Digital cassettes?

[cuallito]

This is probly a stupid idea, but humor me. What about digital cassette tapes? They could be recorded by sending the master audio signal through a high quality ADC, the resulting pure binary stuck on a cassette, and then when played back, then the pure binary reinseminated into analog. With the enormous storage capacity of cassettes, you could have insane sample rates like 96,000 times per second and goodness. How 'bout it?

[Peter Daniel]

Didn't Philips come with that few years back, but somehow it didn't pick up? They were using a standard Cassette for that.

[cuallito]

how'd they sound?

[Peter Daniel]

I didn't have a chance to try them. That system disappeared pretty quickly. I guess it was about 10 years ago.

[cuallito]

wating for someone else to put thier 2 cents in.

[mjarve]

I had a Philips DCC-900 deck for about 3 years. It did not use standard cassettes for the digital recording/playback, but it could be used to playback analog cassettes. It was okay, but its compression left a little to be desired, although Stereo Review said it was better than MiniDisc. DCC decks were also sold by Technics (Panasonic), Radio Shack, NEC, and were installed in some Ford automobiles. I remember the special “digital” cassettes were fairly expensive, about the same as DAT. Really its only advantage over DAT or CDR was its backwards compatibility with analog tapes. It was a great analog tape deck (playback only; the only reason I kept it around as long as I did), but DAT was about the same price and had better quality.

[Magura]

One have to keep in mind when this actually was. It was when or even before the first CD's came out. Back then it was considered good, and especially the backwards compatibility was a big deal back then when everybody had loads of tapes. The tapes for both DCC and DAT were quite expensive as I remember it.

With all that in mind, both DCC and DAT were a competitor to the CD, and a worthy one that is. The problem was that the days for tapes were counted allready back then. Had they been marketed a few years earlier they would most likely have put their fingerprint on history, but that wasnt the case. I borrowed a DCC for a while and was quite happy with it, butI was even happier that it wasnt mine as it turned out that only few years after they were launching the system, you could hardly buy a tape for any of the two systems, let alone the availability of any sort of recordings. You could compare it to the minidisc. Only difference was that it was launched faster and it died out faster.

I think the one I had was a technics, but im not 100% sure.....it was a great toy for the time being though

Magura

[Pedja]

Originally posted by cuallito
With the enormous storage capacity of cassettes, you could have insane sample rates like 96,000 times per second and goodness. How 'bout it?

Since Philips’s engineers settled on the compression which boiled down the writing of 4-bit signal, I guess you actually couldn’t.

IIRC, during the football world cup 1990 or 1994 DCC was markedly advertised.

It is interesting that a few years earlier, in the middle of 80’s, there were some PCM encoders/decoders intended for usage with home video recorders (VHS) thus resulting in the home digital recorders/players.

Unfortunately I did not have direct experience with either of these formats.

Pedja

[mjarve]

I had an attachment for my Sony SLV-757UC (I think it was that one) that did allow me to record "digital" sound. It replaced the video track, and rendered the tape uplayable on standard decks, but it did provide 16 bit sound at either 22.0kHz or 44.0kHz. Also, another tape meduim that supports digital sound is the 8mm cassette. All 8mm systems record stereo sound (16 bit, 48kHz (or is it 44kHz?)) in PCM format.

[cuallito]

Originally posted by Pedja

Since Philips’s engineers settled on the compression which boiled down the writing of 4-bit signal, I guess you actually couldn’t.

IIRC, during the football world cup 1990 or 1994 DCC was markedly advertised.

It is interesting that a few years earlier, in the middle of 80’s, there were some PCM encoders/decoders intended for usage with home video recorders (VHS) thus resulting in the home digital recorders/players.

Unfortunately I did not have direct experience with either of these formats.

Pedja

I thought tape had enourmous digital capacity, b/c I remember removable storage tape drives for PC that were like 80GB. The cartriges were about the same size as cassetts so I thought......