Did this obscure audio format REALLY sound better than MiniDisc?

The early '90s saw the biggest

format

war that never

really

happened: Phillips DCC versus Sony

minidisc

, while both aimed to replace compact cassettes with higher quality digital

audio

. Some early reviews said the DCC's

sound

quality had an edge, but is that

really

true? Let's Find Out In order to fit a decent amount of music onto their respective media, both the digital compact cassette and the

minidisc

had to employ lossy

audio

compression. If you're familiar with the concept of MP3 files,

this

shouldn't need much explanation except the codecs specific to each

format

. used were different and when the two released in late 1992 reviewers were able to tell them apart, generally speaking they both

sound

ed very good, at least when it came to casual listening, there was no clear consensus on which was

better

, but it seemed that initial impressions in general they bowed. towards DCC sounds closer to compact disc quality and if you took a brief look at the technical specifications of both formats, it would be easy to infer that DCC was overall

better

than minidisc, but the truth is much more nuanced, it all comes down to The DCC compression algorithm uses a codec called precision adaptive subband coding or passc.

It has a fixed data rate of 384 kilobits per second or about a quarter the size of an uncompressed PCM signal like that of a CD. Sony's a-track algorithm, short for adaptive. Instead, the converted acoustic coating runs at 292 kilobits per second, closer to one-fifth the speed of a CD. You could take these numbers at face value and conclude that the MD would sound worse, but there is much more at play that levels the playing field that Sony had developed. a track on its own after much research in psychoacoustics or the study of how our brain perceives sound, atrac divides the incoming signal into three main frequency bands to process it and finally uses a total of 52 sub-bands to determine which parts of the audio would be inaudible, so you might discard them to save space.

Something Sony took into account was the fact that our hearing is not equally sensitive across the entire frequency range - in general, we are better at picking up details at lower frequencies than at higher ones. Those 52 subbands are not the same size, but rather the ones that handle lower frequencies are narrower, which gives the track more precision in figuring out how to compress the signal, basically being able to maintain more detail in the frequencies where it is needed. more likely to notice. Incoming audio is processed in blocks and Sony designed a track so that those blocks can be different sizes.

Rapidly changing audio is re-encoded into smaller blocks in an effort to preserve detail. Phillips, on the other hand, took a different path than his previous codec. actually just a small adjustment to the mpeg-1 layer 1 algorithm, the encoding process uses 32 subbands and each one is the same size, unlike minidisk, DCC could support 48 kilohertz sample rates and not just the standard CD 44.1, but also recording at the same time. in mono it didn't double the runtime as it did with MD, but since it was based on a third-party standard, pasc effectively gained a development advantage over a track. Work on mpeg-1 began in 1987 and the standard was released in late 1991, meaning there was plenty of time for Phillips to use it as the basis for pasc before the debut of dcc, a year later Sony had a deadline a bit tighter with one track, meaning there wasn't as much time to iron out the bugs if The Minidisc were to be released alongside DCC, which was very important from a business strategy perspective, so ultimately a track was generally a more efficient codec than pasc, allowing you to get away with a lower bit rate.

Complaints about minidisc sound quality are best attributed to the fact that the format was somehow rushed to market. Sony not only had to do all the software engineering for a track, but it also had to design custom silicon to use in conjunction with a dedicated large-scale integration or LSI chip that was key to the minidisc approach in On the other hand, The mask of portability and good battery life was a little more mature when the first DCC recorders hit the market and reviews of the two formats were generally very similar when it came to sound quality;

It's probably best to listen to them yourself, so To that end, I put together a couple of sample recordings using a first-generation DCC platform, a Philips DCC 900, as well as Sony's first MD device, the mz1. The source audio came from lossless files and was recorded digitally over an optical connection so any analog conversion could be performed. circuits out of the image, likewise the samples were played and captured digitally, so the only differences between them should be their compression algorithms, of course YouTube will apply their own compression to

this

video, so don't try take this as an example of These formats have absolute sound quality.

Instead of trying to distinguish how they are different, make sure you listen to them using good headphones or speakers. If you like music, I included links in the description of the video yesterday abroad. I'll see you again. I'll do anything. So baby, open your mouth, you know you have my full attention. I'll do it all my time. I will give you all my time. Is there anything I can do? Something that leads me to you because I will give you everything. my time laughs, could you tell the difference because honestly I'm not sure I can? If there are any in my ears, at least they are so subtle that they really don't matter.

The minidisco may sound a little cleaner in the lows, which makes sense given what we know about how a-track works, but both are equally fun to listen to for me. I suspect that any audible differences noted in those early '90s reviews were probably related to the digital or analog circuitry in the decks. or the recordings themselves. I've seen anecdotes online that pre-recorded minidiscs don't sound as good as ones that consumers record themselves, for example, and this would make sense considering that both Phillips and Sony had to produce duplication equipment in advance of the releases of both. formats, so that a selection of music titles were available on day one, perhaps pasc was further along in development at the time, while Sony was still on a Mad Dash to get a track to sound as good as possible, but one of The key aspects of a track are that since Sony developed it in-house, it was also free to enhance it whenever it wanted and the company did exactly that with later generations of minidisc recorders.

The quality of aatrax encoding was gradually improved, while maintaining backward compatibility for backward playback. Hardware Phillips was heavily reliant on the MPEG codec developers for any changes, but since it sounded so good at launch and the DCC format generally had poor sales, any effort to increase the sound quality probably wouldn't have been worth it, I prepared one more. audio test between DCC 900 and mz1, but this time I also included my MZ r700 in the mix, that model dates back to 2001 and uses a-track version 4.5. I played your recording through the mz1 so the audio decoding process was the same. and since I only used foreign digital connections before, thank you, we are the last chance.

Yeah, not much difference here. The r700 recording may sound a little softer in the treble, but again, you would have to know the source material well to If we can distinguish such a subtle difference, there may be a greater impact with different genres of music, but given that both DCC and minidisc were advertised as general consumer formats, it stands to reason that most owners would listen to popular music, the fact that both this lossy compression used was reason enough for serious audio files to discard them entirely, but for me they are equally cool, also a quick note for keyboard warriors, many disc recorders often had a note at the bottom referring to Dolby licensed skates.

Digital formats like MD didn't need that company's noise reduction technology, like that commonly seen on cassette decks, so some might think a track might have been something created by Dolby, as it turns out during During the development of aatrax, Sony engineers discovered that the concept of resizable data blocks had already been patented by Dolby. It was an important enough concept to the codec that Sony decided to simply license it rather than spend additional time and resources trying to develop an alternative A track. It was absolutely something that Sony created. and they have several patents to prove it.

Lossy audio compression was a novel and somewhat polarizing concept in the early '90s, one that delayed audio files and is part of the reason why neither DCC nor MDC grew much at first. The two sounded better really have a big impact on your sales. I doubt they each faced their own larger struggles in other ways, but given that they both used compressed digital audio nearly a decade before MP3 files were widely adopted, it's hard to argue that these two didn't at least begin to lay the groundwork. bases of how we mainly listen to music today