The Beta Legacy
When it comes to technological change, my family is pretty
resistant, at the cottage anyway. True, we have had running water and flush toilets for
more than fifty years, and the cell phone and microwave oven do make things more
convenient than they once were, but there has been general consensus on one thing: no
television!
Until a couple of years ago, that is. Cottages are great
when the sun shines, but they can be boring for kids on rainy days. I argued that a TV set
would allow some entertainment, even if it were only somewhere for my teenage nephew to
plug in his video games. The additional ability for the adults to catch the news
occasionally would be a plus.
The question arose because there was a TV set available. In
a perhaps-futile effort to free up some space in my basement, I wanted to get rid of my
old television, but it still worked well and I was less than anxious to junk it or sell it
for pennies. Twenty-five years ago, anyone who was truly picky about TV image quality had
only one choice when it came to buying a set -- a Sony Trinitron -- and this was mine.
Even quite modest televisions can outperform it today, but it's still a fine unit and I
wanted to see it used.
Grudgingly, the family agreed that the TV could come as
long as it lived in one of the detached sleeping cabins, rather than the main living room.
The fact that reception there is not great, and thus TV watching would tend to be an
activity of last resort smoothed things over as well.
But the poor reception did limit the usefulness of the set
considerably, so the next year I proposed the addition of a VCR. Most of the kids (and
adults) who frequent the place have a few tapes, and there's a video rental outfit not too
far away, so I figured this would be the solution to the otherwise snowy pictures.
Again, my ulterior motive was to clear out a corner of my
basement, where my first VCR has been gathering dust for years. In fact, it was broken,
but I suspected that the problem was minor and mechanical; if it could be made to run
without costing a bundle, it would be ideal for the cottage (it and the Trinitron had
constituted my video system for years, so I knew they were a good match). Sixty bucks
worth of belts and cleaning later, and it was off to the lake.
While it was still here, however, I played with it for a
couple of hours, as a matter of technical nostalgia. Compared to today's machines, the
mechanical controls were remarkably clunky and the functions offered very primitive. And
the thing was huge: two modern VCRs could easily fit inside the box, which probably
weighed in at something like forty pounds.
But in spite of its retro styling and limited amenities, it
produced pictures as least as good as the current model I compared it to. And tinkering
with it reminded me of what a revolution it represented.
In fact, my machine was a VHS model, produced by Hitachi in
1976. But in function and performance, it was preceded by the introduction of the really
ground-breaking machine a year earlier, Sony's first Betamax.
An ongoing bit of mythology would have it that Beta was
technically superior to VHS, and ultimately lost out because of more aggressive marketing
by Panasonic and RCA and the others in the VHS camp. Even Sony never really made that
claim, but any technical edge it may have had would have been tiny, and insufficient to
raise the picture quality out of the "lousy" range. Both systems were designed
to produce the minimum acceptable quality, given the low-res TV sets of the day, in order
to keep costs down.
Sony made a fundamental miscalculation by designing a tape
on which you couldn't record a whole movie. When JVC introduced VHS the next year, it used
a larger cassette which could hold two hours of material -- enough for most movies. Beta
retooled to catch up, but never really did, and as both systems introduced slower speeds
for longer recording times, VHS always had more.
In the end, the movie industry decided there was a buck to
be made in video, but hated the notion of producing their wares in two forms, so they
backed the one with the largest manufacturing support, VHS.
By the same token, Sony led the way in producing technical
upgrades that would substantially improve picture quality -- and VHS followed suit, more
or less -- but Hollywood wouldn't play, and refused to release anything in the
higher-quality formats, which is why my 1976 recorder produces pictures (but not sound)
equal to a 2001 machine.
But none of that takes away from the innovations Sony
incorporated in that first Betamax, which created and shaped a whole industry.
Many of these had to do with the matter of getting
information on and off the tape, but I think the most inspired thinking went into
interfacing the machine with the sort of equipment consumers already had. Television sets
of those days had no outputs at all and only an antenna terminal for input, so it was no
small endeavor to get the VCR to work with a set.
Playback was no big deal: the VCR contained a circuit that
took the line-level video and simulated a TV signal that could be fed to a set's antenna
terminals. But it didn't work the other way, so the VCR could only record signals off air
if it had its own built-in tuner. By feeding the antenna (or cable) signal through the VCR
to the TV, you could record a program while watching it, or use a bypass switch to record
one program while watching another, or use a built-in timer to record a program while you
were away. All of these functions were incorporated in the very first Betamax...and every
VCR made since. And they required no modification of existing equipment.
Which is why my 1976 VCR will work just fine with my 1975
television set, and why my smaller relatives will be able to watch 102 Dalmations
on a blustery day by the side of the lake.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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