Introducing myself

[Pandha64]

Hi There, first of all my apologies upfront for any language errors and typo’s, English is not my mother tonque and there are more reasons why I can and will fail in English, that said:

I am Henk Tittel, living in Baarn the Netherlands and I was happy to have worked for a Philips company called Poygram Record Service or short PRS…hey for many of you this might ring a bell
I started at PRS in Baarn in 1984 at the MC department (MC = Musicassette, which is NOT a typo but basically is a short for Music Cassette, which actually is a pre-recorded analog music cassette, I have no idea where/who/why this unlogicall shortname comes from) anyhow, back to my years at Polygram, started at the production area of analoge tapes, I can explein in detail how this proces is from start to end product, but then it will be a very long story which has not much todo with DCC and I am not sure if there is any interest in these details.

I saw first hand the beginning and the downfall of DCC production wise, very sad.
Afterwards you can say it was an illfated product with all the good intentions, most likely Philips should have choosen for an optical solution instead of the tape solution, because PASC itself was a great invention, specially in the early 90’s.

I can tell you much more details, if there is any interest but I want Ralf to have a saying in this first.

Having a collection of pre-recorded DCC’s, an Philips DCC 900 and an DCC 134 I think I can say I used to be an DCC “lover”, used because over the years I have to admit that I like the convience of the optical CD and later the streaming audio, next song bang there it is instead of endless spooling forward or backward.

I just recently stumbled on the DCC Museum and I am lucky to have met Ralf in person.

Anyway, just to introduce myself to this forum.

Many greetings from Baarn, the Netherlands,

Henk Tittel

[mattz]

Hello everybody!

Although my alter ego had been Patreon of the DCCMuseum for a few years, I never made an account on this forum, until today, after I was reminded about the forum on the meet and greet in Heerlen yesterday (2024.08.05).

I am not going into great lenghts explaining the path how I got here, suffice to say I was once educated to be an electrical engineer, but never ended up in an electrical job, but as a product marketing manager in Telecoms and project manager ICT instead. No longer though.

I have had a keen interest in all things audio for as long as I can remember, ever since playing the trumpet since age 9. I played in several brass bands and even in a symphonic orchestra. Also no longer play that instrument.
I started building my own speakers at age 18, immediately building the largest Philips design available, because I could procure most things Philips a bit cheaper through the Philips shop, since almost all my relatives were working for Philips. I was even born in Eindhoven.

Over time I have hoarded quite the collection of Philips audio equipment, especially large FB series loudspeakers and (almost) all MFB loudspeakers, plus equipment to make it go loud of course. Currently I am building a large extension to our home that is supposed to house it all, including a home cinema and a workplace for repair of mostly Philips audio equipment, including DCC recorders and players. I’ve been repairing on and off for the last 20 years, but never commercially.

Well, that should cover it for now. When reading the list of DCC recorders I own, bear in mind that most of them require repair (in the near future) and currently one DCC730, one DCC951 and one DCC600 work faultlessly, the rest is waiting for me to finish the extension (disassembled where necessary).

Like it here already!

[drdcc]

It was fantastic meeting you and to hear your stories about your involvement with PASC and DCC.

Feel free to share them with the community.

[drdcc]

It was great meeting you finally this week. Welcome.

[Jac]

@Pandha64

Philips should have choosen for an optical solution instead of the tape solution, because PASC itself was a great invention, specially in the early 90’s.

If you look at DCC as the successor of the analog cassette, it makes a lot more sense. The DCC documentary and especially the presentation by Gijs Wirtz at the 2019 DCC Convention make it clear how, at that time, it really was the next logical step. We had vinyl records and analog cassettes, and the CD was getting more and more popular because the prices of CD players were coming down and everyone agreed that CD sounds better than vinyl. There was clearly a demand for a digital version of the cassette. DAT was a recent development but at that time it was fragile and took up too much space to put into a portable device or in a car stereo. It would be better to have a version of DAT with a static (not rotating) head, and it would be great if that S-DAT system would be compatible with analog cassettes. The result was DCC. Too bad it took so long to develop that it got overtaken by events: Analog cassette decks quickly became better and cheaper; Philips and Sony worked on CD-R and Magneto-Optical discs (the latter became the basis of MD) and Philips made mistakes bringing DCC to market.

