From: curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch)
Newsgroups: rec.audio
Subject: Re: DCC -- JUST SAY NO!  (was: The end of cassettes,
Date: 17 Nov 92 18:06:58 GMT
Reply-To: curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch)
Organization: Carderock Division, NSWC, Bethesda, MD

In rec.audio, jeh@cmkrnl.com writes:
>I dunno.  I can't see a DAT deck in, for instance, the dirty environment of a
>typical car.

My first reaction would be the same, but I don't think that this is true.  You
can buy DAT players for cars, they've been on sale for a long time now.  The
one or two people I've seen talk about their car DAT players said they had
no problem with them.  My guess is that they could be just as reliable as
a car cassette player.

>If you want near-CD audio in the car, why not just install a CD player or
>changer?

I have a car CD player (because a car DAT player cost too much).  I'd
love to have an MD player instead because of the size of the MD vs the
size of the CD.  CD's are too big, and too hard to handle.  They are
a fine size for home use, but in the car, it's hard to switch CDs while
driving (and drinking a coke, eating a Big Mac and talking on the phone
all at the same time).  I've got it down to an art form, but still, I'd
prefer MDs any day.

>Still, the basic quality from the DCC deck will be better than that from almost
>all cassette decks.  But will anybody hear the improvement?

I think so.  You may not hear the difference in the car, or through
those cheap earphones, but the MD and (someday) portable DCC players
will double as nice sounding home units.  This is one reason why people
use portable CD players now.  You can use it as a portable, but you can
also use it as a high quality home unit.  You can't do this with any
of the portable cassette players and get anywhere near the same sound
quality for the money.

>Again:  If you want near-CD audio in the car, why not just install a CD player
>or changer?

Why install a CD system in the car when you can install an MD player?  With
MD, they will be easy to change (no exposed disk to touch), the media will
take up much less space in the car, and you can record your own disks.

Why install DCC when you can install MD?

Why buy a home DCC deck when you can spend less money and get a portable
MD player, and still use it as a high quality home player?

From everything I've seen so far, I don't see how DCC could win out over
MD.  But the big remaining unknown factors are the cost and availability
of pre-recorded media, sound quality, and marketing.

>What you don't realize, Tony, is that the record companies don't LIKE people
>like you.  They spent hundreds of millions of dollars (in today's $), maybe a
>few billion, buying up the hundreds of small labels that proliferated in the
>50s and early 60s, consolidating the music industry under three or four giant
>umbrellas.

One of those "giant" umbrellas is now Sony.  I bought two CDs the other
night.  Both had a new little peice of silver tape holding the CD case
closed.  On the silver tape it said, "Sony Music" in 3D.

>They don't want to have to do that again, and the availability of
>cheap, high-quality recording equipment is NOT something they want to see.
>Count on them to try to further restrict the availability of DCC.

I don't think this is what will happen.  I'm sure all the recording
companies would love to see a new media format take over.  This will
encourage everyone to go out and buy all new music.  It will help sales
much more than it will help the competition make their own recordings.

The cost of recording is going down, but it's not the DCC and MD units
that are doing it.  It's the DATs, and ADAT type units that have made
high quality home studios possible.  But this isn't hurting the record
companies, it's hurting the studio owners.

The cost of recording really isn't that important to the record
companies.  It's having the money to find, buy, and promote the
best talent that's important.

What the record companies don't like is loosing their market because
people are copying their friends music instead of buying it from them.
With DCC, the record companies I think are expecting a law to be passed
that will add a tax to blank media.  The important factor here is not
that they will get this money, but that this will rase the cost of
blank media, so it will make it less likely for people to copy instead
of buying new music.

Sony isn't as worred about this with the MD, because blank media for
the MD is more costly to produce than pre-recorded media (for technical
reasons - not political).  I think the initial list price of blank media
will actually be greater than the cost of pre-recorded media.

You could still buy one blank disk, and copy the few soungs you liked
from 4 or 5 or your friends CDs and save money, but at least the higher
price would greatly reduce the amount of copying done.

A one paragraph note in last month's Mix implyed that the release of MD
might beat the release of DCC in the US because the record companies
would not start selling DCC until this law was passed - and it looked
like the law wasn't going to be passed as soon as had previously been
expected.  I'm not familiar with this law.  Does anyone know what's
being done?

Curt
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