Peter W. Mitchell: The public debut of Philips's digital compact cassette (DCC) was the biggest event at the 1991 CES in Las Vegas…
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Editor's Note: In the 21st Century, lossy audio data compression, in the form of MP3 and AAC files, Dolby Digital and DTS-encoded soundtracks, and YouTube and Spotify streaming, is ubiquitous. But audiophiles were first exposed to the subject a quarter-century ago, when Philips launched its ill-fated DCC cassette format. What follows is Stereophile's complete coverage on both DCC and its PASC lossy-compression encoding from our April 1991 issue.—John Atkinson
Barry Fox interviews the principals at Philips on DCC
Since taking over reins and reign at Philips, Jan Timmer (previously head of PolyGram, then head of Philips's Consumer Electronics Division) has given no personal interviews. The only exception was for the official magazine of the MIDEM music industry conference held in January at Cannes, in the South of France.
It would have been hard for Timmer to refuse the MIDEM organizers' request. This year was the 25th anniversary of the event, where record companies, music publishers, distributors, and music-industry trade bodies meet…
Peter van Willenswaard on PASC
How can two channels of 16-bit audio be recorded on something similar to an analog cassette? The maximum bit rate in a linear track of a tape running at 4.76cm/s (standard compact cassette speed) is somewhere near 100kbit/s which, as DCC offers eight parallel tracks, results in a total "space" of 768kb/s. Half of that space is consumed by Reed/Solomon interleaving, synchronization bits, and a 10:8 modulation scheme, so only 384kb/s are available for pure audio information. Now there is no way around Shannon/Nyquist, so in order to maintain 20kHz of audio…
More on PASC from Peter W. Mitchell
The digital input filter in the DCC's PASC encoder divides the audio spectrum into 32 sub-bands of equal width; but the initial announcement did not specify whether they are equal on a linear or logarithmic scale. I naturally assumed a logarithmic scale, which would make each sub-band about a third of an octave wide, as in an audio spectrum analyzer. But my Boston colleague E. Brad Meyer learned that they are equal on a linear scale.
To clarify the point I called Gerry Wirz, project manager for DCC, at his office in Holland. He confirmed Brad'…
I do quite a bit of headphone listening during the day, making use of their convenience to shut out the office hubbub while I get down to serious copy editing. The system I use is modest—a pair of no-longer-available Sennheiser HD420SLs driven by an Advent 300 receiver I bought for $75, with CD source provided by a Denon DCD-1500 II—but I get quite a bit of musical satisfaction from it.
It was with great interest, therefore, that I read Part I of Bill Sommerwerck's monster headphone survey in the March 1991 issue, as well as Gary A. Galo's report on Joseph Grado's HP 1s elsewhere in this…
Sidebar: Measurements
Measuring headphones is fraught with practical problems, mainly due to the fact that the target response for a drive-unit that fires straight into the ear canal is anything but flat, given the frequency-response–modifying natures of the pinnae and inner ear canal which, as mentioned earlier, are unique for each person. Fig.1, extracted from an excellent 1980 AES paper (footnote 1) from Audio Contributing Editor Jon Sank, shows the envelope of responses he found desirable for conventional headphones to sound flat.
For this review, I measured the responses of…
The August 2016 issue of Downbeat includes the results of its 64th annual Critics Poll, and, as usual, I'm in accord with some picks, in discord with others. (I should say, I started to cast my votes in the poll, but something went wrong with the server halfway through and I never got back on.)
Many of the results are strange, as democratic theory would predict of any poll that involves many candidates. (It's conceivable, for instance, that the winner of a category might be someone who was nobody's #1 choice: maybe this musician was everyone's #2, but the picks for #1 were so split, among…
Michael Fremer may be Stereophile's Mr. Analog but he was mightily impressed with the Moon 780D digital processor from Simaudio, which never meets a source of data it can't turn into music. Herb Reichert gets excited by an affordable tube preamp from Rogue, as does Fred Kaplan over an expensive VTL tube preamp; and Art Dudley and John Atkinson get much musical enjoyment from Sony and PSB speakers, respectively. And as well as our regular "Analog Corner," "Listening," "Gramophone Dreams," "Aural Robert," and "Industry Update" columns, Sasha Matson interviews Ayre's Charley Hansen—the "Wizard…
It was 89°outside at 11am on the opening day of Capital Audiofest in Rockville, MD, a day when the high temperatures were predicted to reach the mid-90s—the show continues today and tomorrow. One could be forgiven for asking: why not spend the day at an audio show in a nice, newly renovated, air-conditioned hotel?
Why not, indeed. There are 58 individual exhibits here, representing God-only-knows-how-many different brands: Munich High End it ain't, but then Munich isn't a 25-minute Metro ride from our nation's endearingly dysfunctional capital.
And look! Here it was, a full hour…
I assumed they called this delightful, human-scaled, audio exposition Capital Audiofest because it is held near our Nation's capital in Rockville, MD—but alas, I think I was mistaken. It appears it is because every sleeping, exhibition, or conference room at the Rockville Hilton had a big digitized photo of some Roman Corinthian capitals—every one! Or perhaps that is just some sly, tongue in cheek, ironic illusion to "All roads lead to . . ." But I was not mistaken about the delightful and human-scaled part. Founder and organizer Gary Gill has open arms and a big smile that always makes…