The Digital Dilemma

By PATRICK E. COLE LOS ANGELES

As any music lover can tell you, the trouble with sound systems is that they have this unfortunate tendency to become suddenly obsolete. Remember the eight-track tape? The LP? Just when you think it's safe to settle on one system, the electronics industry changes the rules.

While everyone is getting comfortable with CDs and cassette tapes, the industry has come up with two competing options that threaten to make existing technologies obsolete. One is called a minidisc, the other a digital compact cassette. Like the popular CDs, they are each digital, which means electronically perfect sound with no static. But unlike CDs, you can record on both new devices, and they are very portable.

Sony fired the first shot last October when it unleashed the MiniDisc player, a $750 gadget that plays or records music on a 2 1/2-in.-sq. disc. Philips returned the fire the next month with the digital-compact-cassette (DCC) player, a $799 home tape deck that can use a new type of digital cartridge as well as old-style cassettes. Now Sony is introducing yet another model: a $1,000 home MiniDisc player and recorder that will hit stores in April.

It seemed only a few months ago that the CD player seemed guaranteed to be around for a while. Today industry experts aren't so sure. "There is a fear that MiniDiscs could knock out CDs, which have become a standard," observes Michael Riggs, executive editor of Stereo Review. "I would really prefer that it wouldn't happen because it might upset the investment people have made in CDs." A lot of other people would have that preference too, it seems safe to say.

Sony, which introduced the first home-use CD player in 1982, is counting on its new minidisc to win over people who use standard cassette tapes. "The MiniDisc is designed to replace the analog cassette," says Michael Vitelli of Sony. The key is recordability. By making its MiniDiscs recordable, Sony reasoned, the company could ride the coattails of the CD explosion.

Philips' new digital compact cassette, like comparable products from Marantz, Matsushita and Tandy, is able both to play and to record on digital and old-fashioned cassettes. "It makes tape-format obsolescence obsolete," says Frans Schmetz of Philips Consumer Electronics. The devices include features like the ability to fast-forward at hyperspeed.

The recording industry has quickly responded by putting software onto the market. Major record labels such as Warner Bros., Atlantic and GRP, a leading jazz house, have produced about 600 DCC titles and 350 minidisc titles featuring such artists as Bon Jovi, Natalie Cole and R.E.M. By comparison, music buyers had only about 20 titles to choose from during the CD player's rookie year on the market.

That has helped spark an enthusiastic response among cutting-edge audiophiles. The Wiz, a New York City-based audio-products chain, reports brisk sales for its stock of both DCC and minidisc players. Sony says it will sell about 70,000 MiniDisc players in 1993.

Which one will make it in the long haul? Some industry experts believe the formats could co-exist but that it's still too early to tell. "We're not rooting for either one," says Jordan Rost, a Warner Music Group vice president. "The consumer will have the final vote."

With reporting by Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo and Jeffrey Stalk/Amsterdam