Thanks for posting your story! Very interesting.

Maybe you have some tips about cutting video tapes up to make them into DCC tape?

===Jac

[Pandha64]

I would like to follow up on the answer and share some more details with you all, if anyone needs it

I was indirectly involved with the DCC project, or better said PASC, as I indicated earlier I worked at Polygram, I started in 1984 in the MC department, I actually did all the usual work there for the first 2 to 3 years, from the flushing of the MC’s (called C0) on the C0 loaders (in short we said CoLA, where the 0 was replaced by an o), packing the MC’s, later in the copy department and later again as a music controller.

If there is interest in how the total process works from Master to MC end product then I would be happy to explain that, but in itself that has nothing to do with DCC.

In my former function as Music Controller I was asked if I wanted to participate in listening sessions for a new product (which later became known as DCC) interesting is especially when this was:

I am certain that it was early 1990, but I think it was late 1989, I am not completely sure about 1989, people tend to mix things up after so long, but I am 100% certain about 1990, this because Polygram moved from Baarn to Amersfoort in January 1991 and immediately started with test productions of the DCC tapes.

The listening tests were in Baarn and at that point in time that I was involved, it was not even about the medium DCC but about PASC, as you all know PASC is the compression system that was needed to make the source as small as possible while retaining as much quality as possible, Sony had its own system (I have forgotten the name) and Philips had put its money on PASC.

Well, my input was simply blind listening sessions, there were 4 sources:

1. “Old-fashioned Analogue”

2. CD

3. CD played by PASC

4. Sony MiniDisc

All 4 sources are started at the same time (usually with a delay of 1 second, so that when switching between sources you hear the same piece of music) but as a listener you do not know which source you are listening to, that is determined by the person behind “the buttons” and that is why it is called blind listening.

At that point in time, PASC was still a prototype 19 inch cabinet in which all the hardware and software was located, which was constantly being adjusted using large plug-in cards.

The Sony system was much further along at that time because we had a prototype MD player there (when I asked where it came from, they literally said: don’t ask any questions about its origin )

The assignment was simple, could I blindly indicate which source I was listening to?

Now, in retrospect, that was a fairly simple assignment, I could get a high percentage out of it when I listened to source 1 and source 4, I had more difficulty with source 2 and 3, in other words source 2 (CD) and source 3 (PASC) were so close together that it was actually a guessing game, source 1 (analog) and source 4 (MD) were easy to separate from each other and completely from source 2 and 3.

Not because I worked at Philips at the time and was therefore biased, at that point in time, Philips was sound-technically further along than Sony with their compression system. The Sony compression system was clearly inferior and I would also put it in 4th place in terms of quality.

Dead listening room

The equipment used was:

Studer A86 Power Amp

Studer A80 1/2 inch recorder

JBL 4315 loudspeakers

Quad ESL63 Loudspeakers

Philips CD Player (I think the CD 304)

Unknown Sony MiniDisc

PASC

Philips home-made mixing console

The much-used slogan at the time was: CRUSH SONY, it was clear that PASC had to be better from Philips Eindhoven and that may also be partly responsible for the end result of DCC, a failure, it HAD to be better than Sony and Philips (of course) continued to develop PASC, and that in itself is normal, what was not normal in my eyes is that hundreds of DCCs were destroyed every day because Philips Eindhoven had a new soft/hardware update and that it was EVEN better now than yesterday or last week.

I thought this was strange, because production that we had approved yesterday and sent to the customer was now destroyed (often even recalled from the distributor) and then destroyed in Amersfoort, a separate department had even been set up to destroy the DCCs, 4 or 5 people work there 8 hours a day for this task.

