Since their introduction in 1983, compact discs have become the best recording medium for music. Unlike record albums and tapes, compact discs cannont be damaged with normal use.

A standard-sized compact disc is less than five inches in diamter and is capable of storing up to 75 minutes of digitally encoded music. Each disc contains billions of tiny pits that represent musical signals with numeric codes. A beam of laser light reads these pits and converts the codes into musical signals.

Compact disc players have a wide variety of features. The following list will help you choose exactly what you would like in a compact disc player.

*Wireless remote control allows you to program, play, pause, skip, repeat and perform a vareity of other functions without being at the compact disc player.

*High speed transport (or high speed linear motor) allows you to access any track on the disc in less than a second.

*Programmable music scan allows you to automatically listen to the first few seconds of every track, one right after the other.

*Programmable play allows you to hear only the tracks you want to hear in the order you want to hear them.

*Direct access allows you to have immediate access to any particular track without having to forward or reverse through other tracks.

*Auto cue allows you to place the laser pickup in a standby mode at the beginning of each track.

*Full function LCD display provides a clear indication of disc playback information, such as the track number, elapsed playing time, remaing disc time, etc.

*Shuffle (or random) play lets the compact disc player randomly play the tracks of the disc in a new order each time.

*Repeat mode allows you to replay your favorites over and over, from a single song to the entire disc.