Disc, Dat and the Other Things

A generation ago, we thrilled to the sight of the NBC peacock unfolding on a 21-inch color TV set and marveled at the sonic sock that stereo brought to our hi-fi systems. If we adjust yesteryear's dollar to what's left of today's buck, that vintage video cost as much as, if not more than, today's best monitors, and the venerable Garrard turntable of early stereo systems cost more than a basic CD player does now. Well, start saving pennies to boost your audio/video budget, because the consumer-electronics (continued on page 148)Disc, Dat(continued from page 107) industry—which had been struggling under the burden of a sluggish economy—is about to rise again and tempt you with previously undreamed-of viewing and listening experiences. In 1959, Rod Serling figuratively welcomed viewers to a new dimension in his Twilight Zone series. In 1988, we invite you—literally—into the new dimensions of home electronics.

Digital Audio Tape

Digital audio tape (DAT) delivers what office-copier companies only promise: perfect copies. A tiny cassette, about half the size of the standard audio cassette, can hold as much as two hours of compact-disc-quality sound. In other words, it shrinks the CD to shirt-pocket size. For the first time, you can walk around with an entire opera or rock concert in your pocket.

Being digital, DAT performs many of the same tricks as CD. Slip a recorded tape into the deck and a display automatically tells you the number of tracks and their length. Skip forward or back to the desired tracks by touching the appropriate buttons, or program only the tracks you want to hear. These functions may resemble CD's, but they happen much more slowly, since the tape has to physically shuttle back and forth, compared with the quick flick of the laser on a CD player. Unlike CDs, which should never wear out, DATs, like all tapes, will ultimately deteriorate. Ignore rumors that DAT will supplant CD.

Although both DAT and CD use similar digital systems, they are not identical. You won't be able to make direct digital copies from CD to DAT. Should some technical genius come along with a black box that matches CD to DAT, copies would still be impossible, since most CDs incorporate a digital copy-prevention code that doesn't impair the audio.

All the subtle differences in the digital system, and the digital copy-prevention code, don't affect analogue copying. You simply copy as you do now from the line outputs of the CD player (or amp or receiver) into the line inputs of the DAT recorder. Even this method results in remarkable transfers with inaudible sonic losses.

The ability to make near-perfect copies has piqued the ire of the recording industry. Since the announcement of DAT, record companies have attempted to stifle sales by requesting that an integrated circuit chip be incorporated in every machine to block recordings of discs and prerecorded tapes. But after extensive testing, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) found that the copy-code system audibly degraded sound quality and could be circumvented. Those findings removed a major roadblock to DAT sales in the U.S. As we go to press, it is too early to tell the immediate effects of the finding, but, more than likely, some DAT recorders will be on sale by the time you read this. One company that jumped the finding is Harman Kardon; its machine, along with others, is in the $1500-to-$2200 range.

Since the main controversy concerned DAT's recording ability, the first models that became available were DAT players designed for the car. Several small record labels have rushed to fill the void with prerecorded DATs. Kenwood and Clarion released players this past spring, and Ford offers one as an option with its Ford/JBL Sound System in the Lincoln Continental. DAT fends off bumps and vibrations on the road better than CD. That also applies to Walkman-style personal portables smaller than a paperback novel from Technics and Casio. Don't postpone buying a good CD player, but perhaps you ought to put that analogue cassette deck on pause.

Super VHS

To corrupt the lyrics of that old pop hit, "We can see clearly now/The grain has gone" sums up the biggest video break-through since the VCR. Most household products debase the word super through hyperbole, but not Super VHS (S-VHS). If any doubts still exist about the supremacy of VHS in the world of home video, S-VHS settles the question once and for all. Even Beta's stalwart developer, Sony, announced that it would begin marketing VHS machines this year.

Recent developments in technology enabled JVC to electronically "stretch" half-inch video tape. That greater band width permits recording more video information and, thus, more lines of resolution. S-VHS tape, conceived by 3M (Scotch), marks a dramatic improvement over conventional video tape. As you may know, color TV consists of both color information (chrominance) and black-and-white information (luminance). Broadcast TV and conventional home VCRs mix the two, reducing the quality of the picture. S-VHS keeps them separate. Some new TV sets include a special Y/C or S connector, which keeps the signals apart, resulting in the utmost picture quality. But even if your set lacks this new connector and mixes the chrominance and the luminance, the picture you'll enjoy with S-VHS is still 90 percent better than what you've seen before.

S-VHS decks remain compatible with older VHS decks and tapes. The S-VHS deck automatically senses tape type. Insert a standard VHS tape into an S-VHS machine and it records or plays in standard VHS. You can even use S-VHS tape as a high-grade tape in your standard VHS machine, but the recordings won't be S-VHS. The one impossibility is playing tapes recorded in S-VHS on a standard VHS deck.

S-VHS decks sell in the $1000-to-$1500 range, with prices already falling. Blank two-hour S-VHS ST-120 tape, at $15–$20, costs about triple the price of high-grade T-120 tapes. That only sounds expensive, since recording at the slow EP speed on S-VHS equals or exceeds the picture quality of the faster SP speed on regular VHS.

S-VHS faces one main obstacle, similar to owning a high-performance track car and not being able to find a gas station that sells premium racing fuel. Software companies and commercial duplicators say they are waiting until enough people purchase S-VHS machines before releasing S-VHS movies. A tiny trickle of S-VHS releases began this year, but it looks as if it will be a while before it turns into a flood. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the remarkable picture of S-VHS by making your own videos with one of the many S-VHS and S-VHS-C camcorders on the market.

