VOLTS IN VEGAS
Despite the recession, the winter Consumer Electronics Show seemed an upbeat affair. While many of the mass distributors of mid-priced gear were wondering how to turn down their volume, so to speak, many of the value/image-oriented manufacturers appeared to be in good shape. In such times many consumers place a priority on performance and perceived value, not necessarily on price. This in turn benefits reputable manufacturers. Everyone has felt the crunch of consumer reluctance. But the recession did not happen overnight; many manufacturers planned accordingly and are prepared.
Consumer Electronics Shows are buoyed whenever major software formats are announced. The last One was the CD in the early '80s; it is time for something new. The Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) is just that.
In digitizing the cassette, one of Philips' prime concerns was the fate of all the analog cassettes already in the marketplace. Common sense says that you don't abandon a medium while it is still growing, improving, and virtually without competition. It was in 1983 that the prerecorded cassette overtook the LP in unit sales in the United States, and that margin has grown to the point where the LP is all but nonexistent.
Philips estimates that 180 million cassette players are added yearly to the one billion plus population of players already in the field. They state further that 2.6 billion cassettes are purchased each year-40% prerecorded and 60% blank. This is the payback to the hardware and software industries for Philips' skillful management and maintenance of cassette standards over the past quarter century.
In promulgating a digital standard for the cassette, Philips determined that the new cassette would have virtually the same shape and mechanical parameters as the old one. This made it relatively easy to include an analog head so that all of the new digital recorder/players would be able to play back the older analog cassette format as well. What a marketing coup this truly is; it ensures, among other things, that the record companies will not have to start making digital cassettes tomorrow. They can take their time and phase in the new medium when they've tooled up for it and when there are enough new players in the field to justify it. It is thus possible that high-quality analog cassettes will continue to be manufactured for some years, while at the same time an orderly and careful phase-in of DCC can take place.
What does Philips' announcement mean to R-DAT? R-DAT has found its new existence as a professional two-channel recording medium, and I believe that its window for acceptance as a consumer medium for distribution of recorded programs was shut long ago.
However, let's give technical credit where it is due: R-DAT is an archival medium and, as such, uses no data compression, while DCC depends heavily on a data compression scheme called Precision Adaptive Sub-band Coding (PASC). For the professional it is important not to use data compression unless absolutely necessary; for the consumer, the performance aspects of PASC are so well worked out that there are no audible artifacts.
The only possible casualty of DCC may be Dolby S-type noise reduction, which is just now making its appearance into a number of high-end cassette recorders. With DCC just around the corner, record companies may feel that no further changes need be made in the manufacture of analog cassettes, which universally use Dolby B-type noise reduction. Time will tell.
In the review of last summer's CES, I mentioned the plight of high-end audio manufacturers and their mass exodus to a Chicago north side museum to stage their own show. What a sad comparison this makes with the fair treatment of high-end audio in Las Vegas. Here, there is no attempt to keep all exhibitors in the Convention Center; there simply isn't enough room. So, CES books space in such hotels as the Sahara, Riviera, and Mirage for additional exhibit space primarily for audio and video specialists. There is ample space both large and small for all budgets, and just about everyone seemed happy. We hear that a midtown Chicago hotel has been discovered (or rediscovered?) to accommodate the high-end group in a manner similar to Las Vegas-or at least as it used to be in Chicago in the days of the Conrad Hilton and Pick-Congress.
It isn't often that a new electrostatic loudspeaker comes along, and the Dutch Audiostatic Reference Series made a notable impression at the Riviera. Fortunately, these loudspeakers were in a large room so that the inevitable placement difficulties with electrostatics could be dealt with adequately, while leaving sufficient room for listening. The basic radiating element is flat, about six feet tall, and about seven inches wide; as a result it fairly well approximates a vertical line source, with the accustomed excellent horizontal dispersion in the midrange. This, in fact, was the most notable aspect of the loudspeakers' performance. Bass was fairly well extended, with additional units functioning only at low frequencies. The overall physical impression was reminiscent of the Acoustats, rather than the Martin-Logans with their wide, curved panels, or the Quads with their sequential firing rings-a notable addition to a select group of loudspeakers.
Once more, John Dunlavy of Dun-tech proved that traditional cone and dome transducers can be combined into multi-way systems with superlative electro-acoustical transfer characteristics to rival any of the electrostatics.
His Black Knights, driven with FM Acoustics amplifiers, were on display at the Barbary Coast and again walked away with the Best-in-Class prize. His company has relocated from Australia to Utah, so we can expect Duntech products to be better distributed in the United States at lower prices.
Another Best-in-Class prize goes to Harman Video. In a joint demo with Fosgate, they showed a new projector that has a digitally controlled convergence system that simplifies alignment of the system. The result of this is an extremely clear picture with none of the mis-convergence at the edges that has too often characterized three-tube systems. When you can see all the raster lines in an NTSC transmission, as you could in this demo, you know that you are looking at monitor quality video! Incidentally, Fosgate has recently been acquired by Harman International Industries.
What has happened to DSP? Digital signal processing generally implies that such functions as gain control, equalization, and time delay (reverberation) are carried out in the digital domain rather than by traditional analog methods. Sony introduced a DSP preamplifier almost two years ago that combined equalization, spatial enhancement, and Dolby Surround in a single unit retailing for about $1,000. In Las Vegas, the most visible examples of DSP were in automotive systems for spatial enhancement and in the remarkable Meridian loudspeaker system, where all aspects of frequency division and time domain control were carried out digitally.
I believe that we are basically looking at aspects of cost effectiveness.
For a given level of performance, it is still cheaper to carry out most signal processing in the analog domain; only time domain manipulations, such as delay and reverberation, are better done digitally. I would not expect to see the economic balance change in this area for at least two years.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Jun. 1991; Bert Whyte)
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