To me it feels the same as a car manufacturer, so to speak, recalling and destroying their production because there is now a new steering wheel.

In 1989/1990 when it was not yet fully known within Polygram Baarn that the end product would be DCC (after all, at that time it was PASC), PASC was miles ahead of SONY, Sony’s advantage was that they already had a medium with the optical MD, but in terms of sound technology they were a considerable backlog.

I maintain my position that in retrospect choosing a tape medium was not the wisest decision, but at the time it was a logical one, I remember very well that when we had just moved with Polygram to Amersfoort there was a separate listening room for the DCC project, and demonstrations were also given there, somewhere in February 1990 we were allowed/had to come in groups to attend the official introduction of DCC, and there it was explained what DCC was, we could listen to DCC and it was also explained why the tape medium had been chosen. The main reason was that Philips strategy was based on the USA, if you conquer the USA you conquer the world was the idea, and why TAPE and not an optical medium? And then came what seemed to us a perfect strategy:

The USA was a tape country, estimates were that there were 500 million MCs in circulation in the USA, because the DCC player could also play the old MCs, Philips thought they could conquer the USA market with this strategy, 1 player that could play both the old and the new sound carrier, it seemed like a brilliant idea, in retrospect it was not the right decision.

I think that in retrospect there are several reasons for the failure of DCC:

1. tape medium

2. backwards compatibility (which was well thought out but caused the heads to become dirty and worn)

3. much too expensive

4. too few titles

5. too much product thrown away, Polygram never really had the chance to flood the market with the entire catalogue of pre-recorded product, the capacity was there, but simply finished product was dumped en masse

6. too much fighting with Sony, which meant that their artists were not released on either DDC or MD, this of course because both Philips and Sony had their own labels and therefore artists

7 both DCC and MD failed

I am sometimes going a bit off topic, but that is caused by a brain disease (CBD) that is playing tricks on me and I have also been busy writing this for a long time, because I am trying to avoid there being untruths in it. That is why I say the year 1989 with reservation, because I am not 100% sure anymore, the year 1990 I am sure about because of the move of Polygram from Baarn to Amersfoort.

Questions and or comments? I would like to hear them and I am also curious about reactions.

Kind regards,

Henk Tittel

11-08-2024

Baarn, Netherlands

[Jac]

Thank you for that great response! Very interesting.

Sony’s system was called ATRAC of course. I know very little about it; I understand that it compressed a little bit more than PASC and the main difference with PASC is that the frequency bands are of unequal sizes, whereas the frequency bands in PASC are all the same size.

It sounds like Philips wasted a lot of money destroying production runs. We didn’t know that. But did they destroy actual cassettes? Or just the tape? Or did they erase the tapes and record them again?

Also I thought Philips didn’t get the DCC heads production ready until 1991 or so, because Seagate had been sitting on their asses instead of working on the development. When Philips found out about that, they had to set up a development facility in Eindhoven to develop and produce the heads themselves. That must have been a stressful time for everyone. So did they use those Revox tape recorders as surrogate DCC recorders using analog heads or something?

At the DCC museum the biggest unanswered question we have is probably: what happened to the machines that were used to produce prerecorded DCC’s? We know there were machines that would be used to edit a DCC master (and ITTS information) based on a digital recording, and the master was stored in (we think) a big box with memory chips (EEPROMs I think) because hard disks wouldn’t be fast enough or big enough. That box would then be connected to another machine that would duplicate the recording onto a big pancake of tape, at (I think) 64x normal speed, both sides of the table at the same time. The pancake could then be used on a normal cassette splicing machine like Thomas at De Bandjesfabriek has now. Can you tell us anything about this process?

Thanks!

PS I know @drdcc is in the Netherlands right now, I hope he has time to get in contact with you for a video interview.

