Disc jockey to the world.

• Author: Johnson, J. Douglas
• Position: James M. Frische - Cover Story

A small-town Hoosier leads the way into The Information Age as head of Digital Audio Disc Corp. in Terre Haute -- the world's leading producer of digital discs.

You can rightly call James M. Frische "King of the Shiny Round Rainbows." As chairman and CEO of Digital Audio Disc Corp., a Terre Haute-based subsidiary of Sony Corp. of America, Frische presides over the production of more digital discs than anybody else in the world. We're talking compact discs, larger laser videodiscs, MiniDiscs and CD-ROM discs.

The message is engraved in plastic and backed by an aluminum mirror. Light reflects off of it, colors dance and glow like the Western sky after an afternoon shower. And this shiny round rainbow, optically read digital recording system is moving like a whiz.

It all started 10 years ago, when the country's first disc factory was built in an old record-pressing and tape-duplication factory on Terre Haute's south side along Fruitridge Avenue. The first CD it produced was Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." Today the "Big Blue D" facility is across the street and has swelled to five times its original size. Production capacity for regular CDs is up to 14.6 million per month, plus a million a month for CD-ROMs, half a million a month for MiniDiscs and 250,000 a month for videodiscs. The company employs 1,500 who work the machines around the clock. In the entertainment industry, parent company Sony Corp. does it all. The firm supplies customers with the artistic talent, the equipment and the materials the equipment plays. Sony manufactures the hardware, designs and creates the software and produces the medium that delivers the message. In effect, it pitches and catches.

Of DADC's 800 or so customers for which it produces discs, one of the biggest is Olaf Olafsson, president of another subsidiary, the Sony Electronic Publishing Co. "The international multimedia market has virtually exploded in the past two years as CD-ROM," Olafsson says.

CD-ROM is a compact disc with "read-only memory": a fixed base of data that can hold large amounts of permanent information such as an encyclopedia. "Its enormous capacity for informative and creative presentation has become widely accepted. Five years ago only 200 titles were available. By the end of 1994 we predict a total of 6,100 titles, with new ones coming out at about 300 per month. CD-ROM drives are standard in the newest generation of computers and are becoming standard in the next generation of...