Media Reports
MP3 Triumphs as DRM Expires
By Barry Fox
Multimedia Manufacturer, July/August 2006
Wouldn’t it be nice to get rid of connecting wires, especially
now that we are threatened with 7.1 surround?
Infrared links only work if the receiver can see the transmitter.
And the link drops if someone walks through the beam.
FM wireless suffers from hiss and interference. The tuning can drift
too.
The computer industry has developed digital wireless systems to
connect computer equipment together, and to the Internet. These
can be used for audio and video.
Wi-Fi is the catchall word. The standards were set by the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in America. All work at
frequencies that require no user license. Data speeds up to 54Mbps
are possible. But these are maximum speeds and often real speeds
are much less.
The IEEE has a good track record. IEEE Ethernet is the de facto
way of connecting computers by wire. The Wi-Fi standards are good
and solid, although inevitably at the mercy of radio congestion
and interference. Transmission powers are limited, too, to avoid
interference between next door systems.
Low power means that the claimed 100 meter range of Wi-Fi only holds
good if the signals have a clear run, without thick walls.
This is why hi-fi home networking systems usually still rely on
cables. The latest Incognito system from Cambridge Audio gallantly
tries to make it easy to connect a living room hi-fi to slave speakers
in the kitchen and bathroom. A Wi-Fi connection would very likely
stop working as soon as the bathroom door was closed. So Incognito
plays safe and uses Ethernet cables.
Bluetooth was developed by a group of computer industry manufacturers
to give much shorter range connection than Wi-Fi. The aim was to
let computer equipment automatically connect whenever it comes within
10 meters. Bluetooth is now widely used to connect cellphones to
headsets and printers. The standards were flaky and it is still
hit and miss whether one piece of Bluetooth gear connects with another.
But some companies now see Bluetooth as a way of connecting audio
and hi-fi equipment.
Motorola has been promising an all-digital home entertainment network
using the new Class 1 A2DP Bluetooth standard. Class 1 extends range
to 100m, and the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile uses heavy
compression to give high quality audio in stereo.
In 2004 Motorola said the DC800 transceiver would be available in
“the first half of 2005.”
“We are just about to launch it now, together with the Bluetooth
Stereo headset,” said a Moto spokesman in June 2005. “It
is a very vital part of our entire Music Ecosystem Strategy, where
the device will be the center of a number of various solutions with
which stream music from your home stereo, your PC, iPod, phone,
etc., to any kind of headset, speakers, etc.”
“We never did a formal press release or launch,” said
Motorola at the end of 2005, “but they have recently gone into
stores in the UK.”
“Motorola breaks new ground in Bluetooth wireless technology.
. . making this the perfect music accessory—the DC800 transceiver
turns your stereo into a wireless music system,” said a blurb
for the £150 system, promising “high fidelity stereo
music without wires from any music source to the headphones.”
I borrowed a transceiver and headphones and was pleasantly surprised
at the sound quality. But I soon found a serious problem with the
system, which may well explain why the launch was so low key.
The Bluetooth circuitry has to do so much coding and compression
that the sound is considerably delayed. For video or TV, the pictures
end up many frames ahead of the sound. The effect is very disturbing.
I asked Motorola for comment but after many months and reminders
the company has come up with absolutely no comment. Doubtless Motorola
knows it has an insoluble problem, which is why it is now doing
no publicity for the product and wishes it (and I) would go away.
This is exactly the attitude that let Nokia knock Motorola off the
top spot in cellphone sales.
It’s very likely that all digital wireless audio links will
suffer from the same “latency” problem, for many years
to come. So think twice before buying a digital wireless audio link.
PowerLine Communication technology sounds like the obvious answer
to getting rid of wires, with high frequency digital data piggybacked
on the low frequency mains. So every mains socket becomes an audio
socket. The hidden risk is that high frequency hash will leak out
of the unscreened house wiring and cause interference to hi-fi systems.
But none of this seems to worry Europe’s Open PLC European
Research Alliance (OPERA) group, which has now picked the DS2 technology
from Spain as the de facto standard in Europe. And still no one
in the hi-fi business seems to be showing any interest in the audio
interference issue.
Marantz will soon launch a multi-room system that relies on powerline
connections. How will this fit with the Marantz tradition of very
high-end audio designed with no compromises by the highly respected
Ken Ishiwata?
LOOKING BACK
Record company Naxos has now done what EMI should have done 20 years
ago. That’s when California record collectors Brad Kay and
Steven Lasker came up with the intriguing theory that some old mono
recordings were accidentally made in stereo.
