Signals & Noise (Letters to Editor) (Jul. 1992)

Great Scott

Dear Editor:

Thank you for the article in your January issue on the history of the radio electronics industry ("Tuning In to Yesterday"). An article like this can be used as a measuring stick to see just how far we have come over the years.

About three years ago, I acquired an antique radio built by the E. H. Scott Radio Corp. in Chicago and have been restoring it. This model has a unique feature in which the user may adjust the bandwidth on short-wave and the old familiar AM band. On AM, it can be adjusted to a width of 16 kHz, which will give a frequency response from 30 Hz to beyond 15 kHz. Connecting this set, from 1937, to a modern, quality loudspeaker reveals that the quality of AM can be very close to FM's.

This discovery leads me to a question. Why can't companies like Magnum Dynalab and Creek Audio Systems, for example, who are serious about high fidelity, build an AM/FM tuner that has FM quality on both bands? I believe a feature like the one on the old E. H. Scott Philharmonic would help snap AM out of the doldrums. If we had the technology in 1937, we must certainly have it now.

-Scott Guthrie; Guelph, Ont.

Tuned In, Turned On

Dear Editor:

Just a brief note to say how much I enjoyed the pictures of the old radios ("Tuning In to Yesterday") in your January issue. I was two years old when my father manufactured the first commercial radio in Austria under Siemens license back in 1924, so these things do evoke memories for me. I can still remember tuning the separate circuits in TRF receivers with non-ganged condensers (some were actually tuned with coils) and carefully turning up the filament current to get enough gain but not high enough to burn out the tube.

I am probably the only one in our business who still remembers all this, which sometimes makes me feel that I belong in a museum myself and should be dusted off from time to time.

-Hans Fantel, Syndicated Columnist, Sheffield, Mass.

You Can Bet Your Life on DAT

Dear Editor:

Congratulations on the 34th Annual Equipment Directory (October 1991).

As an audio marketing manager (who used to fill out your stinking stack of forms every June for almost 10 years), I can tell you that the "bible" has really established itself as an indispensable reference in my office. The directory issues take up almost half a shelf in my bookcase.

I was a little surprised to see the letter from Danny Blatt, the first in that issue's "Signals & Noise" column. As one of the earliest and staunchest proponents of DAT in our industry, I have grown so weary of the Danny Blatts of the world. While Blatt has astutely ob served that CD is an optical process, his inference that CDs won't wear out is absurd. After all, a scratch of less than 1/8 inch presents an obstacle that no CD player can navigate. If this tiny scratch happens to occur somewhere over the table of contents, the entire disc is rendered unplayable.

So how long will a Digital Audio Tape last? As Blatt points out, the tape and transport are quite similar to those used in VCRs. I think it fair to suggest that their effective lives should also be similar. How many times can you watch that favorite dogfight in Top Gun before the videotape wears out? When was the last time you replaced a video tape because the picture quality was so degraded from wear that you couldn't take it anymore? I think that in my entire life, I may have worn out one passage of one tape. And, of course, let no one forget that the signal on the videotape is analog.

With its digital signal, sophisticated error correction, and integrated self defense system (tape shell), I believe that a DAT could last 10 times longer than its analog video brother. And that's a lot longer than the luckiest CD ever pressed I ran one DAT cassette 1,100 times and had no problems. If I had to bet my life on the long-term performance of a digital audio carrier, I'd have no qualms with DAT. Unlike CDs, DATs don't care about fingerprints or scratches, and error correction seems to take care of everything else.

-Bruce D. Adams Stockholm, N.J.

(adapted from Audio magazine, Jul. 1992)

= = = =