1982: Is this CASSETTE the FUTURE of Hi-Fi Tech? | Tomorrow's World | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
- "A standard cassette recorder with a superior quality of digital recording."
To the untrained eye, it looks just like any other cassette tape, but this prototype will not work on your existing stereo.
Judith Hann demonstrates a new cassette incorporating metal tape, that contains music which has been converted into digital code. When the tape is played on a compatible tape deck, the digital code is converted back into music, producing excellent sound quality with none of the audio degradation associated with existing pre-recorded cassettes.
The tapes can hold more than just music though, they can also hold digitised pictures, meaning that in the future, albums might include not just songs, but digitised lyrics, album covers and even videos.
The first commercial machines are expected to go on sale in three years time.
Originally broadcast 11 March, 1982.
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I bet techmoan would like to get his hands on one of these presuming they made it into production. Tomorrow's World was pure quality and the presenters were the best they could have been
I thought of Techmoan too.
This was an early prototype of what eventually became DCC (Digital Compact Cassette) in 1992.
@@vwestlife Thanks for the info. Great to see you here.
@@vwestlife Is it really? I mean, obviously, it is the same concept, but was its development directly related to Philips and Matsushita's work on the DCC format years later? Which Japanese company made the prototype in this video?
@@vwestlife Oh really hmm. great channel you have. Have you seen my AM Stereo recordings from Radio Studio X ?
Tomorrows World was (for me) the epitome of what made the BBC so good back in the day.
Before it become woke.
The height of misogyny and paedophilia😢
@@diggerpete9334 what a tedious bore, trying to insert "woke" into every conversation. Take the day off.
I liked jim'll fix it 🤔
@@hugostiglitz6914 like your dad
This feels like it was shot in one take. A testament for the presenter. She actually knows what she is talking about.
It was literally broadcast live. It had slightly higher production values than a Twitch livestream, and about 15 million more viewers.
Judith was really classy and very intelligent.
Back when proper pronounciation, education, and justification lead to more clarification and prosperification!
yeah, cuz in 80s it wasn't so easy to cut and paste clips, so you had to rely more on skill than tech.
nowday world is vice versa.
Yes these mostly live - also the presenters had to be very conversant with the topic as you’ll notice that they’re often looking away from the camera so the script would have to be memorised as autocue wasn’t an option.
Kudos to Judith and all the Tomorrow's World presenters that demonstrated tech LIVE each week!
Huge respect to them.
Never missed it as a kid... was the highlight of my week 😉
I used to love this programme as a child. Wish they brought it back
Judith is now 80. Hope she’s doing ok
@@digitalmediafan Wow, I didn't know she was that old now.
Really impressive the amount of detail they would go into for stuff like this - back when there was only 3 or 4 channels for people to choose from, a large chunk of the UK population (myself included as a child) would have tuned in not necessarily expecting to understand everything but to know that they would go beyond the high-level marketing and actually try to explain what was going on underneath.
Agreed, everything is dumbed down for the lowest common denominator these days!
This is something that has been lost in the last couple of decades.
People in modern society have very poor knowledge about how things actually work.
Especially in the audio sector.
Ask someone on the street about bit rates, file compression, audio compression, FLAC, WAV, OGG, VORBIS, ..... They would literally have no clue what so ever.
Even how does streaming work and why is the quality so crap, you'd get a blank glazed look
@@KDBAO I'm 59 and sorry to say I'd be a blank starer. But ask me how a cassette works, or a messageswitch system and I'm right at home.
It wasn't just the UK who tuned in every week to watch this amazing program, growing up in Ireland this was essential viewing for me too. The BBC were at the cutting edge when it came to introducing us to new technology back then.
They couldn't really make this show now as all new tech is to restrict our lives not make it more enjoyable.
Tomorrows World was THE best tech program ever. It was essential viewing.
And my first memory of TW was 1966.
@@darkstarnh Ahh, the days opf Raymond Baxter. Mine was a bit later, the mid 70's.
I love this. Back from the days when the BBC still made quality and informative programming
They still do they still make the best science and natural history documentaries of any channel anywhere
No Tom. They really don’t. Society has dumbed down and sadly, so has the beeb. I truly hope they scrap the license fee, it is criminal.
@@Tom-uv7ry unfortunately not. I've used a whole range of clips from different sources when I was teaching. Very, very few were from the BBC.
David Attenborough is still around...right now broadcasting a new documentary "Wild Isles" about nature in Britain and Ireland.
American broadcasting comes nowhere near the quality of European Broadcasting in general.
