Media Reports

DCC & Beer; Cell Fi Plus Uploaders Fined
By Barry Fox
Multimedia Manufacturer, January/February 2005

Remember DCC? It was the digital compact cassette that Philips launched a little over ten years ago, along with Panasonic/Technics and against Sony's Mini Disc. DCC delivered very good sound, and Philips boss Jan Timmer saw it as the natural follow-on from CD, and not as contentious as DAT or recordable CD.

The biggest challenge was to make a recording/playback head that also played analog recordings. Philips developed a single head with nine inductive gaps to record digital code, nine magneto resistive heads to play back the digital recording, and two magneto resistive heads to play analog. (There was no analog recording mode.) The digital play head gaps were just 70 microns wide, around the width of a human hair. Like the conventional cassette, DCC recorded on one half of the tape width only, and the whole head block flipped through 180 degrees at the end of the run to play the other half running in the opposite direction.

The first machines were too big, bulky, and expensive to catch on. By the time Technics delivered a tiny portable, DCC was dead.

The Philips team behind DCC reworked it as a computer data recorder. One of the team lurked in the corridor near Jan Timmer's office, with a trolley of lab equipment, to try and make him curious. But Timmer left the company, leaving Philips free to launch CD-R. So the DCC data project died too.

But the lithographic thin film technology developed to make the heads lives on. If you drink beer in Holland you may well be benefiting from it.

Fluxxion is a small start-up company, based in the new science park or High Tech Campus which Philips has been building since the management offices moved to Amsterdam.

Fluxxion is run by Peter Sygall, who was one of the original DCC team. He has adapted the DCC head-making system to make filters in the same way microchips are made. Microchips are made by etching fine patterns into a 6" wafer of silicon; DCC heads were made by etching gaps in thin metal layers deposited on the silicon; and the new filters are made by coating silicon with a 1 micron layer of silicon nitride and then etching 3 billion holes, each less than half a micron in size, through the nitride coating.

The holes are small enough to trap bacteria. Future filters will use 0.2 micron holes to trap viruses. The nitride coating is so hard the liquid can be pumped through in pulses to stop clogging.

Says Sygall: "When we were making DCC heads, we didn't know we were doing nanotechnology because the word hadn't been invented. We just did what we had to do to make DCC recorders work."

CELL FI
The cellphone companies are now trying to muscle in on the audio act. But I don't think the hi-fi industry has much to worry about, yet.

Very wisely Nokia has now quietly shelved plans to launch the 7700 range of phones with Virtual FM, the system that receives stereo from an FM station and descriptive data from a cellphone call that the user must pay for. But Nokia has obviously not given up on the idea of using the cellphone as a music player. The company has been working on a phone which claims to deliver high quality sound from an internal speaker.

The phone body has a small speaker inside, and three cavities that amplify sound by resonating like an organ pipe. The front of the speaker fires sound into a small cavity that resonates at high frequencies. The back of the speaker fires into a bigger cavity, which resonates at low frequencies. Both these cavities connect by tubes to a third cavity where all the sound mixes, resonates some more, and fires out of a mouth in the side of the phone.

It should be really nasty sitting next to someone with one of these.

Motorola recently announced its "most iconic and secretive (sic) product yet"-a new range of cellphones, called V3 Razr, which are lighter and thinner than ever before. At the press launch we were given a specification sheet which refers to the phones having a "22kHz polyphonic speaker." Although this sounded very impressive, I had no idea what it meant. So I asked.

Product Director Michael Karasinski had no idea either and could only say he thought it must mean whatever it means for other Motorola phones. After a bit of nagging he checked and found out what he meant. I quote:

"The V3 speaker will support audio up to 22kHz frequency range. As a reference the human ear can usually recognize up to 20kHz and dogs can hear up to 40kHz."

Yes. Because I have spent most of my working life writing about audio, I know that only babies hear over 20kHz and most adults are limited to 15kHz. A small speaker can very easily reproduce up to 22kHz and over, and the difficult challenge is to make them reproduce lower frequencies. So what does the Moto phone go down to?

