In the early eighties, cassette tapes were a smash hit. They were a huge step up for the bulky LPs and eight tracks of the previous decade. For those who are unaware of an LP is, it is a vinyl record. People had tape players all over the place with towers upon towers of tapes. They had them in their cars, on their hips, in their homes, and even at their places of employment. You could listen to virtually anyone you wanted to anywhere you wanted to. This was thought to be the best audio invention of the century. Little did consumers know that audio specialists were working hard in their laboratories to create a media as round as a roll of toilet paper, the compact disc. This item was to contain what is

The most common compact disc is the pre-burnt disc. When you go to any store that sells music CDs and purchase a CD of your favorite artist, the CD has been pre-burnt or in other words, pre-recorded. To make this a little easier to understand, an artist goes in to the recording studio and records his song at the there. The studio then mass-produces the CDs after the recording. Since the disc has been pre-recorded, this means that you cannot add to this disc, nor can you erase the contents of the information stored on the disc. This disc can be read by virtually any CD player, even one of the original players back from the early eighties. It can also hold up to eighty minutes of audio. The compact disc carries quite a crisp, clear sound, yet is not exactly like being in the recording studio with the artist, but I will get more in to that later. The next two discs are called the CD-R and CD-RW. These abbreviations stand for compact disc recordable and compact disc rewritable. With rewritable, you can erase the information on the CD and put other information on it. This means that with the right set of tools, you can create your own music CD to listen to almost anywhere you have a CD player. A major downside to the CD-R, is that not all CD players will play it. Even fewer CD players will play the CD-RW. The majority of them will not. Many of the older players will not play either of these, and even some of the new ones struggle to play them. Like the regular CD, the CD-R and CD-RW can store up to eighty minutes of music. These items are very tricky when it comes to sound. The music you put on one of these CDs can come from many different sources. Depending upon where the music came from, the quality could be as good as a regular CD or even as horrible as an eight-track! Most of the music compiled on to a CD-R or CD-RW comes from either another CD or a medium called the MP3.

According to Larry Klein of "Electronics Now", the compact disc was officially introduced in 1983. The cost of CDs has not fallen greatly over the past twenty years. They originally sold for about fifteen to twenty dollars (Klein). When first introduced, CDs were predicted to be a very hot item on the market. Consequently, many distributors stocked their shelves with the expensive devices to play these items. The CD did not come off quite as hot as everyone had thought. Many of these CD players were left of shelves due to the main reason of cost. The cost of a CD player was well over a thousand dollars when first hitting the market (Klein). The low demand for these items drove the market for them into the ground. CDs themselves have not fallen in price, yet the devices that play them and use them have had major price decreases since the early eighties. Shortly after the CD finally caught on in the late nineties, a new form of the CD was released, called the MD.

called digital audio. If you were born in or before the eighties, you know that the word digital was a very technical, futuristic term. Consumers would be able to seek to their favorite track instantly w

Some common words found in the essay are:
, MP3s I'm, CD Compact, Klein Electronics, CD-R CD-RW, MD MD, CD CD, According Kaplan, Misery It's, SACDs DVD-As, compact disc, players play, cd player, cd-r cd-rw, cd players, recording studio, audio compact disc, devices play, songs cd, amount information, music cd, cd players play, records song studio,
Approximate Word count = 2081
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)