(A prominent American "news" station, Fox News, broadcasts outright lies and calls it "The News".)
Modern science documentaries (BBC and others) are very dumbed down nowadays.
By comparison, I found her pace of explanation extraordinary. The TW team clearly assumed the audience would keep up. Back then this would have been a tsunami of fresh information, but she clearly and swiftly told the whole story.
They would spend an hour on this now, use music to make us "feel" things and dumb it down so much they'd actually introduce untruths.
As a Canadian who never saw these shows in original broadcast, I'm so impressed with this. This is definitely a refreshing break, and heads above a lot of the junk put out today. Thanks for this treasure!
I read it as a comedian. I was very confused. ☺
@@sirbum1918 lol you may be dyslexic
Can we have a bit of appreciation for the model makers who made those demonstrations of the difference between analogue and digital recording. Sterling work! 👍
Actually if you could see magnetic flux it would NOT look like the waveforms depicted. In fact the "rays" surrounding the Alexander Place aerial during the end-cap is more accurate.
@@rambo1152 But you wouldn't clearly recognize the difference between a PCM signal and analog audio if it was depicted like that. I think they did a great job visualizing the differences there. I wish they gave the bitrate of the PCM signal and whether it goes through any kind of lossy compression at all (like DCC does).
YEP - thats what impressed me
common sense to me, but i agree, it's so well presented. very simple and short. if someone doesn't understand what is shown on this video, then that person belongs into asylum
Awww Thursday nights after Top of the Pops, I used to love Tomorrows World as a kid. Bring it back BBC!
Thank you... I was wondering what night it used to be on
They did revive it, I think in the 2010s? But it didn't last.
Or rather, bring back the BBC that used to create this kind of content. Doesn't exist anymore.
The Tomorrow's World presenters really were the best presenters on TV.
Pure class
Led by the great Raymond Baxter.
Yes we were spoilt back in the day with the quality of tv presenters.We didn't know at the time we were living in the golden age of the BBC when it really did inform,educate and entertain.
There was a dude who also presented a tv quiz show...can't remember his name.
@@stevespenceroz Was it Michael Rodd who presented Screen Test?
Wow, imagine being able to store both music and pictures on a single cassette tape and play them back digitally. Tomorrow's world was fantastic and missed by many people.
In fact that was the DCC cassette from Philips. Only the pictures I've never seen.
I always liked the professional presentation Judith gave, excellent job.👍♥️
I guess that was an excellent Hann Job
@@davidlewis1787 😂😂😂
@@davidlewis1787 Get out now! 😆
@@davidlewis1787 boo!
😂
@@kildogery 🤣
The BBC props dept have gone above and beyond for this one
As a youth, I just adored these glimpses into our future, that Tomorrows World provided.
One of my favourite TV shows, sadly missed.
One of the highlights of the TV week back in the day.
Days of work putting all that together - the TWO models were so well made...absolute quality throughout that show.
Tomorrow's World was ace. And watching back archived clips shows what we lost when it ended.
Her nephew was in my class at school. Was so jealous he had such a cool aunty!
Those jvc amps were absolutely sublime. Restored one 2 years ago. Built like a tank and such good sounding.
I still have my Yamaha kit from 1980. I've never felt the need to replace it.
JVC's Digifine and Super-A equipment was top-notch.
@@putinspuppet a-x9
@@ElectoneGuy still got a ax-440 kicking about. Owned a a-x7 last year. One down from the one pictured here. Really great unit. Sold it purely due to having so much gear and running a business.
@@James-gf9jl got one of yamaha's 1st remote controlled pre amplifiers. Sounds sublime. I've pretty much only used yamaha pre amps within my hifi barring the odd purchase.
Will just add that the quality of these uploads is stunning, just shows what high quality the original video recordings were. They look great in 720p at 50hz de-interlaced! Well done BBC Archives.
Makes a change from the days when the BBC would sometimes upload to RUclips in the wrong aspect ratio!
Yeah the digitisations on this channel are all brilliant!
They used digital cassette tapes.
I love these old programs.
A different world and time never to be experienced again , only through these videos and peoples memory’s
I see that uploading in 50p is now the standard by the looks of it. Whoever decided this, thank you! It's so nice to see VideoTaped material look how it should instead of being filmized.
Noticed that too, 50hz is oddly immediately recognizable
Hear Hear!
If you have time could you explain what you mean. I agree it looks a high quality reproduction of the original programme better than many of the BBC archive videos.
