Home Recording a Century Later, More or Less
Since machines that could play recorded music were
invented, the companies who made them assumed people would want to make their own
recordings. But while there has indeed been a group of dedicated hobbyists who enjoy the
creative recording process, the proliferation of inexpensive recorders over the past
couple of decades suggests that most users are not very interested in making original
recordings. Instead, if they use the recording function of their machines at all, it's to
copy existing commercially recorded material, either to play in a car or Walkman, or to
avoid paying for the music.
But none of that was foreseen in the early days. Audio
recordings were seen as analogous to photographs: everybody likes to look at them, and
most people like to take them as well. With mechanical sound recordings -- first cylinders
and then 78-r.p.m. discs -- there was a major hindrance to making one's own: if the medium
was soft enough for the recording stylus to make a good representation of the sound, it
was too soft to allow more than a few plays before wear made things unlistenable. So,
while disc recorders did appear from time to time over the years, they were never very
popular.
Magnetic recording showed more promise. Not only was it
free of those physical limitations, but the media could also be erased and reused -- a
major potential saving in cost. As early as 1899, a Dane named Valdemar Poulsen had
demonstrated a magnetic recorder that used a length of steel piano wire wrapped around a
brass drum. It was the magnetic equivalent of its competitor the wax cylinder, but had the
major disadvantage of a much shorter playing time. Also, it sounded lousy.
As it turns out, magnetic recording has a particularly
unpleasant quirk. Every sort of audio process has an upper limit, beyond which it
overloads and begins making very ugly noises, called distortion; normally, however, as
long as the level is kept below that maximum, everything sounds fine. With magnetic
recording, there's a lower limit as well; performance is quite good in the
mid-levels, but as the signal drops below a certain point and approaches zero (silence)
distortion rises. Since even very dynamic signals contain a lot of material in the
low-decibel range, this behavior is a serious drawback. Consequently, Poulsen's invention
languished for more than 30 years.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, however,
German engineers started to play with something called "AC bias." This was a
very high-frequency tone -- typically five or six times higher than a human can hear --
added to the music to push it into the range where the recording system was linear. The
recorder couldn't distinguish between the bias and the regular audio signal, and since the
bias was always there, the overall level never dropped to the distortion zone near zero.
But since the bias was so far out of the normal range of hearing, it had no audible effect
on the recording during playback. It took what had been merely a curiosity and made it a
viable recording medium.
Outside Germany, nobody took much notice. It is true that
one of the leading conductors of the day, Sir Thomas Beecham, made a recording using the
system late in 1936, but listening to the tape today, it's not hard to understand why it
failed to impress. The Germans had progressed from steel wire to tape -- a thin ribbon of
plastic coated with iron oxide (rust) -- but they had not perfected the bias levels.
The result was a very muffled and noisy recording.
But they persevered, and by the early part of the war,
German broadcasters were relying heavily on tape recording. The attraction for them was
that, unlike the cumbersome and inferior 16-inch transcription discs used elsewhere, tape
produced sound quality that was indistinguishable from live broadcasting. This was
important because the country's leaders were given to hours-long harangues at huge
rallies, and they knew that the Allies were quite capable of tuning in the broadcasts,
figuring out where the rallies were and sending planes to bomb them. With tape, Hitler and
friends could be long gone before the broadcast even started.
In the aftermath of the war, occupying forces found the
tape recorders -- called Magnetophons -- in radio stations around Germany and commandeered
several to be sent back to the United States. Soon a company called Ampex was knocking off
duplicates and selling them to the radio networks. The first program to be taped was Bing
Crosby's variety show -- Crosby was a notable technical visionary -- but his bosses were
sufficiently dubious about the new technology that they insisted the program be copied
onto transcription discs before broadcast, just in case something went wrong.
Such reservations didn't last long, however, and tape soon
revolutionized both the broadcasting and recording industries. And it hardly took any time
at all before consumer versions of tape recorders began to appear, from companies such as
Webcor and Revere, Magnecord and Wollensak. In 1949, playwright Arthur Miller had one of
his characters describe the delights of time shifting in a passage from Death of a
Salesman: "Supposing you wanna hear Jack Benny, see? But you can't be at home at
that hour. So you tell the maid [sic] to turn the radio on when Jack Benny comes on, and
this [the recorder] automatically goes on with the radio. . . . You can come home twelve
o'clock, one o'clock, any time you like, and you get yourself a Coke and sit yourself
down, throw the switch, and there's Jack Benny's program in the middle of the night!"
