"What medium had its first test with a recording of Richard Strauss's ""Eine Alpensinfonie"" by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan in 1981, and its first commercial pressing with ""The Visitors"" by ABBA a year later?"
Comparison of analog and digital recording analog format inaccuracies than anything else. One of the first and largest supporters of digital audio was the classical conductor Herbert von Karajan, who said that digital recording was "definitely superior to any other form of recording we know". He also pioneered the unsuccessful Digital Compact Cassette and conducted the first recording ever to be commercially released on CD: Richard Strauss's "Eine Alpensinfonie". While the words "analog audio" usually imply that the sound is described using a continuous time/continuous amplitudes approach in both the media and the reproduction/recording systems, and the words "digital audio" imply a discrete time/discrete amplitudes approach,
Deutsche Grammophon performed by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic for sale in the new medium in 1983, the first recording being Richard Strauss's "Eine Alpensinfonie". DGG/Polydor's entrance into the US market in 1969 (DGG had distribution deals in the US with Decca Records and MGM Records beforehand) came at a time when the big US classical music labels RCA Victor Red Seal and Columbia Masterworks were dropping their unlucrative classical artists and pressing poor-quality records. The fine quality both of recording and of pressings helped DGG succeed in America and attract artists such as Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops