TROUBLE OR NOTHING

R-DAT and Copy-Guarding

The prospect of R-DAT home recorders that can make perfect digital copies makes record-company executives perfectly sick. They fear that DAT's recording quality will not only encourage home taping of commercial recordings but will also encourage professional record pirating. And the very last thing they want is a system that could make digital-to-digital copies from CDs that would be like putting a "Take Me" sign on a studio master tape.

Last year, a bill was introduced into the Senate by John Danforth (R-Mo.) which would have placed a prohibitive 35% duty on DAT machines that were capable of copying CDs, while imposing only a 4.1% tariff on machines with chips which would prevent such copying.

(Such an anti-copy system has been developed by CBS and endorsed by the Recording Industry Association of America.) The bill did not pass, but the issue was scheduled to come up again when Congress reconvened in January. The European Economic Community has already informed Japan that DAT machines may be excluded from the Common Market if they are not rendered incapable of copying copyright material.

Meanwhile, Chris Byrne of Akai America told an industry meeting that the public would never accept a copy-guard system that prevented making digital-analog-digital copies.

He did suggest that a system to prevent digital-to-digital copying be added to CD software and DAT recorders. Byrne predicted that DAT would sell mainly as an ultra-portable playback system.

In December of last year, top Japanese electronics executives representing the EIAJ (Electronic Industries Association of Japan) met with the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers (IFPI) to discuss the problem. European and American record companies and European electronics manufacturers supported the IFPI's position that DAT should not be allowed into the U.S. or Europe without a built-in copy-prevention system. The Japanese representatives, however, declared that the EIAJ had no intention of incorporating such a system, which would infringe on consumers' rights.

Even the rudimentary precaution of not allowing DAT machines to record at a CD-compatible sampling rate of 44.1 kHz may not last. In addition to the Sony professional R-DAT deck reported on by Bert Whyte in his column last month, several Japanese companies reportedly showed CD-compatible R-DAT recorders at last fall's Japan Electronics Show.

Conceivably, R-DAT could wind up as a system of unrestricted versatility-but with its marketing restricted to the Far East.

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News and Notes

It may soon be possible to buy Japanese-made CD players with Kodak optics made in the U.S.

Kodak's first such product, a single aspheric lens designed to replace the three-element lenses now in use, became available to player manufacturers last October. More optical products for CD will become available this year.

Despite all the excitement generated by the Compact Disc, only 6.4% of U.S. families owning stereo equipment had CD players by mid-1986, according to a poll conducted last year by Newsweek magazine.

Nevertheless, that's more than 3.5 times as many as in 1985, when the figure was only 1.8%. Among audiophiles, of course, CD has made greater inroads-in 1985, for instance, 44% of Audio's readers owned CD players.

In Boston, engaged couples can register their preferences not only in china, silverware, and linens, but in Compact Discs as well. A local store, Boston Compact Disc, maintains the registry.

The speed of sound, which was determined in 1942 to be 741.5 mph, has now been recalculated and found to be 0.4 mph slower. The acoustical rule-of-thumb figure of 1 foot per millisecond is therefore more accurate than ever: Sound actually travels 1.087 feet/mS, almost 0.04 inch per second slower than was previously believed.

Australia's first CD plant, the first in the Southern Hemisphere, is scheduled to open this month. The Disctronics Ltd. plant should be producing more than 7 million discs a year by the end of 1987. At least three other companies have announced plans to produce CDs in Australia as well.

The latest use of ceramics in audio is for making cassette shells, now available from Sony in Japan.

Presumably, the ceramic shells will be immune to heat-induced warping.

The silvery CD is now available in gold from Mobile Fidelity, for under $30. The company claims that the usual aluminum coating oxidizes and that gold's greater reflectivity reduces dropouts by 90%.

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Jolly Good Fellows

Last November, at the 81st convention of the Audio Engineering Society, Richard C. Heyser became the Society's President-Elect.

Mr. Heyser, a Senior Editor of Audio, is best known in the field for his development of Time Delay Spectrometry, now used in speaker testing and acoustical analysis in many countries. He has been engaged in research with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Cal., since 1956 and is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) as well as a Fellow of the AES.

