"Carl Valle" wrote in message
m

The thread on the subject of CD replacing LP is not entirely correct.

Nothing's perfect, but based on past experience, Valle posts are very far
from perfect.

In fact, if you look at RIAA numbers you would find that for 2 years,
LP sales were outstripped by the lowly cassette.

Note that Valle tries to distract readers from the obvious fact that CD
sales outstripped both formats. DVD sales outstripped both formats.

What consumers wanted was an alternative to LP's problems.

Actually, both producers and consumers wanted to end the LP madness.

Several high end attempts
were made with cassette, such as HX Pro, chrome tape, better casings,
and digital bin duplicators.

Mere efforts to polish a well-known turd being the cassette, and by
extension analog tape.

When the CD came out it was a natural.

The CD did just about everything better. In fact other than riding the hobby
horses of luddite vinylphiles, it has few if any faults.

It was more convenient than tape.

Valle can't bring himself to admit that the CD format has the potential to
sound vastly better than the best LP. No tic, tic, tic, and lots of other
nastly-sounding things that are built into the LP and analog tape
technologies.

But it took two years for CD sales
to eclipse cassette, mainly because of the high price of the playback
machines.

And high price of media and avaiilability of product. Remember this is Valle
talking and it seems like he can't get anything right.

DCC and DAT also made a run for the money, and scared the
hell out of the RIAA because they were recordable.

Speaking of getting something right. Valle actually got something right.

Open reel never made it because the machines cost way too much,

Actually, pretty fair open reel machines were cheaper than cassette machines
at some point. Open reel didn't make it because it was too complex -
required people thread the tape to play it. If you did it a lot it was not
much of a hassle, but initially, it scared a lot of people.

but open reel did provide a jump to cassette when cheap cassette machines
and software
became available.

The big advantage of cassette was that you didn't have to thread the tapes
and the tapes were smaller and easier to move around and store. The big
disadvantage was sound quality - while 7.5 and higher tape speeds had the
best sound this side of digital, cassette sound quality always sucked and
still sucks. No amount of cheap or expensive band-aids could or did fix
that.

Anyway, the LP had already been replaced when the CD made it's
appearance.

So what?

The CD just killed LP faster. If car CD
players had come out earlier, it would have been even faster, but the
cassette held on for a while for automobile use.

Ageed again. Car CD players really didn't become mainstream until 10 or more
years after the introduction of the CD. In 1995 the standard audio package
for many car lines was still based on a cassette player.

To be fair there was
talk about perfect sound, but what sold was acceptable sound, cheap
software, and cheap machnes.

The perfect sound is there, as experienced by anybody who has burned a
hi-rez master tape to CD and done careful comparisons. No sonic loss
whatsoever. Bad CD sound was always due to bad music, bad recording, bad
production, bad mastering, but it was never due to an inadequate medium.

The rest as they say, was fringe
benefit. It will be interesting to see if CD survives much longer, I
suspect that internet music on demand like the ipod and apple music
store etc. finish off the 'record store.'

Internet sellers like Amazon did their part. Few if any brick-and-mortar
stores can compete with the selection. Now that Amazon has wired used and
specialty media sellers into their system, they are hard to beat for
convenience and selection.

Several shops in st. louis are going under right now.

Again agreed. For over 30 years Detroit had a thriving local chain called
Harmony House. They closed their doors in the past 2 years. Three years ago
there was a Harmony House and a Sam Goody's within walking distance. They
both closed and the Barnes and Nobles doesn't carry prerecorded music. never
did.