For all its promise, consumer acceptance mainly eluded tape
recording throughout the '50s and early '60s. Those who took up recording as a hobby
bought machines, of course -- the pastime was particularly popular in Britain and Japan,
where magazines and recording contests abounded. And the sort of buyer who has to have the
latest of everything -- like Miller's character -- purchased recorders as well, but they
never became mainstream items, even amongst audiophiles.
For one thing, live recording is an exacting process
requiring lots of experience and dedication; it's definitely not for the casual user. And
never mind the finer points of level-setting and microphone placement -- most users had
difficulty simply threading the tape.
The tape system at that time was open-reel (or
reel-to-reel). To play a tape, you had to put it on a little turntable on the left side
(usually) of the machine, and unwind a foot or so of tape by hand. This had then to be
threaded through a slot to be next to the recording and playback heads, and then
ultimately to the empty takeup reel, where it had to be wound tightly enough around the
hub so it wouldn't slip when the recorder's mechanism was activated.
It was this last step that defeated most users, and an
inordinate amount of effort was expended by tape and recorder companies to perfect an
easy-threading system. They never did.
Even worse was the proliferation of formats that could be
used, each introduced mainly to get a little more recording time on a tape. Even ignoring
specifically professional variants, there were five different reel sizes, from 3 to 10-1/2
inches in diameter, and four tape speeds from 15 inches per second (i.p.s.) -- mainly pro
but available on some home machines -- to 1-7/8 i.p.s. (later the cassette standard, but
first introduced in open-reel). In addition, there were four standard tape thicknesses and
five track-width formats. When you multiply all that together, there were some 400
different ways to configure a tape!
Put another way, a tape with the smallest reel, widest
track, highest speed and thickest tape could hold 7-1/2 minutes of recording; the largest
reel, narrowest track, slowest speed and thinnest tape could hold 48 hours of material.
And tapes were sold only by length, in feet, so you had to work all that stuff out every
time you made a tape.
Perhaps the greatest barrier to the acceptance of tape by
the general public was not that you could make your own recordings but that you had
to -- there was practically no commercially-recorded music on tape. Occasionally a
specialty company would issue a few titles, but they were never more than curiosities.
Throughout the '50s, the record companies were wrestling with the challenge of marketing
discs in six different formats, and were not about to add even a modest selection of the
numerous possible tape configurations. In fact, when a seventh disc format arrived -- the
stereo LP -- the record industry unceremoniously dumped four existing formats: two sizes
of 78, the extended-play 45, and the 10-inch LP. And when ultimately they did enter the
prerecorded tape business, they ditched mono records altogether.
But tape didn't go away. As always, it was pushed by the
audio equipment manufacturers, who were always looking for new markets to develop. They
realized that tape would only succeed if a simple system could be developed, in which the
consumer only had to pick up a plastic cartridge of some sort and shove it into a slot.
Several abortive systems were demonstrated over the years, but by the middle 1960s, things
had settled down to two competing formats.
At first, in North American at any rate, the 8-track
cartridge was dominant. It had been adapted from the endless-loop "carts" used
in broadcasting, and for consumers this was simplicity itself: push it into the slot, and
that turned on the player and put it in play mode. Nothing to thread, no speeds to select,
nothing. When it was over, you just pulled it out. In most machines, the only control was
a track selector; since the music (always stereo) was recorded on four pairs of
side-by-side tracks, this button let you switch from program to program. That was it.
While nobody claimed much for the 8-track in terms of
quality, its supporters argued that true hi-fi wasn't really necessary because the
cartridge was almost invariably listened to in the noisy environment of a car or truck.
And the 8-track did play a major role in creating the market for car stereo systems, which
is still huge.
Many members of the record industry were in favor of the
8-track largely because it was very difficult to record on, and that made the chances of
consumers pirating copyright music much less likely.
