West-Central Indiana's largest employers.

• Position: Regional Report: West-Central Indiana

Sone Corp. Corporate headquarters: Tokyo. Employs more than 1,600 in Vigo County in two separate subsidiaries: Columbia House and Digital Audo Disc Corp.

Columbia House--sometimes referred to locally as CBS Records--is one of only two major direct-mail record-and-tape clubs still operating in the nation. (The other, RCA Music Service, is also based in Indiana.) Columbia House's 1,100 workers receive, process and fill orders for thousands of records, cassette tapes, compact discs and videocassettes. Because it maintains its own Terre Haute warehouse for music storage, Columbia House can handle all national distribution in Indiana, instead of serving as a "traffic officer" for warehouses across the country. The company's goal is to process all music orders within 24 hours of receipt.

The Columbia House CD and videocassette clubs are relative youngsters among the company's product divisions. Columbia House dates its beginning from a 1955 ad in The New York Times offering customers one free record with the purchase of any four at regular price. Columbia operated as a division of CBS Records until 1987, when sony purchased the music distributor. Columbia started a video club six years ago, at about the same time the company's on-site record-pressing plant moved to Georgia. The CD club started only a couple of years ago.

Columbia House accounts for a full third of all the postal revenues for the Terre Haute area. The distributor also acts as a "sister company" to Terre Haute's Digital Audio Disc Corporation (DADC).

DADC can boast of being one of the most successful high-technology companies in the Midwest. DADC's sole product--CDs for the recording industry--sells in huge numbers around the world. In its five years of operation, DADC has become the leading manufacturer of CDs in the nation. It employs 520 in Vigo County.

Digital Audio Disc was incorporated in 1983 and turned out its first CD a year later. As a joint venture between Sony and CBS to produce the first CDs in the United States, DADC got off to a modest start, since most potential customers had not yet heard of CDs. Around 1985, America "discovered" the CD; CD prices decreased, CD player sales began reaching respectable levels and DADC's business boomed. Sony bought out CSS' half of DADC in 1985.

In addition to CDs, DADC manufactures such related products as the 3-inch CD "single," CD video (a CD that plays music on a stereo and broadcasts video on a television simultaneously), CD-ROM...