At the convention, Audio Associate Editor B. V. Pisha was named a Fellow of the Society. The honor was awarded in recognition of his "contributions to audio component testing and evaluation." He has been interested and involved in audio for 60 years, and engaged in audio testing since 1953. He first wrote for this magazine in the early 1950s, becoming a Contributing Editor in 1973 and being named Associate Editor in 1984.

This brings the number of AES Fellows on our masthead to five. In addition to Heyser and Pisha, Associate Editors Bert Whyte and Edward Tatnall Canby and Contributing Editor John M. Eargle are Fellows. Audio's founder, the late C. G McProud, was also a Fellow of the Society.

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How Good Is "Good"?

I say the Model X cartridge sounds "superior." You say the Model Y sounds "excellent." And Charlie, over there, thinks that the Model Z sounds "ideal." Peter, who's heard none of these cartridges, wonders which of the three sounds best. He'll have a devil of a job figuring it out, according to a recent paper in the SMPTE Journal, published by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

In "Graphic Scaling of Qualitative Terms" in the November 1986 issue of the Journal, Bronwen L. Jones and Pamela R. McManus of the CBS Technology Center reported on an international experiment in which test subjects were asked to show in what order they ranked subjective rating terms like the ones mentioned above.

They were also asked to show how far apart they placed these terms on a linear scale.

The article shows that the difference between subjective rating terms depends on where the raters come from and how the rating words are presented. For example, test subjects in the Eastern U.S. considered "ideal" and "superior" to be just about the same, and better than "excellent." But subjects in the West and in Cleveland considered "excellent" to fall between the other two ratings, with "ideal" best and "superior" worst of the three. Subjects in Pittsburgh, however, considered "excellent" the highest praise.

For the U.S. as a whole, "superior" came out on top, with the other two ratings tied for second place. In Italy, on the other hand, "eccelente" ranked highest, followed by "superlative" (at the same graph level as "superior" here). "Ideale" ranked far behind our "ideal" and "excellent." Furthermore, it makes a difference whether subjects are given a list of words and asked to rank them all or are presented with words one by one.

Changing the way in which the words are presented doesn't change the order of their rankings, but does change the distance that raters put between them.

So which of the three cartridges should Peter buy? Naturally I'd recommend the Model X; it was the one I called "superior," and to us Easterners that's about as good as things can get. In practice, though, Peter should pay more attention to such factors as how each will work with his tonearm, and what each costs, than to his friends' opinions. All three terms connote very similar levels of quality, well above what any of us would call merely "good" or "fine."

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CD Goes to New Lengths

A Swedish record company, BIS, tried to bring out a two-hour CD last year, according to Which Compact Disc?, a British publication. To get around CD's playing-time limit of just under 75 minutes, BIS recorded one-hour-long monophonic programs in each channel. Polygram, however, refused to master and press the BIS recording because it failed to conform to the CD standards. At last report, BIS was still looking for a pressing plant for the disc.

Island Records and Jive Records had better luck. They produced the first CD "singles," selling for £5.75 (about $8.25) apiece, about twice what 12-inch phono singles sell for in Britain. Island's "Angeline," by John Martyn, held five tracks and played for 25 minutes; Jive's Ruby Turner disc, "If You're Ready (Come Go with Me)," played for 15 minutes. The discs were the standard 12-cm diameter. While CD players' tracking systems (which start at the center of the disc and stop when they reach the outer rim) could cope with smaller diameter recordings, few players' loading systems could do the same.

Meanwhile, sales of 45-rpm singles are dropping rapidly. According to a story in The New York Times, singles are surviving mainly for jukeboxes (whose numbers are shrinking) and for promotion of specific songs. With the coming of CD jukeboxes and, perhaps, greater numbers of CD singles, these reasons for the 45's survival may disappear. The 45's immediate replacement, however, may be the "cassingle"--a short recording on cassette tape.

(adapted from Audio magazine, Mar. 1987)

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