"Digits on disc" - flashback to 1979

[Julf]

The latest HiFi News has a reprint from 1979 (in their "From the vault" series) about the new digital media (by Angus McKenzie).

This was a few years before Philips and Sony joined forces and combined their separate technologies to produce the CD.

Some quotes that might make you smile:

The Philips system is intended to be very competitively priced at E150 or so, which is cheaper than the cost of a good turntable and cartridge combination. This system, incidentally, uses 14 bit coding, whereas the Sony one, somewhat unnecessarily, uses 16-bit (although Sony does say that 16-bit was used in the prototype because of the availability of the electronics as in its PCM-1600 tape system).

The digital disc would give the consumer a peak distortion level of no more than 0.03% and a potential dynamic range of 85 dB at least, with an absolutely flat response up to 20kHz. Crosstalk would be eliminated, together with rumble, spits and crackles and, of course, there would be no more tracing distortion. The sound of such a disc in the home will be very thrilling indeed, and will probably mean that everyone would want more powerful amplifiers in order to gain even more realism from the sound!

I feel the real future for home digital recording lies in the eventual use ot large microprocessor operated discrete stores, perhaps with a bubble memory, but between 3000-5000 million bits have to be stored for each hour
of information in stereo. We have chips which store one million bits, whereas ten years ago the best ones could only manage 256 bits. Perhaps in ten years' time we may get there.

One final problem remains, though, and this concerns the very fact that the available dynamic range is so very high... at least 15dB more than the presently available analogue systems in the home. Since many installations will not be able to cope with this wide dynamic range, it may be necessary to limit the range in some way for listeners.