History of digitization, britpopa, dirty ads and the best beer

The rise and fall of a digital compact cassette remains a useful example for technical giants - how to do almost everything correctly and fail anyway. Like the Britpop, whose golden age from 1993 to 1996 coincides with the short life of the DCC (Digital compact cassette), this format loudly announced itself, achieved some success and was advertised with a juicy advertisement.


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... after which he failed due to marketing frauds, mean PR people and new beautiful competitors.

The release of the DCC was a bold step - in the previous decade, the Dutch Philips conglomerate successfully launched the CD format, made billions in sales, a CD-ROM and only the newly emerged CD-I. Of course, all these products were made in collaboration with Japanese Sony. But in the project of a digital cassette, Philips suddenly decided to break with Sony and build a new alliance with a young company from the city of Kadoma, Matsushita (today known as Panasonic).

They decided to create a carrier for high-quality digital recordings, which would become affordable, backward-compatible, portable, used in studios and at home — and at the same time, that would be sold in record stores with already recorded music.


Reverse side of the cassette

There were two reasons why Philips did not actively promote the new CD-R as a format for studios and home use. First, the CDs were 16-bit, which was not suitable for lovers of high-quality sound and even more demanding recording studios. Secondly, CD-Rs were then expensive to produce and too expensive for the consumer, even if they were bought in bulk. An engineer from one of the studios told me how he once wanted to record several CD-Rs for his girlfriend's birthday party - a collection of her favorite songs, naturally - in the early 90s. Now a clean CD-R can be bought for seventy rubles [British prices in terms of rubles - note of translation]. Then, together with the cost of burning, they cost more than 17,000 rubles a piece (taking into account inflation today it is already more than 38,000 r) - for one CD-R. A good drive could cost hundreds of thousands of rubles.

DCC was the logical way to provide high-quality sound at home — with a system that in parallel was able to play all the hundreds of millions of analog tapes that users had already bought that their parents had used since the 1960s.

And how could this old film be digital? The answer is simple. Digital information was recorded on a magnetic tape in the form of a code, just as it is written on a layer of a CD or DVD. The player reads the code from the film passing by the heads, and decodes it into an audio stream.

For that time, the technology was impressive. The 18-bit digital cassettes had two stereo sides, four data tracks each, capable of holding up to 90 minutes of sound. The decks themselves could also play regular cassettes of 20-30 years old.

In addition, the DCC recording apparatus could write from a digital source of the S / PDIF standard at 32 KHz, 44.1 KHz, and even 48 KHz. When recording from an analog source, it worked at a frequency of 44.1, and due to the slow speed of the film - 4.8 cm / s, like in old tapes - the bitrate was limited.


Portable DCC Player

To overcome the limitations of Philips came up with a codec for audio, similar to MPEG-1 Audio Layer or mp1. It was called PASC (Precision Adaptive Sub-band Coding, Adaptive Precision Sub-Band Coding). PASC could reduce the bitrate of recording on CD from 1.4 Mbps to 384 Kbps - an impressive 4: 1 compression.

Many buyers thought that PASC produced better audio quality than 5: 1 compression, achieved by ATRAC, which was used in Sony's MiniDisc format. Philips fans claimed that the DCC recorder could recover lost data, even if one of the eight tracks was unreadable, or if all tracks were not readable at a distance of 1.45 mm of film.

The DCC cassette was identical in size to the old one and was distinguished by the presence of holes for spools on only one side and the presence of a sliding cover to protect the film at the time when it did not come into contact with the magnetic heads.

The resulting sound was very good, albeit a bit cold. I once met a DCC deck at Acid Jazz Studios on Denmark Street in London, where they recorded music from Britic pop groups Panic in 1995. It turned out that it was a temporary measure used during the couple of days off. But it also demonstrated the potential of the DCC. No studio at the time would even think of using conventional cassettes for mixing.

So did the DCC go wrong?

Manufacturers of hi-fi technology, such as Marantz, Optimus, Technics and Radio Shack, quickly joined Matsushita and Philips in manufacturing various types of decks for DCC. Spanish advertising for television (above) for the first such deck created a slight sensation in the media thanks to the creative use of one of the natural substances.



The launch of DCC took place at the end of 1992, with the involvement of recording giants such as Warners and EMI, which produced a fairly large assortment of recordings on these tapes - from Diana Ross to Lou Reed and U2 - and at first everything looked very attractive. There was a flurry of sales of several thousand copies, there was a reaction from "professional consumers" in the studios. Philips seemed to make a ton of money. But it was money that became the first problem of the product.