But in the long run the 8-track probably had no chance
against the cassette, introduced by Philips in 1963. At first the cassette was no great
technical triumph, being mainly suitable for low-fi voice recordings, but it did include
some innovations. By using a tape speed of 1-7/8 i.p.s. -- half that of 8-track -- and by
using a tape only 60 percent as wide as conventional systems, the cassette could be made
very small, easy to store and to carry about.
Also, the cassette was stereo/mono compatible: a stereo
tape would play in a mono deck and vice versa -- an important part of the Philips
philosophy that every cassette should be playable in every cassette machine. The only
variable was the amount of tape available, and this was specified in terms of playing time
rather than length, which was more or less irrelevant as long as you knew you had 90
minutes of recording time.
What really ensured the success of the cassette, however,
was a Philips decision to license the system free to anyone willing to abide by their
specs. This was greeted warmly by the Japanese, who made most of the tape decks those
days, and so the cassette became the de facto tape standard in Japan as it already was in
Europe.
Then a variety of hands and minds turned their efforts
toward upgrading the system, to make it a true high fidelity format. New tape formulations
pushed high-frequency response to the limits of human hearing, the various generations of
Dolby noise reduction eliminated most extraneous hiss, and better methods of building both
tape transports and the cassettes themselves tamed the problems of speed irregularity --
wow and flutter.
By the latter part of the 1970s, the cassette had arrived
as a full member of the hi-fi team, and the 8-track was being phased out, as the record
companies once again refused to be caught in a multiple-inventory trap. The cassette deck
had become the most popular add-on component for stereo systems, and for the first time,
the vast majority of audio owners had tape equipment of some sort.
The year 1979 was a watershed in a number of ways. It was
the last of the big glory years for the record companies, who hit sales and profit
levels they have never reached since. It was the year Sony introduced the Walkman, one of
the truly revolutionary products in audio, and one that is said to have prompted buyers to
make the cassette the main music medium of the '80s. Not coincidentally, feeding a Walkman
was a main reason for buying a home cassette deck from then on, and record industry
officials largely blame this ease of duplication for their sliding market.
And 1979 was the year Philips first showed the compact
disc, which would bring digital audio into the home for the first time, although that
wouldn't happen in reality for several years. After some initial reluctance to accept yet
another format, the record companies embraced the CD enthusiastically, and proceeded to
administer last rites to vinyl.
When the CD was introduced, it appeared likely that a
digital tape system would not be far behind -- the LP and the cassette complemented each
other admirably in analog times, so it only seemed reasonable that the same would hold
true in the digital realm. And a suitable system was forthcoming, sort of. The major
Japanese electronics companies came up with a digital audio tape (DAT) recorder early on,
which borrowed from video technology but which could be made small enough and cheap enough
that the public would be able to buy it.
The prospect of DAT made the major record companies blow a
fuse. For years they had seen their sales eroded because of the growing popularity of
cassette recorders. For every disc or prerecorded cassette sold, the record manufacturers
estimated that there was at least one tape copy made, for which neither they nor their
artists received any compensation.
The legal status of such copies varies from country to
country. In Canada, for instance, they are generally considered to be illegal, but there
is no practical way for copyright owners to protect their efforts unless an offender makes
duplicates in large numbers and offers them for sale. In the United States, on the other
hand, audio copies made by a private individual for his or her own use are specifically
legal (although piracy is still outlawed).
Because of this, the record companies regarded the imminent
introduction of DAT in the US with more than a little trepidation. With conventional
cassettes, they were able at least to comfort themselves that any copies made would have
lower quality than the originals, and the farther a copy got from the original, the worse
it sounded. With DAT, however, any copies made would be virtually perfect --
indistinguishable from the record companies' own products.
Anticipating such a reaction, the Japanese designers
deliberately made the DAT specification incompatible with the CD so that it would be
impossible to make direct digital-to-digital copies. To copy a CD, a DAT owner would have
to decode it to analog form, and re-encode it to a slightly different digital standard.
This sop was not well received by the record companies.
They held that the degradation this process would cause was so small that it would act as
no hindrance at all. Instead, they proposed a system that would make it impossible to make
a DAT copy of any material they chose to protect. The system, called Copy Code, involved
the removal of a small slice of musical information from the master tape. A chip in the
DAT recorder would detect whether or not this tiny bit of data was missing; if so, it
would disable the recording electronics.
