From: kautz@research.att.com
Subject: Re: So? Anyone have dcc yet? (long)
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 18:29:21 GMT
Reply-To: kautz@research.att.com
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories

Yesterday I played with a Phillips DCC unit at the 6th Avenue
Electronics on Rt 22 in NJ.  There was a price tag ($799) on it, but I
don't know if they actually had it in stock.  They had only 1
prerecorded tape, a collection of show tunes, rock, etc.  They didn't
have blank tapes out to try making your own recordings (probably if
you were nice to the salescritters they could provide one).

The sound?  There was no hiss, of course, and no artifacts like
"pumping".  I thought I did detect a odd sort of breathy, "hollowness"
to some vocal passages, especially those that immediately followed
loud orchestral music.  (This is a purely subjective impression and
may be way off, since I didn't perform an A/B comparision with a CD of
the same songs).  Unfortunately, there was no symphonic music on the
tape; it's pretty hard to judge the quality of any system by just rock
and pop.

Physically, the unit is quite handsome and solidly built.  As the
reviews stated, tape transport functions are painfully slow:  press
the button to skip to the next song, and you'd swear you'd hit the
mute button instead!  There is a little liquid display that shows the
current song's title, abbreviated to a dozen or so characters, but
that's it --- sorry, you don't get a full set of liner notes!

Personally, I don't see the technical advantages of this format ---
analog cassettes are dirt cheap, and the sound quality on a
high-quality deck (eg, in the same $500+ price range) is similiar
(except for a bit of hiss); CD's players of all types are also
incredibly cheap, and recent advantages such as electronic memory
buffering eliminate the skipping problems for portable units.
Certainly pre-recorded DCC tapes will sound better than pre-recorded
analog tapes, but I doubt that they will cost less than CD's!

There is, however, a clear *marketing* advantage to DCC.  In just a
few years, CD player technology has gotten about as good as it will
get; very few people will *ever* have to replace their CD player in
order to improve the sound quality.  While CD's themselves are
expensive, it costs next to nothing to make very high quality analog
copies on a regular cassette deck, so you don't need to *buy* extra
copies of a recording for your car, office, etc.  On the other end of
the scale, the boom-box crowd is devoted to dubbing decks: copying
tapes, and making copies of copies, is a way of life!

Now suppose the recording industry (manufacturers, record companies,
Stereo Review magazine, etc :-) all got together and decided to
promote DCC, and gradually eliminate CD's and analog cassettes.
First, everyone has to buy a new DCC deck.  Then, the sonic
limitations in the format will lead to an endless series of real
improvements in the sound quality: so you've got the high-end of the
market locked into buying a new machine every few years.  Even the
rest of the market will have to replace their DCC machines eventually,
since the complicated mechanisms, belts, heads, etc will simply not
last as long as (e.g.) that of a CD player.  Next, you have eliminated
the dubbing "problem": high-quality dubbing, probably even for a
single generation, will be impossible, due to the losses entailed by
repeated compression and decompression --- much more securely than
with a serial-copy protection scheme.  Next, I predict that we will
*never* see inexpensive dual-well DCC decks --- so you have simply
eliminated the low-end dubbing crowd.  So everybody gets rich(er).  Far
fetched?
--
---- Henry Kautz

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