From: jeh@cmkrnl.com
Newsgroups: rec.audio
Subject: Re: DCC -- JUST SAY NO!  (was: The end of cassettes,
Date: 17 Nov 92 10:02:10 GMT
Organization: Kernel Mode Consulting, San Diego, CA

In article <TONYB.92Nov16135326@oberon.juliet.ll.mit.edu>, tonyb@juliet.ll.mit.edu ( Tony Berke ) writes:
> The previous poster insinuated, probably correctly, that the only
> reason DCC was being promoted was that it would lead to increased
> profits for Phillips.  I don't doubt it, but I must point out that
> that is the same motivating factor for the release of about 99.99% of
> all products on the market!  

Sure, but I wish that Phillips and the record companies would try to increase
their profits by bringing us more value for the money, rather than introducing
a new format that's designed chiefly to justify higher prices. 

> DAT would have
> been my first choice, but the record companies and lawyers screwed it
> all up.  

I dunno.  I can't see a DAT deck in, for instance, the dirty environment of a
typical car.  Ever clean out a car cassette deck that's been in place for a few
years?  Now try to imagine a helical-scan tape technology working in that
environment.  I may be totally off base on this but I never saw DAT as a
serious competitor to the car cassette deck -- I just don't believe it could
ever be made reliable enough in that environment (unless you can get rid of the
cassette loading door :-). 

> The poster continued on to assert that the analog cassette was good
> enough for its "intended uses" anyway, and that there was no benefit
> to the consumer from getting near-cd-quality audio in the car, etc.

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

> As a semi-pro studio engineer that currently sees his products
> released exclusively on cassette, I couldn't disagree more.  [...] I turn
> out great-sounding cassettes, digitally mastered, then duped in realtime
>  on Chrome-bias tape with Dolby-B, on good decks.  These sound great
> on great home systems, but sound like sh*t on many of my
> unsophisticated customers' car systems, which often lack Dolby and/or
> a Chrome EQ setting.  Even when they do, many people don't know what
> they are, and don't set the switches properly.  From them, I get
> complaints that my recordings sound "too shrill".  Gee, I wonder why?
> 
> First of all, many (most) of the analog cassette playing equipment
> that makes its way into low- and mid-fi setups is so terrible that the
> move to digital-quality sound would be a clear advantage.  One might
> not always need the signal-to-noise ratio that digital has to offer,
> but the lack of wow and flutter, speed error, etc, is almost always
> audible.

First of all, there is no technical reason why a car or portable cassette deck
can't be made lots better wrt these factors, probably at a lower cost than is
required to build a good DCC deck.  Cassette wow and flutter, speed error, and
freq response problems caused by tape mistracking are all things that can be
solved by better mechanical design.  Yes, but the DCC gets those things right
automatically... yes, but the DCC *requires* that the tape be handled with a
precision on a par with the best cassette decks; there just isn't much room for
error there!  So by the time you've paid for the DCC mechanism, you could have
bought a cassette mechanism that could do almost as good a job. 

As for the "pilot error" problems, Many cassette decks now automatically set
the playback EQ based on the notches in the cassette shell.  The Dolby problem
could be solved simply by assuming that most tapes are going to be recorded
with Dolby and having the deck come up with Dolby enabled by default. 

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

Car audio systems and boomboxes are usually underpowered, and they're equipped
with speakers that are, well, of limited quality.  They are also operated in
noisy environments where 20-20 kHz frequency response and better than even 60
dB S/N is simply not needed. 

Now, I know that you can set up a much-better-than-"typical" sound system in a
car, and that there is no reason why a "boom box" couldn't be equipped with a
decent amp and decent minimonitor speakers.  But the vast majority of car and
portable stereos are NOT so equipped.  Nor do I expect that they will be 
simply because a DCC deck is part of the system.  

Taking the cassette decks out of, and putting DCC into, these systems will 
indeed eliminate speed error, wow and flutter, background noise, and "pilot
error" such as mis-settings on EQ and NR switches... but most of them will
still be stuck with amps and speakers that will severely limit performance. 

Again:  If you want near-CD audio in the car, why not just install a CD player
or changer?  Hmm, well, because you can't record on CDs.  You (Tony) can't
easily make CDs as you now make cassettes, and I can't assemble CDs full of
my favorite pieces from n different albums, or whatever.  

You're right, the world DOES need an accessible (affordable) digital recording
system. What I am afraid is  going to happen, though, is that the  record 
companies will sell DCCs for more  than they now sell prerecorded cassettes.  
This will cuase even more people to resort to "home taping", trading tapes 
with friends, etc.  (after all, it's digital, so the copies must be perfect,
right?  Try to explain "lossy compression" to the person who doesn't know what
the EQ switch is for!)  Then the record companies will go back to Congress and
demand an even more restrictive home recording act.... and the "accessible
digital recording medium" will become a little less accessible.  

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.  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. 

	--- Jamie Hanrahan, Kernel Mode Consulting, San Diego CA
Internet:  jeh@cmkrnl.com, hanrahan@eisner.decus.org, or jeh@crash.cts.com
Uucp:  ...{crash,eisner,uunet}!cmkrnl!jeh
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