At first, the record companies attempted to persuade the
big audio companies to include this "spoiler" in their machines voluntarily. The
audio companies, predictably, said no.
Having failed on that front, the record companies began an
elaborate process of lobbying governments, in an attempt to make the inclusion of the Copy
Code circuit compulsory. The most strenuous efforts were in Washington, where the
legislators took the matter seriously enough that they commissioned an extensive series of
listening tests to find out if the system degraded the sound. It did.
Meanwhile, although DAT recorders were perfectly legal
everywhere, and a few machines imported from the orient were sold in North America (at
enormous cost), the major electronics firms chose to wait until the legal position had
been clarified before they brought the recorders across the ocean in any quantity.
Then the resourceful engineers at Philips in the
Netherlands came up with a system that looked like it might break the logjam and start the
flow of DAT recorders. They proposed something called Serial Copy Management System
(SCMS), which was a circuit that could be built into the input section of a DAT recorder.
It would allow one CD-to-DAT digital copy to be made -- legal in the US -- but would not
permit any further digital copies to be made of that DAT. Unlike the earlier system, the
SCMS code had absolutely no effect on the audio signal.
Somewhat grudgingly, the record companies agreed that if
these circuits were required by law to be included in all DAT recorders, they would drop
their objections. Back to Washington to try to get it written into law.
Before the lawmakers could rule, however, Philips dropped
another bombshell: they introduced a whole new system that was digital but incompatible
with anything that existed, the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). Congress dismissed the
whole thing and bid the audio industry to get its house in order.
DCC had several claimed advantages. For the consumer, the
cassette shell, tape configuration, tape speed and so forth were the same as for regular
cassettes, and a second audio head in every DCC machine would play the old analog
cassettes so listeners would not have to replace or copy their whole tape collections. New
recordings, however, would be digital, with sound quality that would rival the compact
disc.
The other advantage mainly accrued to the record companies
(Philips, through its Polygram subsidiary, was one of the biggies in that field as well).
The problem of legislating SCMS into DAT machines is that laws would have to be passed
separately in virtually every country where the machines would be sold, an immensely
expensive and time-consuming process. But the new DCC standard was the commercial property
of Philips, and they could enforce the provisions through licensing agreements with the
audio manufacturers, as they had done with the original cassette and the CD. The DCC
included SCMS, which would thus become a worldwide requirement with no laws needing to be
passed.
But if a digital signal could be recorded on what was
essentially a conventional cassette, why hadn't that been done originally? As it happens,
you can't get all the data of a digital audio signal onto a normal cassette unless you
divide it into a number of parallel tracks, and apply perceptual coding to remove material
that is in the original signal, but inaudible. Initially skeptical, many audio observers
admitted that the sound was superb, even with 75 percent of the data missing. That might
have made a tidy end to things, but things are rarely so neat in electronics. As it turned
out, Sony was working on its alternative to DAT, and demonstrated it shortly after Philips
made its splash with DCC.
The Sony system was the MiniDisc, and it looked like a
miniature computer diskette. Inside the protective case, it's revealed to be an optical
disc similar to a CD, with all the compact disc's speed of access. In addition to that, MD
used a massive buffer that made the system almost immune to shock -- jogging or skiing
with it is a real possibility. In addition, the system treated pieces of music like
computer files: they can be split up, scattered about the disc and reassembled in
playback, so tracks can be added and deleted -- or rearranged -- without having to make a
whole new recording.
DCC died a quick death, in spite of being promoted by the
largest and second-largest consumer electronics companies on the planet, Matsushita and
Philips. MiniDisc has hung in a bit longer, and is reputed to be popular in Japan and
Europe. But even as those two technologies were being touted by their supporters as the
future of home recording, other companies were experimenting with CDs that you could
record on, and which would play in ordinary players.
The boom in cheap CD burners of recent years has made the
CD-R and its sibling the CD-RW (rewriteable) the media of choice among today's recording
enthusiasts. Not surprisingly, the record industry has once again worked itself into a
lather.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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