Digital,Compact,Cassettes,Only technology Digital Compact Cassettes – Only Four Years of Life

The electronic cigarette is not new. People who buy electronic cigarette knows that this product has been in the market for years now. Despite some sectors apparently trying to shoot the product down from the shelves, the popularity of elect Active shredder safety technology for the small office. Shreds 15sheets per pass into 5/32" x 1-1/2" cross-cut particles (Security Level3). Patented SafeSense® Technology stops shredding when hands touch thepaper opening. Designated shredde

The 90's saw the development of a number of new audio formats. Therewere competing companies that wanted their new ways of listening to music toprevail. The early 90s saw the introduction of the MiniDisc and even theinitial release of the .mp3 audio file. Phillips unveiled their version of digitalaudio in 1992 with the high quality Digital Compact Cassette.  Unfortunately however, the DCC was anexpensive and short lived endeavor.At the introduction of the DCC in 1992, Phillips had high hopes for aproduct they expected to take over the role of the standard cassette tape.  It was a lofty goal given that every yearmore than 2 billion cassette tapes were sold and 200 million players were beingsold alongside them.  It wasn'tnecessarily a bad push, but there was stiff competition in the recordabledigital market, especially from the MiniDisc.Companies wanted the attention of consumers and digital music could bemade much crisper and free of the quality issues from the wear and tear ofanalog formats.  The problem with thedigital cassette tape compared to the analog cassette, however, was thatdigital audio requires a lot more tape. This meant that unlike the CompactDisc, the digital audio on the DCC had to be compressed.The music at the time was recorded by sampling it as much as forty-eightthousands times per seconds.  Data isstored in binary and in this case, each of the samples is represented by anumber written in a 16-digit string of binary (0's and 1's).  With a stereo, two channels means two signalsso storing a single second of music requires 1.5 million 1's and 0's.Put it all together with additional memory requires for control anderror calculation and a single second of music requires 2.8 million 0's and 1's- or about 2.8 megabits.  At the time ofthe product launch, we were still sticking floppy discs in our computers andeven the most powerful floppy discs used in personal computers at the timecould only hold about 4 seconds worth of digital music.In order to get all of that data packed into a digital cassette tape, developersrealized that it would have to move extremely slowly.  If the digital cassette tape moved at astandard speed it would need to be extremely long.   Using technology from video cassetterecorders, Phillips was able to create a DCC that would move tape slowlyhowever read quickly while carrying a large amount of data.At the time, Phillips was well respected for their ability to stay ontop of advanced technology and create quality products.  With the benefit of their development teams,they were able to use data compression to reduce the binary needed to store thedigital music.  This allowed them to uselinear tracks and reduce the overall amount of tapeAComplicated TechnologyEven with compression though, cramming all of that data into lineartracks is far from easy.  A standardanalog tape has only four tracks - two stereo channels on each side of thecassette tape.  The Phillips DCC, usingtape of the same width as standard analog cassettes, had 18 tracks with 9 goingin one direction and 9 going in reverse. Eight of those tracks would contain the music while the 9thtrack was all control information.Because of this, a sophisticated recording head was developed in orderto read all 9 tracks in parallel.  Thissped up the flow of information onto and off of the digital compactcassette.  It's also why the machine wasbackwards compatible; the sophisticated head could easily play simple analogcassette tapes.  With the sophisticationof the digital compact cassette however it's easy to see why a standardcassette player couldn't read the digital tape.AQuestion of QualityAt the time, the biggest concern was whether or not the compression ofthe data on digital compact cassettes would damage the music.  During the launch of the product and theperiod leading up to, journalists spoke with various individuals in the musicindustry and many attested that the Philips system sounds as good as compactdiscs of the time, which used no compression at all.With the quality being comparable to Compact Disc and MiniDisctechnology, what led to the downfall of the Digital Compact Cassette?  It seams people were ready to move away fromtape and sales of the competing MiniDisc (despite being lower in quality), beatthe DCC. It had a short run of only 4 years and was discontinued in October of1996. What once seemed like a fantastic advancement in technology quicklyturned into a niche product for audiophiles.