===Jac

[Pandha64]

Hi Jac,

I will reply in parts on your questions, that is for me easier to handle.

"quote:

It sounds like Philips wasted a lot of money destroying production runs. We didn’t know that. But did they destroy actual cassettes? Or just the tape? Or did they erase the tapes and record them again? unquote"

the answer to this question is:
Both, you have to look at it this way, for example on Wednesday a message comes in that new software is available, and the previous one was from let’s say 2 weeks before, then you had both finished product and half product, the finished product could still be in the local warehouse or already shipped, in the latter case it was often called back, if it was local then that was of course a lot easier.
Finished product was destroyed, the cassettes were not re-recorded because then you were left with “custom length cassettes” and that was very inconvenient because of the way the cassettes were made, just like the analogue MC you start with an empty casing that was spooled onto a TapeMatic. and so each run had its own length depending on the length of the album.

Copies still on open reel were erased and that could be reused.

Perhaps it would be nice to talk via Teams or WhatsApp, so I can explain to you verbally in detail how the process went from start to finish.

Here is an picture of the TapeMatic as used by PolyGram in Amersfoort.

[Pandha64]

@Jac

Also I thought Philips didn’t get the DCC heads production ready until 1991 or so, because Seagate had been sitting on their asses instead of working on the development. When Philips found out about that, they had to set up a development facility in Eindhoven to develop and produce the heads themselves. That must have been a stressful time for everyone. So did they use those Revox tape recorders as surrogate DCC recorders using analog heads or something?

I know nothing about this problem, I do know that the first digital masters were made in Baarn in 1990, I asked my best friend who worked at the so-called “Transcription Centre” in Baarn (in Amersfoort the name was changed to “Mastering Department” I also have a master from 1990.
In other words, in 1990 we could already make masters in Baarn and so we must have had the heads then, I must mention here that those heads were NOT in the well-known DCC recorders as they were later available but in a drive in a 19 inch cabinet

[Pandha64]

@Jac

At the DCC museum the biggest unanswered question we have is probably: what happened to the machines that were used to produce prerecorded DCC’s? We know there were machines that would be used to edit a DCC master (and ITTS information) based on a digital recording, and the master was stored in (we think) a big box with memory chips (EEPROMs I think) because hard disks wouldn’t be fast enough or big enough. That box would then be connected to another machine that would duplicate the recording onto a big pancake of tape, at (I think) 64x normal speed, both sides of the table at the same time. The pancake could then be used on a normal cassette splicing machine like Thomas at De Bandjesfabriek has now. Can you tell us anything about this process

All equipment was destroyed, I think some parts were taken by the staff as “souvenirs”, Philips was so disappointed about what then turned out to be a deep money pit that there was no more talking about it, talking about it was a big NO NO.
DCC…WHAT IS THAT? I have no idea what you are talking about.

Then, the next part:

I first will give you the “real names” before google translate them into English.

1. Moederband = Mothertape/master tape
2. Gever = The source machine which pushes the programs to the “Slaven”
3. Slaaf = The Slave machine who receives the pushed signal from the “Gever”

So in below story, Google translate, translates this to masters, givers, slave etc, but actually within PRS/PMDC we spoke about moederbanden NOT masters in this stage of the process, Mastertapes are in an earlier stage.

The masters were basically regular DCC tapes as we know with the program and all digital info like ITTS etc.
The masters were made in the mastering department based on either the analog or digital masters.
To make things confusing for a layman there are different types of masters that have different names in the production process, I will try to explain that briefly and concisely.

Apart from what happens in the recording studios or live recordings (because there too they talk about master tapes/mother tapes etc.) I will only talk about the names that are used internally at PolyGram.

1. Prod. Master (stupid short for production master)
2. Mother tape, also a strange name because mother should be the source but at PolyGram it was a copy of the Prod. Master so you should actually call this a daughter tape.