@@iainmacdonald3571 Videotape has a certain smoothness in motion to it. It's made up of 25 frames and 50 fields. Filmizing means converting the fields down to 25 as well, making movement seem jagged and less fluid like a piece of film. If you watch an old TV show like say Fawlty Towers or Benny Hill, you'll see the Studio VT stuff looks nice and smooth with body movement etc, then the filmed stuff is a bit more jumpy and less fluid. I hope that makes sense.
@@goodiesguy Thanks for your reply. Yes I understand why now.
Fascinating! The digital tape recorder as shown here, using a special multi-track head to record the data was never released to my knowledge. The first digital compact cassette system was the DAT recorder, which used a very different approach to recording the data. It was based on video recording technology rather than this multi-track concept. I guess they found this prototype wasn't reliable enough or to expensive or something like that. Later Phillips did introduce the DCC digital cassette recorder, which was backward compatible for playing analog cassettes and used dedicated tape cassettes in a slightly different housing for digital recording. To allow for this however, the data bandwidth limitation of recording on a standard cassette tape was solved through data compression rather than using a type of video head recording.
DCC uses multitrack heads, 9 tracks in each direction (8 audio + 1 auxillary info) , so the product here was some precursor for DCC
@@jarlrise Indeed, and DCC also featured the on-screen Teletext-style system via the optional ITTS Box.
@@jarlrise May be completely different though as she said the data is on the entire width of the tape and played faster. I don't know if DCC was still 1.78 ips or not. For the analog, yes. But the digital, I don't know. I never bought one. But maybe MP3's wouldn't have existed without the DCC being made as DCC's used an earlier version of MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer II rather than MPEG-1 Audio Layer III which became known as MP3. Or something like that.)
@@jarlrise Yes, I've looked it up and DCC did indeed also use a multi-track head. But the format shown here must have recorded uncompressed PCM though as the data compression technology used in DCC was not available at the time and no dedicated processors were available that could do this kind of complex data manipulation in realtime in 1982. So DCC was really a different format. I suspect that the format shown here might have compromised on some things to make it work, like for instance it might have used a lower recording frequency than CD, (32 KHz perhaps) or maybe it used a faster tape speed to compensate for the limited bandwidth.
@@MacXpert74 Possibly they used something similar to NICAM.
Thanks BBC Props Department. You guys really outdid yourselves for literally around a single minute of television. And Judith with the single pan shot!
Wonderful clear presentation from Judith. No gimmicky fast editing or sneering swipes. The past was a better country.
The past as edited and played through your rose tinted specs maybe but the hard truth is that it was far more misogynist, racist, homophobic. We had 4 TV channels, no cable or satellite, no decent cell phones, no internet. In so many ways the world IS a far better place today than at any other time- the PRESENT is always going to be the best time to be alive.
WOW!! was that all in one take? What a star Judith is!
Yeah, that was quite impressive.
There's a thing called 'Autocue' in front of the camera so that the presenters could read their scripts to camera. Not everyone is Tom Scott.
@@johnrussell5245 Quite possible, but it is clear she's not only reading some random text, but understands it.
One of the impressive things is that it would have been written and rehearsed in one of the offices in TV Centre and they probably didn't get the models from the props department until about 5pm on Thursdays, whereupon the team would rush down to studio to get everything into place for final rehearsals once the Blue Peter team had finished.
Respect to Judith - a good presenter.
When TV used to have integrity and actually teach the public something useful
I'm still waiting for my personal jet pack that Tomorrow's World promised I'd have by 1999!!! 😊
Maybe a flying car too.
I love the models that they made to demonstrate to the average Jo how the technology worked
Yes, those are fantastic.
The public understanding of technology has diminished since then. I can't help but think it's because of the assumption that people these days will lose attention when media goes into detail.
I was thinking that as I was watching it. Well done to the prop/effects guys on this. "We need to represent how analog and digital tape is recorded for the segment...and we need it tomorrow."
@@MrOttman001 It's probably also just because the more digital things become, the more consumer tech is just made from commodity chips and black boxes that aren't very interesting to talk about. It's like the transition from low level programming languages, to high level, to just asking ChatGPT to do it for you -- the more levels of abstraction there are, the less interesting all the lower levels become. I've loved this sort of stuff since the 70's, but very little these days is as exciting as anything that was happening then.
@@scottishwildcat Perhaps, but even shows about the engineering of structures, machines etc are regularly dumbed down - being little more than people repetitively recounting basic details over separate footage of the subject.
Looks like an early version of DCC, as DCC also used multitrack recording (8 audio + 1 auxillary data track per side).
