DCC. One I Missed Along The Way

[Wombat]

Totally missed this one but I had stopped reading audio press by then:

https://www.stereophile.com/content/pasc-philips-dcc

http://dccmuseum.com/

I was aware of DAT and Mini-disc, though.

 

[amirm]

I was working for Sony then and execs there hated Phillips for that (and other things).

 

[astr0b0y]

I remember being very interested in buying a DCC recorder after they had been released. I was in my late teens and starting to buy my first round of hi-fi kit. The appeal was the ability to digitally record at home, something we couldn’t do then with CD unless seriously cashed up.
If I remember correctly the DCC deck I demoed had the ability to vary the level of losslessness and at the most lossy it sounded quite different- similar to 32 kbps MP3. Blank tapes were expensive too, 4 or 5 times that of a good quality cassette.

A couple of years later a friend received a Sony CD recorder for his birthday so we set about making some mix tapes of our favourite techno vinyl, only to find we needed to buy "audio ready" recordable CD stock at around $40 a pop! Given we all had CD recorders in our computers by then and "data" CDs cost a few dollars only it felt like a rort. We were happy to discover a workaround by using one "audio" CD to initialise the Sony CD recorder then manually prise open the tray, replace the "audio" disc with a "data" disc, push in the drawer and proceed to record.

 

[Frank Dernie]

I have a MarantzDD-82 DCC recorder in here. I haven't connected it in years. I originally bought it at a huge discount to use as a DAC.

 

[Cosmik]

It's a tiny little footnote in audio history. The multiple track stationary head idea is quite interesting. Presumably much less complex than a VCR-style spinning head and would surely have migrated to a new format of digital VCR if optical discs hadn't been a better option.

Edit: Not sure now if they didn't use stationary heads for VCRs or camcorders at some point. But if so, I wasn't aware of it at the time.