The Great Lp Vs. Cd War )

By Michael Walsh.

To die-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.

But the LP is not 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."

The 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 the digits back to sound.

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."

That view is extreme. While CDs were disfigured in some early releases by a forced, overly brilliant presence, they have improved significantly as recording engineers have become more familiar with the different microphone placements demanded by digital recording. To be sure, claims of disc invulnerability have proved overly optimistic. And as the popularity of CDs has increased, so has the number of flawed discs, with too few pressing plants working overtime to meet demand.

Still, just as personal computers have steadily improved in speed and power, so a doubled sampling rate and better playback equipment should eliminate many of the current complaints. "The compact disc is a technology still in its infancy," says Michael Smolen, senior editor of Stereo Review magazine. "By the time it reaches adulthood, there won't be any of these specious arguments."

Analog defenders contend that there is nothing wrong with LPs that cannot be cured by a $1,000 Linn Sondek turntable, a $1,200 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 one side, CDs still have more potential playing time (75 minutes) than the average LP. Cuts can be programmed to play in any order, or skipped entirely, affording music lovers the opportunity to customize their listening.

Worries about a vanishing repertory are more legitimate. The LP catalog has found a place for both the most familiar Beethoven symphonies and the most obscure baroque fugues. For now, classical and pop CDs run to the best-known artists and material. Yet some major classical labels, including RCA, CBS and the giant PolyGram complex (Deutsche Grammophon, Philips and London), have begun issuing their huge catalogs of conventionally recorded LPs as CDs.

Every advance in recording has been accompanied by the cries of those whom technology has left behind. In 1949 a British critic complained, "I ask readers if they want to feel that their collections of records are obsolete, if they really want to spend money on buying discs that will save them the trouble of getting up to change them, and if they really want to wait years for a repertory as good as what is now available to them." He was defending 78s against the encroachments of the new long-playing records in much the same terms that LP defenders cast their arguments today. And no doubt there were those who bemoaned the loss of their Edison cylinders when shellac came in.

Without gainsaying the emotional appeal of LPs, it is clear that CDs are here to stay. Good-quality players are available for $350 to $500, and the price of the discs has fallen from an average $20 to around $14. High-end enthusiasts are likely to be the last holdouts in a war that has already been lost. "CDs may not be perfect," says Feldman. "But they are the best thing to come along since Edison invented the phonograph."

With reporting by William Hackman/Los Angeles and Thomas McCarroll/New York