The first problem with the sales of recorders for DCC was their price - in today's money it is more than one hundred thousand rubles. Decks, players cost cheaper, but the lack of recordings nullified the whole idea of ​​entertainment with high-quality music for fans of hi-fi and audiophiles - and of course for independent and home studios. Britain, moreover, slowly rolled to the " black environment " of 1992, to the recession and 15% of loans. At such a moment, small business, like a small studio, did not have time to borrow money. Outside Britain, prices were lower, but even in the USA, the cost of the deck ranged from $ 600 to $ 1,700.

The initial price shock was complemented, at least in Britain, by short-sighted, fierce PR people. Advertisers were in no hurry to distribute or even rent the first wave of DCC recorders. For example, at that time there were about 75 journalists working both full-time and freelancing with IPC Media brands (now Time Inc. UK) covering music: NME, Melody Maker and Vox magazine. The total sales volume of these journals was 350,000 copies (last year the last paid issues of NME came out and their sales fell from a quarter of a million to 25,000). The rest of the niche occupied such publications as Q, Mojo and Word. Most of the publications reviewed the entire spectrum of media - singles, albums, concerts, books, videos, movies, computer games, hi-fi.



However, the PR people hired by Philips, with a creak, identified as many as two DCC decks for reviews by journalists from the magazines listed. If they wanted the journalists of these publications to highlight the new sensation in the world of sound, they should act extremely tightly.

In addition, these decks soon began to complain due to contaminated heads. If you used them only to play DCC cassettes, you did not have any problems with the playback head, although you had to clean it more and more often. Or, if you played only regular cassettes on them, everything was tolerable.

But the whole essence of the DCC decks was in digital recording and playback of digital and analog tapes, and when you regularly did this and changed tapes, you might end up with the need to use a cleaning tape every hour (I’m in my bitter experience) . Part of the problem was that the recording and reproducing heads did not move, as in the analog player, which gave greater sound stability, but also greater film abrasion and oxide accumulation - therefore the rotating scanning system was used mainly in professional studios on DAT recorders drum, about the same as in VHS and S-VHS players. For DCC they made a high-quality film, here Philips did everything right, but even a good film was worn out and in the case of DCC, it was worn out pretty quickly.

Another problem was that DCC decks did not need to be demagnetized, and consumers learned this after trying to demagnetize it and found that the heads were becoming unusable.

All these problems could be solved if the format had no competitors and the sales would be higher. But they were not higher, because from the very beginning the DCC had a competitor in the form of the MiniDisc format. Just as VHS lost in quality to Betamax, but won the market, so MiniDisc, with its limited ATRAC compression system, did not reach the DCC standards in terms of audio, but won. And although the MiniDisc was not backward compatible with anything, it was smaller, cheaper, and faster. And since it was a magneto-optical data storage system, there were no problems with cleaning.

A fire that burns twice as bright ...

During the last week of November 1995, at the computer show HCC Dagen in Utrecht, Philips demonstrated the portable recorder DCC-175, which could be connected to any IBM-compatible computer via cable. It could be controlled from a PC, and it was a prototype of a docking station for the iPhone. Like the integrated graphic equalizer, it was a bold idea, but the DCC-175 was only sold in the Netherlands. To be honest, the time of digital cassettes has already passed, and the time of the docking stations has not yet come.

In most parts of Western Europe, the DCC defeated MiniDisc for a while, and in the Netherlands they loved it very much, but the end came very quickly.

A year later, Philips gave up and ceased production of DCC-decks, followed by other manufacturers (and some stopped production even earlier). The market had its say and in parallel with the extinction of Britpop - another victim of hype, bad press and strange marketing - the company had no other options.

And although MiniDisc is also not particularly well finished, this thinner format lived 17 years longer than its competitor. On the Philips side, there was quality, compatibility, software and innovation, but there were no such important elements as creative marketing, accessibility and reliability.

DCC did not disappear without a trace; the idea of ​​using fixed heads was refined and OnStream Holdings (separated from Philips in 1998) used this principle to produce storage media. Such heads are still used in some hard drives, although instead of AMR used in DCC, they have now switched to GMR.

Technological innovations, originally invented to create recording and reproducing heads of DCC decks, are today used for the nobleness-comparable task of filtering beer. Micrometer-sized silicon wafers ideally suited to remove excess yeast particles from the beverage.



DCC recorders and players periodically pop up on eBay, at prices ranging from 4,000 to 20,000 p, depending on the state, model and availability of bundled tapes. Some experts enjoy the recovery of damaged models.

Unlike other forgotten formats, DCC did not make it to cult status. He is not too old and not too new; not completely digital and not completely analog. But it cannot be denied that from a technical point of view, the DCC was a good attempt and innovation. And just for this we will raise in his honor a glass of filtered beer.