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- Newsgroups: rec.audio
- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!sun4nl!dutrun!donau!donau.et.tudelft.nl!glas
- From: glas@muresh.et.tudelft.nl (Jack Glas)
- Subject: Re: DAT, DCC and MD
- In-Reply-To: ritc0003@student.tc.umn.edu's message of Wed, 20 Jan 1993 14: 16:38 GMT
- Message-ID: <GLAS.93Jan21081603@muresh.et.tudelft.nl>
- Sender: news@donau.et.tudelft.nl (UseNet News System)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: muresh.et.tudelft.nl
- Reply-To: glas@donau.et.tudelft.nl
- Organization: Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
- References: <C15ozr.C3F@news2.cis.umn.edu>
- Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 13:16:03 GMT
- Lines: 30
-
-
- DAT recorders use the same coding technique as cd-players and so they will come up with the
- same performance (which is quite good). Their advantage over cd-players is that you can also
- record yourself. A disadvantage is that they make use of rotating heads, which is very
- expensive and involves a lot of mechanics (just as in VCR's). Another disadvantage is that
- need yet another part of equipment in your audio system.
-
- To do something about the disadvantages mentioned above Philips (one 'l') invented the
- Digital Compact Cassette system. These players doesn't have rotating heads (so they can
- become cheaper than DAT recorders), and you can play (and record) you normal Compact
- Cassettes in them. The system makes use of PASC (precision adaptive subband coding) to
- compress data.
-
- PASC is based on two phenomena of the human ear:
- * One can only hear sound above a certain level, called the absolute hearing threshold.
- * Loud sounds hide, or mask, softer sounds in their vicinity. They dynamially adapt the
- hearing threshold. This applies to the frequency domain (spectral masking) as well as to
- the tiem domain (temporal masking).
- So you have to be a GOD to hear the differences between CD and DCC.
-
- I think everyone who doesn't believe me (which ofcourse is also a matter of taste) should
- at least read one of the following articles:
- * Gerard C.P. Lokhoff: 'dcc-Digital Compact Cassette', IEEE transactions on consumer
- electronics, Vol. CE-37, no. 3, pp 702-706, august 1991.
- * Gerard C.P. Lokhoff: 'Precision adaptive subband coding (PASC) for the digital compact
- cassette (DCC)', IEEE transactions on consumer electronics, Vol. CE-38, no. 4,
- pp 784-789, november 1992.
-
-
- Jack.
-