Prepare Decks For Cd Recorders
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday April 12, 1992
EVER wanted to record your own compact discs? It will soon be possible, as a new range of CD recorders reaches the Australian market.
These recorders are known as CD-R machines. The discs they produce can be played on any existing CD player, including car and portable players. Given good source material, the sound quality should be up to the standard of commercially recorded compact discs.
The recording process is as simple as making a tape cassette recording. The catch is the price. At $10,000 to $20,000, CD-R recorders are clearly not for the mass market yet. Initially, they are being targeted at the professional and semi-professional markets: recording studios, radio stations, even rock bands who want to record their own sample discs. But they are also expected to appeal to enthusiastic - and well-heeled - audio buffs.
The Kenwood group, which last week demonstrated its CD-R system to the Australian press, believes CD-R will gradually take over the role once filled by open-reel tape decks.
This belief is shared by Marantz, which will begin marketing a CD-R recorder in Australia in May at around $15,000.
Yamaha has had a recordable CD system on the Australian market for more than two years. But at more than $20,000, it has been aimed squarely at the professionals. It has recently been joined by the model YPD-601 at $17,000 including tax: a model more suited for consumer applications.
Prices are expected to drop as CD-R production is scaled up. By next year, Kenwood plans to have a $10,000 recorder on the Australian market, and some observers see prices eventually coming down to $4,000, perhaps even less. CD-R should not be confused with Mini-disc, a recordable disc system which the Sony company plans to introduce worldwide later this year.
Mini-discs will look a bit like a CD, only smaller. They can be erased and recorded many times, just like tape cassettes, and played back in a portable Walkman-style machine. Indeed, Sony sees them as a long-term replacement for today's cassette system.
Sound quality of Mini-discs should be close to CD quality. And at $500 to$1,000, Mini-disc players should be within the reach of the general public.
But Mini-discs will not be compatible with conventional CD players. So far, the concept has had a cool reception from the recorded music industry, whose support is needed to popularise any new mass-market recording system.
For these reasons, some observers have doubts about Sony's ability to make the Mini-disc system catch on in a big way.
A more likely candidate to take over from the audio cassette could be Philips's digital compact cassette (DCC) system, also due on overseas markets this year and probably in Australia in 1993.
DCC cassettes, like Mini-discs, approach CD quality. And the players retain some compatibility with the existing analogue cassette system. DCC owners will be able to play their existing tapes on the new machines, although the new digital cassettes won't play on older machines.
Both Mini-disc and DCC use data compression schemes in order to accommodate the vast amounts of digital information needed to form a recording. That inevitably means some loss of sound quality.
The CD-R compact disc recording scheme, however, involves no compression. You record the full digital signal, just as it is on a commercial compact disc, to the same high-quality sound standards.
The CD-R system has the full blessing of the Philips company. Its standards are set out in Philips's so-called "orange book", just as the original CD format is inscribed in a "red book" with which all manufacturers must comply.
Technically, it's known as a write-once (WO) system. That means you can record on a disc only once: the signal cannot be erased, edited or re-recorded as you can with tape.
Blank CDs have a green translucent colour instead of the shimmering silvery rainbow of normal CDs.
That's because a green dye is used as the recording medium. When you're recording, a laser beam heats the dye, burning a pattern of microscopic pits into the green layer. The more laser power, the bigger the pit.
The string of pits forms a digital signal which a laser beam in a CD player can read, just as it does the more conventionally formed pits in an ordinary compact disc. A digital-to-analogue converter changes the digital coding into the musical signal needed to drive audio loudspeakers.
Kenwood's flagship CD-R recorder, the model LZ13, looks much like any other audio component. It's about the size of a normal hi-fi amplifier or cassette deck, and it has similar controls.
You can record from any digital source - a CD player or digital audio tape(DAT) recorder - as long as it has a "digital out" socket. Most high-class CD machines have these sockets.
However, you should be aware that the vast majority of music on compact discs is copyright, and re-recording without permission of the owner is currently a breach of the copyright law.
(So is the common practice of making tape cassettes from CDs. Australia has passed, though not yet brought into service, laws which would permit home recording of tapes and CDs in return for a levy on blank media.)
If you want to record live music onto CD, you would need some way of turning the analogue signal from your microphones into a digital signal. To do that, you need a device called a PCM (pulse code modulation) audio processor between the mikes and the CD-R recorder. PCM processors are made by Sony, among others.
CD-R could really come into its own if digital audio broadcasting ever gets under way in Australia. This would be a sort of pay-audio service, delivered like pay TV either via satellite or cable direct into the home.
Kenwood's LZ13 is not quite ready for commercial sale. It is expected to hit the Japanese market about the end of this year and be available in Australia perhaps about mid 1993 at about $10,000.
Blank discs for Yamaha machines cost $52 each. Kenwood expects blanks for its machine to cost $30 to $40 initially. But by next year, as mass production ramps up, it's believed the price could drop to around $15.
© 1992 Sydney Morning Herald
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