Digital Compact Cassette

[IAtaman]

Saw this recording media and format on latest Mend it Mark video. For those of you who don't know this channel, he repairs and restores vintage electronic equipment, mostly audio. If you have thing for old school electronics, you will like it.

Right. So, in his last video, Mark had this funky Bose prototype from 1995 that featured a Digital Compact Cassette player. I have never heard of such a thing and it got me intrigued. According the Wikipedia I shouldn't be surprised that I never heard of it:

The Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) is a magnetic tape sound recording format introduced by Philips and Matsushita Electric in late 1992 and marketed as the successor to the standard analog Compact Cassette. It was also a direct competitor to Sony's MiniDisc (MD), but neither format toppled the then-ubiquitous analog cassette despite their technical superiority, and DCC was discontinued in October 1996.


In retrospective, with MP3 and internet on the rise in mid 90s, maybe the failure of a lossy compressed physical audio format is not that shocking.

Do you guys have any experience with this media and format?

 

[khensu]

I’d never seen or used DCC, nor did I know anyone who had. It was a bigger flop than MD which did have at least modest success for a short time. The wikipedia article does a pretty good job explaining why.

For professionals at the time, DAT was king. For the consumer, nobody wanted or cared about yet another new format. With the standard cassette and CDs, why would Joe Consumer want a new format that didn’t provide better sound quality than CD or the ubiquity of cassettes?

 

[Prana Ferox]

We had a thread recently that got into the variants of digital audio tape here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...otape-—-it-was-the-only-way-we-knew-how.45445

DCC was mentioned. IIRC the 'hero' feature of DCC was that the decks could still play back your analog tapes, although they were pretty crappy at it and couldn't record. Between DAT / Minidisc / DCC I'm pretty sure DCC flopped the hardest.

 

[Mtbf]

I own several Philips DCC players of the type DCC 951, all still fully functional. Ingenious machines, can play both your old analogue compact cassettes as well as (of course) the digital DCC cassettes. I seem to have forgotten over the years that you can’t record analogue with it, which is kind of logical, why would you. They use some kind of lossy compression technique which was said to surpass mp3 quality, does sound very good anyway. I used to have a DCC player for my car too.

Pity the technique didn’t survive long enough to make it the success it deserved, it was basically killed by the simultaneous rise of Napster and the likes.

 

[TonyJZX]

DAT hit the pros because its was lossless? also was used as data storage

MD hit only because the JDM loved it.

DCC lost because only Phillips pushed it and it was in a market that did not want... cassettes.

The only signifier to me is that certain receiver/amps of the era had "DCC loops" instead of the usual... you know who... also I think people were not interested in another physical medium, CD was fine, and people werent interested in a new recording medium.

It seemed to be 'mix tapes' were not a *thing* in this era.

According to wiki it uses "MP1 audio layer 1"... which is earlier than the now ubiquitous "audio layer 3" we all use.

less efficient codec = less compression = more 'music"?

 

[Mtbf]

DCC lost because only Phillips pushed it and it was in a market that did not want... cassettes.

I don’t think that’s true, actually analogue cassettes were still very popular in the days. And it wasn’t introduced only by Philips, but also by Matsushita (Panasonic, Technics, Sanyo). Philips introduced DCC in competition with Sony’s Minidisc, but they were too late, as they were with Video 2000. DCC sounded better than MD, but as we have seen more than once audio quality isn’t always what counts. Even the introduction of 18-bits DCC (e.g. my DCC 951) wasn’t enough to help. CD was already there, pricing policy, (too) long track-to-track time, CD-R and Napster did the rest. Among other things, timing is crucial when you are introducing a new system.

DCC-Minidisc “fight”:

There even is a DCC museum nowadays:

DCC Museum - Home of the Digital Compact Cassette

The DCC Museum is keeping the Digital Compact Cassette format alive by restoring and preserving all equipment as well as producing music on original tape.

www.dccmuseum.com

hosting the interesting background documentary “DCC..... THERE IS STILL MUSIC LEFT TO WRITE”:

 

[MCH]

My cousin had one. I remember, at the time, a selling point was that it could play regular casettes as well (many people has large mixtapes collections). You could choose the song and it would go to play it directly, but of course not as fast as a CD/minidisc.

Iirc techmoan explained recently how the fact that with minidisc you didn't have to fast forward made him and most others go for minidisc, that even if eventually failed as well, was by far more successful.

 

[Prana Ferox]

Once people got used to instantly skipping tracks on CDs, no one wanted to spend big money on a format that couldn't do that.

Mix tapes were absolutely a thing through the mid '90s, but if you're making a mix for your sweetie you're not going to assume they own some extremely esoteric format, and likewise if you're selling / trading mixes to boost artist awareness you're going to go for lowest common denominator. Plus a lot of those above mixers (kids, broke artists) were poor, and even blank analog tapes cost money.

I think the key here is that the industry grossly over-estimated the average mixtape's priority for high fidelity. They pushed a lot of these formats as a 'backup' for your CD collection, which for most people was largely irrelevant. That also rolled into the boneheaded DCMS schemes which again deliberately reduced any of these formats' viability as a mixing / sharing tool.

 

[Apesbrain]

I was aware of DCC at the time and played with one at a local Tweeter, Etc. For my purposes -- playing music in my car -- TDK SA cassettes recorded from CD on my Nakamichi using Dolby C were plenty good enough.

 

[Chrispy]

Interesting, always wondered if such a thing had existed. So brief and small an appearance I guess that's somewhat to be expected, tho. I was wondering about our DAT at the office for more than data backup duties at one point, but other digital forms were getting better and easier to use....