I suppose the compact disc, along with digital recording, its partner in computer-based wizardry, is here to stay. Once again the history of musical attitudes to developments in sound reproduction has followed its familiar pattern: initially resisted, new technologies first establish themselves on wider commercial grounds, and then win acceptance from music lovers, not because of the new art these technologies have brought in their van, but because of the old they have conserved in their wake. It was so with the primitive acoustic process at the turn of the century, which many thought would render music soulless but which then turned out to preserve a golden age of Italian and French operatic singing. It was so with electrical recording in the mid-1920s, which was accused by cultivated listeners of stridency and distortion but which served to document the golden age of German operatic and Lieder singing and the rise of the virtuoso conductor. It was so with the long-playing record at the end of the 1940s, which for many seemed thin-sounding and raised the specter of artificial performances assembled through the dubious miracle of tape-splicing; as now seems clear, the LP made possible a hitherto undreamt-of expansion in musical repertory and an enormous increase in our ability to hear great performers of the past who had been recorded on difficult-to-find 78 RPM discs.

And now, replacing all the old recording media, we have the digital compact disc. It is flashy and seductive like each new method of sound