DCC were released in 1992, 10 years after this episode of Tomorrows World was made.
Obviously DCC comes to mind, but that was developed by Philips. Also, at least the way it's presented, this format uses ordinary cassettes and only one track, otherwise it wouldn't be playable on a conventional deck. DCC as you said used multiple tracks, and used a different kind of cassettes, same form factor but otherwise incompatible. Compatibility existed in a limited sense only, as DCC machines were designed to play (but not record) analogue cassettes.
Of course what happened in between 1982 and 1992 was the colossal failure of R-DAT in the consumer market primarily due to record companies doing their best to kill the format.
I think this was probably Sony because to me this looks like an early version of S-DAT (Stationary Head DAT) before they decided on R-DAT (Rotating head DAT) like in VCR's. With a rotating head the tape is written to diagonally so the tape was able to passed over the head slower. Remember that Technics VCR digital recorder that Techmoan did a video on a while back...?
Just a thought
@@tristramllewellyn8162 ironically, DAT was used a lot within record companies themselves
@@xaverlustig3581 No, DCC also had a single MUSIC track in both directions (so only used half tape-width) but 9 data tracks - like this one presented here also has a single music tracks on 8 data tracks.
Playback head in a conventional deck covers 4 of these tracks, so it is certainly capable of playing back some digital noise.
Brilliant! I’d missed this particular one; but absolutely started using DAT and Minidisc’s to record ‘hiss-less’ at my home music studio in the 90’s. Interesting though, these days we have plugins (in music production software) to introduce a degree of fake tape hiss, wow and flutter - if we want it (and this can give more depth to an otherwise overly ‘clinically clean’ digital mix).
I still use Minidisc. I found it was the perfect format, would love to see what would have happened if MP3 hadnt taken over, imagine if they replaced the basic disc inside with a Bluray which can hold so much more Data.... would be able to offer Lossless and even longer disc record times
I started out my photography career using film qnd digital photo software now gives options to add 'film grain aka hiss to the virtually noiseless digital pictures!
@@darrenwells2277 These days solid state TF-card storage can hold much more data than any Blu-ray or other spinning optical media, like 1 or 2TB now. Who needs lossy MP3 or ATRAC, when we've got lossless FLAC for our music :)
@@spikephotography A friend of ours has a modern 4K TV (LG I think) which nostalgically simulates the way old tube TV’s turn off, complete with the small white dot left in the centre of the screen for a second or two afterwards. Completely unnecessary, but absolutely a really nice touch !! I wonder when the crackle and hiss of MW radio will become a ‘thing’ which people want to simulate on their DAB and Internet radios 😂
"irritating hiss", with our latest plugin you too can go back to 1982 and hear what everyone thought of tape hiss.
Wow!!! The mythical, legendary "3M Digital Mastering System" recorder!! Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame) recorded his 1982 blockbuster album "The Nightfly" on such a machine!! They were riddled with technical problems but when they worked they had a silky-smooth sound unparalleled by any analog recorders of the day! An amazing bit of history here!! They had to move the tape at 45"-inches-per-second in order to record all the digital data required! Plus they used a now-nonstandard digital encoding scheme of 12-bits and 4-bits separately, and something like 50,000 Hz rather than the later 44,100 Hz standard. Absolutely ingenious!
It’s a beautiful reel to reel alright!
Thanks Judith. Thudith.
Thankfully she avoided the Helvetica Scenario.
When Tomorrow's World was on, I knew I coming to the end of another long hard week at school as TW used to be shown on Thursday evenings. Also hats off to Judith who handled all that technology so well in one take on live TV, but I do remember there were also a lot of bloopers such as the rain reactive windscreen wipers that failed to spring to life when one of the presenters squirted water on it.
Thursday night in the 80's was THE best night for TV. Lived for it. Top of The Pops, Eastenders in its prime (if you liked that) Tomorrows World and then Blackadder/Alas Smith & Jones etc. etc. And everyone at schol;l would have watched the same thing. Just having 4 channels of TV actually was an amazing thing.
@@jabezhane Thumbs up to all of that, except EastEnders which should have never been invented.
It would seem that my Renault is still using that original wiper system
I remember the part with the orange tape! 😀 I was 19 when I saw it in 1982 …
That studio looks amazing, even for today’s standards.
Fantastic stuff
Also, makes you think how short lived tapes lasted for.
Judith was such a pro. Class act.
Nice to go back and watch this to see how technology has evolved.
