quoted 9 lines O.K. i'm going to make myself look really stupid now, but....
>O.K. i'm going to make myself look really stupid now, but....
>Philips have just bought out a range of DCC machines, and i assume that
>DCC stands for Digital Compact Cassette. I was under the impression
>that it was a system that was similar to DAT, but like it's alot cheaper,
>so what's the difference?
>
>I know this isn't movable parts or a technical equipment mailing list,
>but i'm sure there's a simple explanation, and that someone on here will
>know.
It is not at all similar to DAT. First, a DCC machine uses an audio
cassette-sized format and can still play standard audio cassette
(back-compatibility). Second, DCC uses a special kind of sound
compression which makes it supposedly sound like regular 16 bit
44.1Ksample stereo while actually using a lot less storage. THey do
that by attempting to glom on to the psychoacoustic princicple of
tone-masking in which humans presented with multiple frequencies close
together will only hear the loudest of the frequencies . DCC's thus
mask the information in the quieter "side-bands" and save significant
bandwidth by doing so. The claim is that you can't hear the masked
spectral content as long as the pitch and amplitude of the main tone is
maintained. Obviously, in music there is more than one main tone, so it
amounts to making each frequency peak in the frequency domain more
"spiky" and with less sidebands. Basically, it's a psychoacoustically
based lossy compression technique for music. Whether you can hear the
harmonic distortion caused by a DCC depends on the kind of music you're
listening to, IMHO.
Most audiophiles, however, don't agree that you can't hear the
difference. While it might sound better than cassette for consumer
playback, it's not something you'd want to master your music with
(especially if you're copying stuff back and forth multiple times). You
may be better off getting a regular cassette deck with Dolby S
(spectral noise reduction) which is somewhat related but uses dynamic
sprectrum analysis to reduce noise instead of compressing bits.
If you're doing music, or are serious about music get a DAT deck. DCC
is strictly consumer gear.
This is just a brief explanation as I understand the issues, I'm kinda
rusty on all this since I haven't been doing audio for a few years. So
I'm sure some internet weenie is gonna flame me about some inaccuracy
or other... go ahead, make my day.
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== Niels Mayer --
http://www.eit.com/~mayer -- mayer@netcom.com ==
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