at a nice popular price. Maybe in the hundred dollar range-not bad. But if you want your CD right now, better count on a thousand dollars or so. That's a lot, as Pepsi put it.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Aug. 1983; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
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