Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) was a short-lived magnetic tape sound recording format introduced by Philips and Matsushita in late 1992. Pitched as a successor to the standard analog cassette, and competitor to MiniDisc (MD) and Digital Audio Tape (DAT), it never became popular with the general public. It shared the same form factor as analog cassettes, and DCC recorders could play back either type of cassette. This backward compatibility allowed users to adopt digital recording without rendering their existing tape collections obsolete. Image File history File links DCClogo. ... Compact audio cassette Magnetic tape is a non-volatile storage medium consisting of a magnetic coating on a thin plastic strip. ... Look up encoding in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Philips HQ in Amsterdam Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (Royal Philips Electronics N.V.), usually known as Philips, (Euronext: PHIA, NYSE: PHG) is one of the largest electronics companies in the world. ... Logo for the Panasonic brand Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. ... The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. ... Magnetic tape has been used for sound recording for more than 75 years. ... Philips HQ in Amsterdam Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (Royal Philips Electronics N.V.), usually known as Philips, (Euronext: PHIA, NYSE: PHG) is one of the largest electronics companies in the world. ... Logo for the Panasonic brand Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. ... 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ... An analog or analogue signal is an allergy continuous in both time and amplitude. ... The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. ... See also IBMs VM operating system family, where minidisk refers to a logical unit of storage. ... Digital audio tape can also refer to a compact cassette with digital storage. ... Form factor refers to the linear dimensions and configuration of a device as distinguished from other measures of size (for example Gigabytes; a measure of storage size): in computing, form factor is used to describe the size and format of PC motherboards (see AT, ATX, BTX), but also of hard... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

A DCC is a multi-track stationary head recorder, unlike a rotary-head or helical scan recorder such as DAT or VHS, whose heads are moving relative to the tape. In order to achieve the required bit rate for audio, nine heads are used for writing eight parallel data tracks plus one timing track. The track width, determined by the distance between neighbouring heads is larger, about a factor of ten, than that of a typical rotary-head recorder. As a result the capacity of a DCC is only 105 minutes, compared to 3 hours for DAT. An audio compression codec, called PASC (Precision Adaptive Sub-band Coding), which is a 4:1 scheme similar to MPEG-1, was used to supply sufficient playing time. Many believed this gave better quality audio than ATRAC (used in the original MD), but it was not as good as DAT, which used uncompressed PCM. Bottom view of VHS cassette with magnetic tape exposed Top view of VHS cassette with front casing removed The Video Home System, better known by its abbreviation VHS is a recording and playing standard for analog video cassette recorders (VCRs), developed by Victor Company of Japan, Limited (JVC) and launched... In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (sometimes written bitrate) is the frequency at which bits are passing a given (physical or metaphorical) point. It is quantified using the bit per second (bit/s) unit. ... Audio compression is a form of data compression designed to reduce the size of audio files. ... A codec is a device or program capable of performing encoding and decoding on a digital data stream or signal. ... MPEG-1 defines a group of Audio and Video (AV) coding and compression standards agreed upon by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group). ... ATRAC (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding) is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms used to store information on MiniDiscs and other Sony-branded audio players. ... Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a digital representation of an analog signal where the magnitude of the signal is sampled regularly at uniform intervals, then quantized to a series of symbols in a digital (usually binary) code. ...

DCC was discontinued in November 1996 after Philips admitted it had achieved poor sales. In hindsight it is clear that linear tape formats are not as versatile or robust as disc type formats, and the advent of recordable compact discs (CD-RWs) makes the use of tape obsolete for consumer applications. Professional recording studios still use DAT machines for their higher sample rate (48 kHz), and frequently for their portability. ADAT machines are also still in widespread use in the recording industry. 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... A Compact Disc or CD is an optical disc used to store digital data, originally developed for storing digital audio. ... A kilohertz (kHz) is a unit of frequency equal to 1,000 hertz (1,000 cycles per second). ... This is an article about the digital recording format. ... The record industry (or recording industry) is the industry that manufactures and distributes mechanical recordings of music. ...

A derivative technology developed for DCC is now being used for filtering beer. Silicon wafers with micrometer scale holes are ideal for separating yeast particles from beer. The beer flows through the silicon wafer leaving the yeast particles behind, which results in a very clear beer. The manufacturing process for the filters was originally developed for the read/write heads of DCC players.^[1]

See also

• DAT
• DVD
• Universal Media Disc (UMD)

Digital audio tape can also refer to a compact cassette with digital storage. ... DVD (also known as Digital Versatile Disc or, incorrectly, Digital Video Disc) is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. ... A UMD The Universal Media Disc (UMD) is an optical disc medium developed by Sony for use on the PlayStation Portable. ...

References

1. ^ Hi-fi failure helps to brighten beer - New Scientist Retrieved 2007-4-2.

External links

• DCC
• DCC900