High-Definition TV

High-definition television (HDTV) widens your horizons. It stretches that almost-square TV screen to a rectangle, similar in ratio to a movie screen. But there's more. With HDTV, TV looks like the movies, with a picture that's solid, displaying almost no lines of resolution. The bad news is that HDTV won't be receivable on your present TV set, or even on the one you buy next year. Taping HDTV requires a special VCR, souped up beyond even S-VHS.

RCA has developed an HDTV system, or, more accurately, an improved-definition TV system, called advanced compatible TV (ACTV). Existing TVs will show the normal picture, while new, specially designed TVs will have a wider screen and improved picture quality. Since the system works within the standard TV channel, it can't transmit all the information necessary for true HDTV. Recent demonstrations show ACTV to have the picture quality of S-VHS, far from true HDTV. RCA expects its system to be ready early in the next decade.

While it may be the 21st Century before the U.S. watches broadcast HDTV, the Japanese have begun tooling up to provide it from discs, tapes and satellite. It can also be transmitted via cable. Engineers in Europe and Japan are laboring to develop converters that would make HDTV systems compatible with existing TVs.

CDV and CD + G

Compact disc-video (CDV) and compact disc plus graphics (CD + G) promise more confusion than an election year. Both offer pictures from CDs. That's where the similarity ends.

A CD, of course, is a 4.75-inch digitally encoded audio disc that holds about 70 minutes of music. It's on its way to becoming the standard for music reproduction. LaserVision, on the other hand, started as 12-inch video discs and added eight-inch discs along the way. It recently added the ability to include CD-quality digital sound tracks. LaserVision developed a small but loyal following in the U.S. and Japan for its superlative 420-line video quality, unmatched until the recent introduction of S-VHS.

Last year, the electronics industry decided to fuse CD and LaserVision together under a single family name: CDV. In Europe, Philips, a prime proponent of the system, introduced a 4.75-inch CD that included five minutes of full-motion video as well as 20 minutes of audio. The LaserVision-quality videos sounded as good as CD.

Virtually every manufacturer and record label jumped aboard the CDV band wagon when it rolled into the spotlight at the summer 1987 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. They jumped off just as fast when the consumer response to audio/video discs fizzled. Now about 100 titles have been released on the small discs and about 2000 titles on the 12-inch ones, in addition to the hundreds of existing LaserVision titles. By the end of this year, there should be a few hundred more releases.

When Sony and Philips designed the CD, they built in a hidden bonus. The full 70-plus minutes of music occupies only 95 percent of the disc. The remaining five percent, called the subcode, provides space for still graphics. Hundreds of still pictures can be encoded on the CD without affecting the quality or quantity of the music.

So guess what was introduced at the 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this past January? Something called CD + G. Users select from as many as 16 channels of graphics, with a switch on the CD player or the CD + G adapter, just as on a TV or a VCR. Warner New Media, the power behind CD + G, suggested song lyrics in several languages, sheet music, guitar chords and fingering, opera librettos, photos, interviews with the performing musical artist, extensive liner notes, discjockey cues and creative art graphics as many of the visual possibilities to match the music. The cost of creating all those graphics may be substantial, but the expense of encoding them on a disc is minimal. Warner New Media will release as many as 50 CD + G titles of its own this year and has extended the offer to encode for other record labels for a modest fee.

It's rumored that JVC plans to introduce a CD + G player this summer for an estimated price of $400. Adapters, which Warner New Media calls Graphics Tuners, for already existing CD players with subcode outputs, will cost about $100 to $200.

Two sizes of CD, three sizes of CDV, 16 CD + G possibilities from a single disc and various permutations of these add up to more candidates promising more good times than the Presidential primaries.

Surround Sound

A good magician shades the line between illusion and reality. Dolby Surround enhances the illusion of reality. Movie theaters exploit Dolby Surround, seducing you to return for the "theater" experience. Most recent films encode the Surround on the sound track. Now here's the big secret: The same encoded Surround information survives the transfer to video tape.

Dolby, the company that popularized the Dolby Stereo System for theaters, does not manufacture home Surround products but rather licenses the process to other electronics companies and, until recently, home-movie buffs enjoyed only the mildest form of Dolby Surround. But this year, Dolby's theater system, which utilizes an analogue computer that steers dialog to the center channel while increasing stereo separation, became available for home use under the name Dolby Pro Logic Surround.

Shure, an electronics company located in Evanston, Illinois, licensed Dolby's basic Surround process but improved upon it with its own logic circuitry. Shure's newest model, the HTS-5200 (shown in the illustration), is currently considered by many to be the state of the art in Surround processors. The nifty graphic red display indicating the position and intensity of the sound alone justifies the $1000 price.

For Surround, in addition to the processor (Lexicon, NEC and dbx also make excellent ones), you'll need a pair of front-channel speakers, a pair of rear- or side-channel speakers, a center-channel speaker for above or below the TV screen and a subwoofer. The rear-channel speakers and the center-channel speaker need not match the extreme low-end and high-end capabilities of the front-channel speakers. You'll also need three stereo amplifiers to power all those speakers. Table-d'hôte Surround begins around $3000 with the processor.

More than 100 years have passed since the invention of the phonograph. New Age music arrived early, but New Age electronics arrives now.

"Virtually every record label jumped aboard the CDV band wagon in 1987.... They jumped off just as fast."