But to stick to the name as used by PolyGram (actually I am using the wrong name here, I should actually say PRS for Baarn and PMDS for Amersfoort, which I will do from here on)

The Prod. Master is the tape that we receive from the product managers, these are copies of the original studio or live recordings, and mastered at a mastering studio.
These Prod. masters were stored with us in a cooled vault.
Depending on the final product, these Prod. masters different master tapes made:

1. for Gramophone records
2. for analog music cassettes
3. CD
4. DCC

These master tapes differ from each other because the end product is different, for example a master tape for Gramophone had a 3DB cut off because otherwise the needle could jump out of the groove at low tone, this cut off was not necessary for a CD for example (and here also comes a partial explanation why in the beginning of digital music, the purists hated it and thought that analog sounded MUCH better than digital, I can also elaborate on this but that is a completely different discussion that I would also like to have but then not in this topic I think)

Returning to the master tapes, these were stored in another safe conditioned and they were used for the real final production, with MC the master tape was a 1/2 inch tape (2 tracks in each direction) and with DCC itself just a standard DCC cassette as we now know it as the end product.

With MC the master tape is spooled into a so-called “GEVER (in English Giver)”, the beginning of the tape is glued to the end so that the tape becomes “endless”, actually a large loop that was then “played” at 32 or 64 times speed and the signal was sent to the “slaves”. 1 slave consisted of 4 decks and 1 transmitter could control up to 8 slaves if I remember correctly, so you could make a maximum of 32 copies at a time at 32 or 64 times speed.
There was a transparent window between the beginning and the end of the master tape and every time this window passed an “eye” the transmitter sent a humming sound to the slaves, this humming sound is needed to indicate the beginning and end of the program to be spooled when the empty cassettes (C0) were spooled so that the TapeMatic knew when and where the tape had to be cut. DCC was not much different than the “giver” was indeed nothing more than a large piece of memory (eeProm) where the DCC master tape was loaded and as you correctly indicate was sent to the slaves at 64 times the speed.

To be clear, in this phase of the production process both MC and DCC are still on open reel tapes, although different in composition but the idea is the same, on these open reels are, depending on the length of the program, the length of the open reel tape (which is then still called virgin tape) approximately at least 15 copies increasing to 60 copies, which are separated from each other by the hum.
Indeed, both the A and B side are sent to the slaves at the same time, so 1 side is copied backwards.

Here some pictures of the “Moederbanden” for DCC, in English we should say Mothertape or Master:

[drdcc]

@Jac

PS I know @drdcc is in the Netherlands right now, I hope he has time to get in contact with you for a video interview.

Already visited Henk. No worries Jac.

[drdcc]

@Pandha64

Here is an picture of the TapeMatic as used by PolyGram in Amersfoort.

This might not be the machine used for DCC, but for regular cassettes.
The DCC Tapematic 2002L was loading on the left, but otherwise similar.

[pvdm]

Very very interesting thread.

[Jac]

As an intermezzo, here’s a short story about something I learned about tape duplication. Around 1989 I was looking for a job and I went to a duplication company (I forgot what it was called) in Helmond for a job interview, and they showed me around (I didn’t get the job by the way). One of the things they showed me was a machine that recorded video to ferro tape in a format that was basically the mirror image of VHS tape. That tape was then used to make high quality prerecorded video tapes for rentals: Another machine would run the ferro tape and the blank chrome tape over a heated metal drum at high speed. The high temperature of the drum reduced the coercivity of the chrome tape enough to be magnetized by the ferro tape, but the ferro tape didn’t get hot enough to be affected. This made it possible to produce high quality tapes at very high speed, so the production cost of prerecorded video tapes that were produced was much lower than cassettes that were produced in the traditional way (with a whole wall of VCR’s all recording the same movie for two hours). I thought that was a great piece of technology and later I thought that might have been a great way to duplicate DCC tapes too, because DCC tapes were basically chrome video tape, too.

===Jac

[Pandha64]

Perhaps EMI?