Oh wow, would love to get my hands on the kit shown in this program, the prototype, and those reel to reels are things of beauty too! The real nostalgia though is remembering when TV wasn't dumbed down.
Makes me sad that the BBC that created this sort of quality program, no longer exists. This & other programs were my childhood and I loved them.
The size of all the equipment is amazing lol. I think my recollections of Tomorrows world, and it shows here, is that everything was explained in an in dept, but easy to understand, way.
Only 25 years ago, ppl were still using pens/pensils to rewind/ff cassettes
I would use one hand to rewind the tape quickly like those football clackers you spin with one hand. Occasionally the tape would fly off the end of the pen and maim someone.
@@krashd 😂
Judith Hann, Now 80 and still going strong :-)
Late 20th century BBC at its best demonstrating the difference between analogue and digital recording. (Thanks to skilled prop makers). I don’t recall this tech making it to the consumer. I'm guessing if it did, it was unlikely to have much of a lifecycle, CD’s were introduced at the end of that year (1982). I’m old enough to remember music recording on Vinyl with the added joy in the quiet parts hearing bacon frying in the kitchen next to the recording studio.
That was only 42 years ago and look how far we've come!
The days when television respected a viewers intelligence!
those old videos are just gold, the way they explain how it works is so simple.
as a kid i understood how cassettes worked and i was experimenting on my own. i was born in 90s, so cassettes weren't that new, but still widely used. i tried putting computer data onto tape, but it didn't work that well without proper equipment, however i did manage to record pulses from a TV remote onto cassette.
i basically created a "macro" in 90s as kid. i connected 2 extra wires to TV remote's IR LED (one that sends signals) and connected those wires directly into microphone's input. i cut the microphone wire and connceted it directly to that IR LED, so signals were sent from TV remote into cassette player's mic input.
this allowed me to record those pulses onto cassette.
then i reversed the process and connected IR LED to speaker (player's output) and pointed the LED towards tv ... what do you know, it worked!
it was so amazing inventing stuff like that. it wasn't as high tech as the one seen on this video, but it was still cool concept.
i also remember some basic games that were on cassettes by using same method, but i think those cassettes needed a special player that had AV (audio video) output and was able to play the cassette back/forth at different speeds.
I actually remember watching this clip as a kid when it was first broadcast !
Seeing Judith takes me back to being a kid and this being on TV. I’m not sure how much I appreciated it as a little lad back then though. Nice to see she’s alive and well.
Judith Hann never dumbed down the tech unlike later iterations of TW. There was a time when you learned things from TW.
Later on, you just learned about things.
I’m glad I saw the Golden Age of TW with Raymond Baxter, Michael Rodd, William Woollard and Judith. I had just missed when James Burke was presenting.
Just said the same to a much younger mate of mine. People are only interested in the end result (as a general rule)... not interested in the consequences either.
Oh you watch any BBC science show now and its dumed down to tadpole level. Brian Cox going to 5 different exotic locations in a 5 minute section to try and fail to describe something that Judith would have popped out in 2 minites with a model and a diagram.
Judith was the standout presenter, but was one of probably one of only two with a science degree - in typical BBC style, most TW presenters were arts graduates. The more recent 'Bang goes the theory' showed how proper science could be made accessible to a TV audience.
Judith Hann and the other presenters on TW were a class above.
As a film and TV buff the VHS cassette was a game changer for me. Tape it and watch at your leisure,again and again.
Haven’t we come such a long way with amazing technology since then.
It's like some kind of weird time warp. 40 years forward in techology but 40 years backwards in TV presentation and quality.
Yes but it still amazes me that this was 40 years ago. The greatest leaps in computer technology seemed to be between the early 80s through 90s due to the home computer revolution and eventually, most everyone's home and work computer being an IBM compatible PC. Everything else followed and through the 2000s things just got a lot smaller and faster and now we're into the realms of AI (which frightens the crap out of me in the wrong hands)
Still got my Cassette deck ....analogue music forever..
Very interesting and really well presented!
Funnily enough, last month's Viz comic magazine had an '8 Ace' strip where a younger version of the 'thirsty family man' is lying on the floor as a kid in the 1970s watching 'Tomorrow's World' with the presenter spouting some rubbish about life in the 21st century being where we will all lead a life of luxury and plenty with dirt cheap electricity.
Read on to the final scene in the comic strip, set in the present. A poverty stricken character shivering in a dark freezing wrecked living room, with bust windows, slugs and mildew on the walls and a broken telly.
They should never have stopped/scrapped Tomorrow's World.
