Music: The Great Lp Vs. Cd War

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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."