I've not had an answer on that, but at least we know that the new Moto phones are just the job for babies and dogs.

UPLOADERS FINED
The news that the UK's BPI (British Phonographic Industry) is now suing music file sharers does not mean an end to copy-protected CDs; nor does it signal a common standard for legal downloading, comparable to a CD bought anywhere that plays anywhere.

Says Jay Berman, Chairman and CEO of world trade body the IFPI: "Copy-protection is a decision for individual companies. It always was and it will remain so.

"There are over 150 hundred legal sites round the world, 100 in Europe, with over 25 in the UK. We want a common platform and interoperability. But a single platform doesn't exist. We are music companies, not technology companies. We sell music, we don't develop technology. We have to talk to the CE industry and the computer industry. They have proprietary systems and are proud of them. We are now talking with Microsoft and Apple about Digital Rights Management."

In addition to 28 UK actions being brought, a hundred cases are also being launched in Austria, adding to 174 in Denmark, 50 in France, 100 in Germany, seven in Italy, and over 5,700 actions brought in the US over the last six months.

The actions are against people who are uploading, not downloading, and they are under civil, not criminal law. The UK targets have been using KaZaA, Imesh, Grokster, Bearshare, and WinMX.

"UK offenders will not get a criminal record," says BPI lawyer Geoff Taylor. "We want damages and an injunction to stop. We have not ruled out going after downloaders later."

Taylor refuses to give any figures for the damages sought, but the IFPI is more open and expects an average of several thousand Euros per person. Actions brought in March against 80 people in Germany and Denmark have netted damages of up to Eu 13,000 per offender.

Geoff Taylor admits that no one has actually yet been sued. The BPI has simply got the IP addresses of 28 people, and must now seek court orders to try and find the owners' names and addresses. The BPI will then try to settle before suing.

Jay Berman defends the case of the 12-year old girl sued in the US. "We don't screen for political correctness. We only look for the level of activity. We don't know who we are dealing with until we get the name and address for the IP address. The mother of the 12-year old settled as soon as she found out what her daughter had been doing."

Asked if any of the panel had ever downloaded an MP3 file instead of buying a CD, Pete Waterman admitted what many CD buyers surely suspect:

"We are in the record industry. If we want something we just call EMI and they send it over."

SWEET SPOTS
Denon's new AVC-A1XV home theater amplifier weighs in at 90 lbs/41 kilos, mainly because the transformer must power ten audio channels, each delivering 170W. But what intrigues most about this "£4000 "behemoth"—as the publicity material describes it—is the use of Audyssey Laboratories' MultEQ system. This claims to provide "sweet spots" for up to eight listener positions simultaneously.

Denon has next to no information on MultEQ, and Audyssey's website provides little more than performance promises (http://www.audyssey.com). Hi-Fi News has however found two patents, now published for anyone to read. US 2003/0235318 and 2004/0109570 were filed by Sunil Bharitkar and Chris Kyriakakis, co-founders (with Philip Hilmes) of Audyssey in July 2002, as a spin-off from the Immersive Audio Laboratory at the University of Southern California (USC).

The inventors acknowledge that it is now well-known for an amplifier to generate a test signal that is reproduced through the speakers and picked up by a microphone put at the listener's favored listening position in the room. Computer intelligence in the amplifier then compares the original electronic test signal with the received sound signal, to reveal what distortion has been caused by sum and difference mixing of the direct sound with room reflections. An inverse filter is then electronically constructed and applied to the music signal before it is fed to the speakers. But this can only correct for one position in the room, e.g., the listener's sofa.

Audyssey's MultEQ takes up to eight separate measurements, with the microphone at eight favored listening positions, intelligently combines the analysis of the response at each position, and builds a single complex filter which turns all the individual positions into sweet spots.

It should also be possible, claim Audyssey's inventors, to build a filter which minimizes or even cancels out the sound in some positions so that some passengers in car or room can have peace and quiet while others listen to loud sound.

Whether the use of an averaged filter to accommodate several sweet spots causes overall loss of fidelity compared to a system that has been tweaked to a single sweet spot, or to a system with no processing at all, remains to be heard from review tests.

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

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