Today, BBC Click program is the closest we have ..
I think it was the case that the gap between experimental future tech and present day tech was closing.
The pace was just too fast for them to find futuristic tech in time before it existed in RL.
The name 'Tomorrow's World' no longer made sense when they featured a product you'd already bought and that had already broken and been thrown in the bin.
Can you imagine the BBC producing such a programme now ?
Clear concise intelligently presented for a knowledgeable audience thirsting for the latest in tech.
aaaaah....no. 👍
Spencer Kelly has been presenting BBC Click for over 20 years, but you can pretend it doesn't exist if you really want to.
I think this is what eventually became DCC (digital compact cassette). It wasn't released until 1992.
DCC used linear recording with 9 very narrow tracks per side, not helical scanning like video recorders or DAT.
But even with 9 tracks bitrate was much too low for uncompressed, CD quality audio so DCC used a lossy compression algorithm that was later standardized as part of mpeg 1.
DCC failed in the market. Must have been painful for all those people who worked on the product for such a long time.
DCC took far too long to come to market and by the time it did, CD was already establishing itself.
I bought a Marantz DD-82 DCC deck around 2001, for a knock-down price (about 25% of what it was originally sold for). I didn't use it much for DCC (although the recording quality was pretty good), but it was great at playing regular cassettes, of which I then had loads, especially damaged ones that would get snarled-up in an ordinary cassette deck.
The problem with music on cassettes being four generations old was that by the time they went on sale that particular genre of music had ceased to be popular leading to disgruntled music fans stuck listening to 1920's jazz. Progress is being made however and next year will see cassette owners finally at long last getting the opportunity to listen to Hip Hop.
The people at the Dolby laboratory were taking the hiss.
What's really weird is that I distinctly remember this lady as being one of the few presenters on the BBC who had a regional accent - but listening to it now, she sounds so upper class!
2:05 No degradation of copies. Here's where the recording industry sat up and took notice.
I loved tommorows world it was unmissable
I really do hope this digital stuff catches on!
NEVER!!!! 🧐
Just a passing fad.
Actual facts. Professionally presented. In a clear format. With no hype or ego. What happened? When did it all go wrong.
Money. The commercial angle. Tomorrow's World was about presenting the facts and the science. Nowadays it's about presenting a "product" in competition with another "product" in order to make a commercial success. RUclips is full of it ... and it's hard to feel that you are getting a truly independent and informed presentation in many cases.
Using the whole width of a tape reminds me of my 4-track recording days using a TASCAM PortaStudio 5 multi-track recorder, albeit that was still only in analogue. It did use the whole width though and it ran faster than normal tape speed
So well explained and presented.
Excellent stuff.
Loved this as a kid.
Personally i Still prefer analog. The first deck she used (a model im familiar with) has impeccable tape speed stability and vanishingly low noise.
God! I actually remember this! I had just left school and was about to start my very first job! Suddenly feel very old!
I am really looking forward to this. I can’t imagine a world where music is digital.
Yeh this is really going to change the woyld
Imagine if they found a way to hold the digital information on something like a record, so that it isn't affected by the wear and tear of the tape - sort of like a disc. I doubt it would need to be as big as a record, so could be quite compact. I wonder what they would call it ........
@@crisofer954 now that’s a little too futuristic
@@crisofer954 Laserdisc 🙂
Yeah, imagine making perfect copies of FM radio! What a time to be alive!😅
Tomorrow's World was the very first time I saw the internet being demonstrated.
It was then just a communications device between a select few.
I cannot recall who the presenter was at the time, but the person on the other side asked how 'Randy Andy' was.
Searched high & low on the internet for this clip but to no avail.
'The information superhighway'
Great concept, but it's a shame that we got the watered-down version of DCC, which was capped at 14khz. Owned the Panasonic version, it was okay but a bit of a flop as a format. Ended up using DAT, which was much nicer, though ultimately still a fragile format. All these years later, I'm still using analog cassettes recorded on a top notch Sony deck and couldn't be happier. 🙂
Meanwhile in 1982, cd's were also starting to become a thing in Japan. Much like the vcr/beta-max, lcd/plasma screen, blu-ray/hd-dvd competitions, this was on the losing side.
i can't wait for that to come on sale. Looks great. Just imagine the possibilities!
I used to love watching Tomorrow's World on the BBC here in England in the 1970's/80's, I think it was on at 7pm and followed by Top of the Pops . . . . . memories lol
The time and effort that had gone into that that tape head prop too. Proper good. Can you imagine TV being done this well today? I remember looking forward to watching Tomorrow's World (on a Thursday, I think) back in the 1980s as a child. If you want yesterday's quality of Tomorrow's World, one must tune into decent RUclips channels today.
