BEWARE: AN UNFAITHFUL ELECTRO-TOY

CD OR NOT CD? Compact discs are the biggest thing to hit the audio world since stereo. At least that’s what millions of Americans think. They’re turning away from traditional vinyl records in favor of these small plastic-and-aluminum discs that hold up to 74 minutes of music ... and deliver it--proponents say--with incredible clarity.

The technology involves a laser beam in the CD player that translates digitally encoded “pits” on the disc. Since no stylus touches the disc surface, there’s no wear--and little chance of unintended pops, clicks or skips. You can also program the discs to play the selections on an album in any order.

But are CDs really as good as advertised?

Terry Atkinson, who writes the Home Tech column for The Times, says yes. John Voland, a hi-fi enthusiast and frequent contributor to Calendar, says no way.

I admire the CD’s convenience. You can play gentle Frisbee with it, and it still sounds the same. It hardly ever wears out. You don’t have to turn anything over. And it’s small enough to fit in a (large) pocket.

In fact, were I a fledgling hi-fi consumer, I’d probably zip on over to a nearby audio emporium and purchase a $249 CD special tout de suite .

For the convenience, the apparent difference in sound and the investment in my high-tech future I’d be making, I feel sure the money would be well spent. Only $249 for a gee-whiz electro-toy that allegedly improves something? A pricey Braun coffee maker pales by comparison; a CD player represents an almost unqualified bargain.

Almost.

See, there are problems. To attempt to delineate them, we have to define once again the term “high fidelity.” And we must also re-examine what it is we demand from our music reproduction systems--whether it’s “high fidelity” or “good sound,” two very different barrels of aesthetic monkeys.

What is fidelity? The dictionary talks about “accuracy of the reproduction of sound, an image, etc.,” but in terms of consumer electronics it should go something like “as close to the original source as is technologically possible.”

In other words, when you hear a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in a concert hall, an optimal “high fidelity” (hi-fi) system would sonically reproduce that performance as closely as is possible. (Remember, you can’t fit the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion into your living room, and no microphone made is as sensitive as your ears are.)

Digital audio doesn’t try to electromagnetically capture and then release the wave-form itself--a labor fraught with peril, as anyone who’s tried to record the “1812 Overture” knows too well.

Instead, it eliminates many of analog’s drawbacks (harmonic “distortion,” compressed dynamic range) by hacking that oboe solo into bits of information, then reassembling it on demand.

As with Russian poetry and French tragedy, a great deal of information gets lost in the translation, however, and this is one of the CD’s great failings: It is a too-clinical technology intent on reproducing only the de facto outlines of the sonic experience.

But your taste is the final arbiter.

To these ears, the CD is a peculiarly lifeless medium. Like the laser-etched photograph, it dictates a facsimile of perfection; the photograph thrusts every possible detail aggressively at the viewer, and the CD throws the harshest kind of fluorescent illumination onto its subject. Reaction, except for a grunt of amazement, is impossible; you can only submit to such “accuracy.”

Imagination--once a vital component of music--has gone the way of the stereopticon, the 78 r.p.m. record and the player piano. In an increasingly literal society, illuminated by VDTs and big-screen TVs and fueled by insane amounts of information, analog’s occasional faults of omission loom larger than the Himalayas. Why should anyone actually have to listen to recorded music when they can hear everything?

Thus the CD, like MTV, is especially well-suited to the similarly lifeless, electro-overdosed pop music now available at your neighborhood record shop. In both cases the missing component--imagination--is replaced by a kind of hyper-clear didacticism. Passivity to the tune itself and the tune’s subtext is the only possible result.

Furthermore, a Krokus fan, a Mingus fan and a Praetorius fan are going to have very different notions of what “high fidelity” means. The pop music devotee is inured to music that sports a host of electronic effects and good sound to him/her entails a hi-fi that booms, hisses, zaps and whizzes. Loudly.

With classical recording techniques, the sui generis was always untrammeled faithfulness and a minimum of gee-whiz studio gimcrackery. Warmth was important, as was the elusive “airiness” or “space,” which are shorthand ways of denoting a sense of the performance hall surrounding you as you listened.

Now, with digital techniques, those qualities are being abandoned in favor of clinical accuracy--a philosophy unfortunately mirrored by many classical performers.

There is another thing pop music does: sell. This fact is not lost on the manufacturers of home stereo equipment, who have leaped on the CD bandwagon. Jeez, Mr. Marketing Director, if you could only get those fun-loving teens, frantically snapping up the latest George Michael release, to get similarly CD-happy, well . . . .

Add in the fact that each CD, at approximately $13, carries more room for profit along with its alleged sonic advantages than the poor old LP, at a mere $8 or so--and you have an awesome technological breakthrough looming on the horizon, no?

Especially since the Big Record Companies are retooling their plants for CDs faster than you can say “laser optics systems,” and production volume almost always tends to drive per-unit production costs down.

This technological breakthrough leaves benighted unfortunates such as myself in the cold, for the mad rush to digitalize every new release and many classic recordings of the past leaves us with few analog alternatives. If we do not admire the Arctic atmosphere of digital classical recordings, we are exhorted to take our fussiness and our business elsewhere.

But where? At least during the Prohibition one could take one’s chances with bathtub gin. There is no bathtub recording process that I am aware of; and even if there were, would Vladimir Horowitz record his final thoughts on the Scriabin piano sonatas with it?

These complaints may sound petty, and they are, to some degree: After all, to fully enjoy the benefits of analog, one needs to spend upwards of $2,000, and one can go CD for under half that.

But choice has always been one of the great perquisites of the American system--if you didn’t like a Chevy, you could buy a Ford. And if you didn’t like VHS-format VCRs, you could buy a Beta.

Here in 1986, however, it’s getting to the point where if you don’t like the digital recording process, you can constantly repair your analog gear and keep your old analog recording exceptionally pristine--or you can start practicing that old Mozart sonata again on your parlor piano.

And maybe that’s not such a bad idea after all. . . .