In the 1920s and 1930s studios cut wax discs. They played safe by
simultaneously cutting two discs—sometimes extra safe by using
two separate microphones, one for each disc.
Kay hunted down matched pairs of old discs and tried playing one
as the left channel and the other as the right. Some engineers who
heard his “accidental stereo” thought it was just an illusion
produced by slight phase differences between two identical recordings;
others thought the stereo sounded too real to be written off. I
wrote about it in several magazines and persuaded the BBC to broadcast
some taped experiments. The only commercial release was a collection
of out-of-copyright Duke Ellington tracks on an LP. Lawyers threatened
legal action when Kay tried to release some classical recordings.
An engineer at EMI’s Abbey Road studios found a matched pair
of discs of Sir Edward Elgar’s Kingdom Prelude recorded in
1933. EMI’s Classical Division was so impressed by the stereo
effect that a company press release promised “a previously
unpublished true stereo version.”
Inside EMI there were mighty disputes. I was getting mocking postcards
from some EMI people and encouraging phone calls from others. The
release was cancelled. “We knew what the result would be—only
fake stereo,” pronounced a spokesman. Why not be scientific
and give us all a chance to hear the effect, I argued, but to no
avail.
Recently HFN record reviewer Chris Breunig spotted that independent
record label Naxos had released a CD of Elgar’s recordings
(Naxos 8.111022) with a “bonus track,” the Cockaigne Overture
from 1933, in “accidental stereo.”
“Listeners can judge for themselves,” says Naxos.
The Naxos re-creation was done by Mark Obert-Thorn, who explains:
“My approach was similar to Kay’s, except that I did it
digitally using a hard drive recorder rather than an open-reel tape.
I first pitched and taped one of the two matching pairs onto one
channel. Then, I recorded the second part of the pair onto a CD-R,
and played it back using a speed-adjustable CD deck while recording
it onto the second channel on my hard drive.
“The second track not only did not start at the same speed
as the first, but also varied slightly up and down throughout the
side (a function of the weight-and-pulley system used by EMI originally
to drive the cutting tables). I’d have to stop, re-pitch that
portion on the CD-R, match it up with the part on the hard drive,
and perform an edit. I recall doing about six such edits over that
four and one half-minute side.
“In the edits, I would try to line the tracks up by looking
at the waveforms on my digital hard drive at the point of attacks
on notes. I’d note the time of the start of the attack down
to a thousandth of a second. I don’t claim that the attacks
on every note are exactly matched—something like that would
take months to do manually.
“Since this recording is out of copyright in most of the world,
I didn’t need to get EMI’s permission to do the transfer.
Brad Kay loaned his original alternate-take disc.
“I hope that the release of this Naxos disc will prompt EMI
and Sony-BMG to go into their vaults, synchronize and release the
accidental stereo material that has already been identified, and
perhaps discover some new material in the process.”
I was recently at a meeting of the Institute of Broadcast Sound
at the BBC’s technical training school at Wood Norton, near
Evesham, so played the disc. A room full of sound engineers was
pretty evenly split between those who thought the effect was stereo
and those who thought it was phase-difference pseudo stereo. But
no one mocked. EMI, please take note.
For copyright reasons you may have to get this disc from outside
the US, but it’s well worth the effort. And for those who like
a little history, here are a few of the milestones on the road to
stereo—and now 7.1 surround.
1931—Alan Blumlein of EMI files his famous patent (BP 394
325) on the idea of stereo.
1932—Bell Labs in the US records two short extracts of Leopold
Stokowski conducting Scriabin’s Poem of Fire in stereo.
1933—Blumlein makes test discs in stereo at EMI’s labs
in Hayes, Middlesex.
1933—Bell uses a three-channel cable system to replay Stokowski
in stereo live from Philadelphia to Washington.
1934—Blumlein records Sir Thomas Beecham conducting Mozart’s
Jupiter Symphony at EMI’s Abbey Road studios.
1935—Blumlein makes test stereo films at Hayes, including a
playlet performed by a local dramatic society.
1940—Bell demonstrates stereo sound from film in Carnegie Hall.
1940—Walt Disney’s Fantasia movie extravaganza is released
in 1940 with three-track stereo and a fourth surround-sound effects
track.
1943—German radio engineers use a modified Magnetophon tape
recorder, made by Telefunken, with BASF tape, to record stereo in
Berlin.
1944—Herbert von Karajan is recorded on stereo tape conducting
Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No.8 in C minor.
1958—the Record Industry Association of America and Westrex
re-invent Blumlein’s system and make it the standard for stereo
LPs.
Barry Fox reports on the audio industry as columnist for the British publication Hi-Fi News. His commentary also appears in every issue of Multi Media Manufacturer.