Wow I can't wait 3more years for all these engineering marvels!
Converted to "computer code", you say? Sounds like the future to me.
Nah, it'll never 'appen
Excellent presentation and explanation
CDs were launched on March 2, 1983 in North America and Europe- only 9 days before this broadcast aired. Digital cassette tapes never stood a chance.
" the CD-R specification was first published in 1988"
"CD-R recording systems available in 1990 were similar to a washing machine and costing $35,000"
so as you can see...Digital cassette tapes DID stood a chance... ;-)
where has your other comment gone? " Actually, no, you're very wrong. The CD vs tape war was already won in the mid-80s. As per me: I lived through that era and remember CDs in the 80s. So, I....."
anyway...a "war" between CDs and tapes in the 80's? what war?
you wanted to buy an album...you obviously got the CD,if you had no CD player...you got the cassette,you wanted to copy an album...cassette,wanted to listen to your music in your car....cassette.
there was no war...you just did what you had to do to listen to music...the end ;-)
and if you remember the era...you should agree :-)
@@vasopel My other comment is still there. I haven't deleted anything. You should maybe adjust your settings. And yes, I was there in the 80s. But I see your stark desire to be right at all costs has led you to semantics and off-topic ramblings. To clarify, just like the Betamax vs VHS war or the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war, these "wars" of like-minded formats were not fought with bullets, grenades, guns nor were there actual people fighting. I guess I need to clarify that for someone like yourself. Also, we are not talking about and have NEVER been talking about analog audio cassette tapes. If you watched the video, we're talking about DATs: DIGITAL AUDIO TAPES. So, go back, read my comments in context and have a blessed evening. 😘
@@VintageTVMemories that comment is still invisible ,only you can see it (for the moment).
anyway...are you "explaining" to me what a "format war" is? hahaha... :-D
well I'm telling you there wasn't one (between CDs and Cassette) ,yes there was one between Beta and VHS...because those formats both do the same thing...play AND record video.
yeah yeah context is important I know...what does that have to do with anything?my original comment-answer to you was about digital tapes wasn't it? bye ;-)
@@vasopel I hope your mental illness is diagnosed and I hope your insurance pays the full amount for your medication. Best of luck to you.
I worked on Judith's Morris Minor back in the 1990's that was totally analogue (Lechlade-on-Thames)
I loved Tomorrow’s World and she was my favorite presenter on it. My goodness, I was 12 when this aired! Is she even still alive?
The birth of Philips DCC!👍
Not really, more like an early format of digital tape that did not make it to the market and has nothing to do with Philips, who launched THEIR format of digital tape a long decade later.
@@BilisNegra I'm not so sure of that. She did say it came from Japan, and I would hazard a guess it's from Sony. Sony worked with Philips for years on many developments, including the Compact Disc and improving the Compact Cassette. And it was only in the late 80s, that Philips and Sony ended their technology partnership. Philips made DCC in 1992, which looks very much like this prototype uses a very similar linear multi-track system to DCC. And Sony went on to make Minidisc also in 1992.
So I'm thinking that some of the engineering and research work that went into this 1982 prototype, may have eventually been used in DCC ten years later.
They were very different formats developed independently. This format (DCC) worked like a normal cassette recording with the information being recorded straight along the length of the tape as they so wonderfully demonstrated in this video. Phillips created DAT (Digital Audio Tape) which used a spinning rotary recording head that laid down a series of helical tracks going at an angle across the width of the tape the same way that VHS video recorders worked. I would have preferred the mechanical simplicity of DCC as it didn't require all the extra mechanics to pull the tape out of the case in order to wrap it around the rotating head in DAT. In the end, I skipped over digital cassette tech and went straight to CD's. I ditched CD's for MP3's very early on and haven't looked back. Actually, I have recently gone full circle and restored my dad's cassette deck from 1982 in order to play back some cassette recordings of his guest appearances on "The Outdoors Show" which aired on WGN 720am in Chicago back around the same time frame. I've digitized them into MP3's to preserve and share them with my 2 sisters (and their children) who are all that's left of my immediate family. They hadn't heard my dad's voice in close to 40 years, hearing him again brought tears to their eyes.
Just a year later the compact disc blew it all away 😀
Back when TV presenters had a brain and treated the viewers as if they did too.
Click! is in no way different to Tomorrow's World so that time clearly still exists.
