Hi there, thanx to a friend of mine I'm able to forward this message to you, out there, participating in the discussion about various DCC matters. I'm NOT talking as an official Philips spokesman; however, I'm involved in digital audio and audio data reduction, and currently I have a DCC player (the upcoming DCC900) at home to try it out. I would like to address several points in the, rather speculative, discussion that's going between you all. 1. audio inputs: DCC players (at least for some time) will have both an analog and a digital input. The digital input format complies with the IEC958 standard, commonly called 'AES/EBU interface', since it was approved by these two organisations (Audio Engineering Society and European Broadcasting Union). The digital interface that many of you will find on your CD player is also in AES/EBU format, or better a subset of it, called SPDIF = 'Sony / Philips Digital Interface'. 2. audio outputs: DCC players (at least for some years) will have both analog and digital outputs in the AES/EBU format described in 1. 3. sampling rates: when recording from an analog source, the DCC defaults to a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz (=CD rate). When recording from a digital source, the DCC switches over to the sampling rate of the digital audio source. All three AES/EBU sampling rates (32, 44.1, 48 kHz) are supported. When playing back, the DCC runs at the sampling rate at which the tape was recorded. The reason for the existence of 3 different sampling rates in 'digital audio land' is the independent choice of the (default) sampling rate for different widespread digital audio applications: 48 kHz: DAT; professional recording equipment; future DAB 44.1 kHz: CD, CD-I, DCC 32 kHz: DSR (Digital Satellite Radio); D2MAC television sound The 32 kHz rate is used since it requires (with the same number of bits per sample) 33% less data transmission bandwidth than 48 kHz, whereas only 4 to 5 kHz audio bandwidth limitation is the consequence, which musically speaking is only a minor third at the highest frequency of what very good (i.e. young) listeners can perceive (plm. 20 kHz). (How many of you, more 'mature', listeners can still hear the 15.625 kHz tone normally generated by PAL television sets?) Since bandwidth is expensive, for the applications mentioned above the small pay-off in sound quality (only noticed by a limited group of listeners) was considered subject to the significant reduction in transmission bandwidth. 4. Copy protection: DCC uses SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) as introduced also on DAT. As one of you already correctly described, SCMS lets you make only one copy of a *digital* source that's copy protected (such as CD), and as many generations of a *digital* audio source that's not protected. When playing back a DCC recording of an *analog* source, the digital AES/EBU output data has no protection, so it can be copied on and on without inhibits (in the description above the DCC can then be considered to be a digital audio source without copy protection). You must realise, however, that every time you make a digital copy, data reduction is applied another time. Since the reduction is non-bit-true (the bits coming out of the DCC digital output at playback are not the same as the bits put in the digital input digitally at recording) a slight degradation is possible. Tests, however, have shown that only for the first copies this is slighlty noticeable, and after, say, 5 generations, no more degradation is perceived. Copies were made up to more than 80 (...) generations, but the audio quality remained very high. 5. Sound quality: the PASC (Precision Adaptive Subband Coding) scheme used for DCC has shown to be very high quality. Extensive tests have been done by large groups of expert listeners (audio engineers, recording engineers, musicians, HiFi magazine journalists) with selected material that's known to be critical for audio data reduction. The results show only tendencies, if any. Our experience is that people who claim to hear 'obvious differences' when they know what they hear, fail to tell what is 'CD original' and what is 'PASC encoded/decoded' in a blind listening test. It's *not* because of my background that I'm saying this; I can assure you that nobody at Philips has any interest in claiming a high sound quality, meanwhile risking to make the Philips label ridiculous when the contrary would turn out to be true! As a final remark, from a technical point of view (confirmed by tests), with prerecorded tapes, DCC in some cases can have a *higher* perceived sound quality than CD, since its dynamic range is far greater than that of CD. Of course, this holds only if you make a DCC recording departing from a better- than-CD source (e.g. the commonly used 18 or 20 bit PCM studio master recording). Have you ever noticed the noise during the fade-out of a track on CD? That's because the CD quantisation noise has (roughly speaking) always the same power, independent of the signal level. At low levels, CD has a poor signal to noise ratio, with the situation made even worse (for the insiders) since at low levels the noise becomes correlated with the signal, and becomes therefore more noticeable: it sounds like a 'ringing' distortion. These artifacts can become much less on DCC. Please realise that the 16 bit PCM format on CD is also a form of coding, and that one coding scheme does not have to be always superior or always inferior to another in all cases! 6. Your auditory system: the point above describes some results of listening tests, because that what we at Philips are interested in. However, take a listen to DCC with your own ears as soon as you can: never let anybody tell you what *you* hear. 7. Audio data compression in the future: in addition to DCC, in many applications that will arrive on the market in the near future, a form of audio data compression comparable to PASC is used or supported. To name a few: * DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting); will arrive in 1995, and gives high sound quality and enhanced other facilities; one of its main advantages is the uncomparably better reception in a driving car than with FM; on several places in Europe cars are driving around for test purposes; * CD-Interactive; * HDTV (both in the European and the American version); * ISDN (the telephone network's digital successor). I hope to have answered some of your questions that were still open. I'm NOT speaking on behalf of Philips, only 'au titre personnel', and only able to speak as far as my knowledge reaches. If you have any comments, please contact me via email. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Dillen Philips Consumer Electronics e-mail dillen@nlvxe2.ce.philips.nl -------------------------------------------------------------------------------