Cable Fable

In January I enthused over a fabulous fiber-optic development, the erbium light amplifier, which seemed to me so incredible, even improbable, that for a while after I sent in my copy I had the dreadful feeling it might be a hoax. Had I been trapped? Was Scientific American emulating Audio's well-known line of Lirpa products, persuasive but improbable? If this was a hoax, I thought uneasily, then it would have been done exactly as that magazine did it, complete with the improbable element erbium, which sounded entirely too much like a concoction of herbs, and a weird picture of a stretch of optical cable wound into a loose circle and emitting a garish green light. It could so easily have been set up in the Lirpa manner! Honestly, I was worried. After all, my 45-year-old reputation was at stake.

Well, sighs of relief, though they came too late for the January issue (publishing delay, as usual, with a handy assist from the post office).

Many readers have seen a second and much expanded piece on the erbium amp in the same magazine, published many months after the first news re port, and this time a feature article. It even has the garish-green photo, enlarged in size, and the subject is laid out in far greater detail with updates.

You will find it in the January 1992 Scientific American. Evidently the editors over there did the same double take on their own earlier news item (March 1991) as I did-that is, suddenly they realized the significance of a simple, repeatable, flexible light amplifier for the entire huge world of communications, in just about any area you can imagine. And so, months later, they promoted the news item into the big time.

If this one is a hoax, then it is one of the biggest in history. If it is merely the scientific truth, then, just as I thought, we have a development as important as the vacuum tube (valve) and, because of its nature, of far greater potential towards revolutionary changes in our own area as well as in numerous others.

I cannot imagine that light will entirely replace electrons (and holes) in the audio world. It is the combination of the two that will be vital in audio and its spouse, video. The first audio example I ran into, the use of a light circuit not for length of cable or for bandwidth but to avoid cross-effects between low-level systems, is symbolic for what's to come. This, and the enormous potential bandwidth in what I still think we should call optonics, are the first considerations in the audio field. The propagation of zillions of signals over thou sands of miles via optical cables is peripheral to our business, even if intimately linked at the ends.

How incredibly fast things are moving! I still sit here in my Connecticut small-town home without access to video cable because the local franchise people say it costs too much.

Not enough houses. True, true. But the phone company has had lines to all our houses since the '20s, and since the mid-'30s those cumbersome and easily damaged electric power lines have also reached every house in town, and elsewhere worldwide. What will happen when, in almost literally months, optical cable becomes practicable for cable's distribution? With erbium for the longer lines? It just seems absurd at this point that cable people are grumbling about the enormous cost of cable extension via existing standards. Well, I'm not in the business and it's easy enough for me to say.

These people have, after all, a huge vested interest in billions of dollars of present cable network, this multiplied everywhere into the biggest force in present entertainment, non-live, as we all know. But glass cable is here-and erbium. And will not be denied.

I know, I know, all the talk now is about "interactive." I'll go out on a limb, or a transmission tower crossbar, and say I'm not that impressed. Novelty, gadgetry. We'll be buried in it in no time. And at every level. I recently saw and heard the first big application of this system for classical music, Mozart Interaktiv, demonstrated at Lincoln Center in New York. On a single 12 inch LaserDisc was stored enough in formation on that composer, plus bits of music as well, to keep you busy for weeks. You control what you want (i.e., interact) by the familiar finger-to-screen method, touching either a menu of some sort or even a section of a picture. There are, so to speak, wheels within wheels, subjects, sub-subjects, and even more to choose, like a video zoom into areas large and small, down to the finest detail.

It sounds wonderful. The technique is intriguing, if already basically familiar via computers. But the content, I thought, was spotty, even occasionally amateurish. Dare I say it? The short bits of music, with video, were shabbily treated, ending with a click, a thump, or a too-short switch-off instead of ending gracefully. The performances were middling, if, needless to say, by well known opera pros and big-name orchestral groupings. Worse, I thought, was the blatant inconsistency between video and audio, though this is a matter both of taste and familiarity. Still, would you enjoy hearing a Mozart singer at stage distance in a big ambience while simultaneously looking at her nearby tonsils?

And the "interactive" locations: You want to see where Mozart was on December 29, 1768? Touch, and there's a street. Like almost any old street, 18th-century style. How about the next musical tour? Another street. Maybe you can zoom in on a house where Mozart slept. It's just another house. And so it goes, with a conventional announcer's voice spieling away short accounts of whatever. (Some were "Englished," though a lot still were in the German original out of Austria.)

A big job, years of work, enormous research, and tons of technical operation to get these mountains of Mozart miscellany onto a disc of admittedly very large capacity. (But aren't we used to that, by this time?) It is a worthy and dedicated beginning, this particular high-level interactive. But a single picture book of Mozart, illustrated in color, could do 90% of the same in much simpler and faster communication-also at far greater length. Why must we listen to an optically stored soundtrack when we can so easily read the printed word at speed? Interactive may be the coming buzz, but I think there are more momentous developments to come, encompassing both interactive, otherwise known as two-way, and the "Read Only" facilities of radio, standard TV, the audio CD, and so on. More on this later; what has to concern us now is, rather, the huge battle that looms between the titans of broadcasting, cable, and the phone companies. For these last are the people who want in!

If light-wave communications make so much possible, then these big forces, notably cable and telephone, are equally able in the engineering sense to enter our homes with anything and everything. Bandwidth to spare, and then more.

From where I now sit, I can see through the window the line that powers me, stretching across a field and through woods to the main road, to a big transformer on the near pole. Be low, via ancient cooperation, runs the thin wire that is my phone. Glass fiber is not exactly ready to conduct power yet, or ever, but I can imagine a glass cable replacing the phone line out there, and it could be soon. Who will bring it to me? Phone company or cable? Why both? Unless for ruinous competition and redundancy, over the vast spectrum that soon will be possible whether interactive or not.

In-between stands that perplexed monolith, the Government. National, mainly, but also state and local. I would hate to be on that firing line! Broadcasting, even by satellite, may fade further or mainly cease, but phone and cable represent two enormous and implacable forces ready to invade each other's territory, government willing. Phew, what a future! Meanwhile, we have a relatively mi nor technical development, HDTV, in several incompatible systems. We left ourselves out of this in the United States. Europe and Japan forged ahead, differently but in analog, for video "hi-fi." Now we belatedly think we might catch up via digital, if and when.

But, digital excepted, this new high fidelity is already in hand and ongoing.

Did you realize that the entire 1992 Winter Olympics were televised by cameras in the new HD-MAC all-Europe (most of it) HDTV system, every picture you saw? Did some of that super quality remain when HD-MAC's 1,250 lines were converted to our 525-line system? I figured yes, somehow or other. The pictures were gorgeous, even non-HDTV.

But there was more. Every picture you saw in those days and days of winter broadcasting (and will see this summer) came through a fiber-optic connection from the cameras on site to a central editing facility. No erbium yet, I assume, but all glass. Not an electron anywhere. Yes, audio too came through the glass.

Hey, it's getting dark outside, pouring rain, thunderclaps booming. What is that silvery sheen I see stretching between the telephone poles? Some body snuck in a glass cable when I wasn't looking? Could be. But if so, whodunit?

(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Jun. 1992)

= = = =