43 years ago, I miss those days !
This is so cool. I was actually recently thinking about if anyone ever did something like this since I thought of how video game code could be put on a cassette and interpreted by a computer and wondered if the same could be done with music to make it higher quality.
This Japanese prototype did not make it to market, but a decade later Philips launched something similar, the DCC. I said similar, not the same, it's a separate development.
Sony and Mitsubishi both worked on formats known as Digital Audio Stationary Head or DASH. Both produced 1/4" pro machines "Similar to the analogue 1/4" demo'ed first. These were obviously for the studio environment. However, Sony was also working on a DASH cassette at the same time as their R-DAT format, they called it S-DAT later on Stationary head Digital Audio Tape. The R in R-DAT was for rotary, a helically rotating head similar to a video recording system. All the domestic digital tape formats failed to catch on as Phillips analogue cassette was good enough for the majority of those who used it. Then for portable playback CD players were shrunk enough to be viable. The brilliant mini-disc failed to get mass market sales, by then MP3 players and i-Pods (Yuck Spit) came along. Which meant none-real time transfers made usage much more convenient.
CDs became widely available fairly soon after this demonstration. Tapes suddenly seemed very old fashioned as they didn't contain lasers, but they survived for a bit as they were more rugged and didn't tend to jump/skip when played on the move (in cars and in personal stereos).
Imagine the price back then for the reel to reel, and especially that second reel to reel! 😨
When they showed this off, they started with the minidisc, with yes, compression but in the end, quality in such a small space. Then DCC started, and when they had to rewind/fast forward, everyone started giggling.
This isn't DCC, it's ten years before DCC was a twinkle in Philips eye.
@@kevinh96 Clearly DCC was developed using these same approaches ... the fact that it was a different company's engineers that kicked it off is neither here nor there IMHO.
This was BBC at it’s best. This was a prime time evening show. Now the BBC are more interested trash soaps and “if you’ve been affected by this programme, call our helpline” show endings.
I guess it never did go on sale, but DAT tapes eventually came into being. DAT was held back by the greedy recording industry that was worried about pirating. They were used as data backup units for PCs and other computers though. I have a DAT tape kicking around somewhere in my attic.
I like how it immediately drops out :))
Interesting to see that there was a successful attempt, as demonstrated here by this prototype deck, to record digital audio to standard analog audio cassettes using the same longitudinal multi-track scheme that Philips' DCC format would later employ, with the difference of this unit being demonstrated using standard PCM as CDs & DAT tapes used, I'd presume (rather than the PASC compression DCC would use). I wonder why this never came out 3 years later in the mid 80s, as Judith mentions that it would.
I wonder what manufacturer developed this prototype (it's obviously a Japanese company, as mentioned). Even more surprising to see that it has text & graphics display capability too, a la CD+G.
And the digital open-reel deck featured at 1:56 is 3M's "Digital Recording System", a 32-track 1" machine (running at a brisk 45 ips tape speed as you can see, most analog open-reel decks like the 2-track 1/4" Studer A80 at 1:15, run at 15 or 30 ips) that was one of the first commercially available digital audio tape recorders introduced by 3M in 1978. It was actually developed by 3M in collaboration with the BBC, who was also developing a digital audio recording system in their research labs prior. 3M also had a 4-track version of the deck using 1/4" tape, which was sold as a bundle with the 32-track machine to recording studios as the "Digital Mastering System" (the 4-track machine could be used as a mixdown deck for final stereo or quadraphonic mastering from tapes played back on the 32-track recorder).
An informative comment. I thought this was DCC at first but then she mentioned Japan.
The amp it’s connected to appears to be a JVC A-X9, and the analogue cassette deck is a JVC DD-9J, so JVC maybe?
@@danielrfry - Good call, thank you. I was going to ask if anyone knew what company made the kit. Interesting that they didn’t run with it, only for it to be picked up a decade later and launched as DCC (minus the graphics capability).
It's an interesting demonstration indeed. I wonder what the specs of this digital recording system were. I suppose there might have been some compromises compared to DAT or DCC, which came later. Maybe the quality wasn't as good as CD because of using a lower recording frequency (32 KHz?) or maybe they recorded the cassettes only in one direction and at double speed, lowering the runtime significantly. I can also see the music labels might have stopped them from releasing it as it didn't have a copy protection system, I presume.
@@MacXpert74 I'll bet you're right on money on those reasons why it wasn't released. It could've very well had some shortcomings that the technology of the era wasn't fully developed enough yet (or developed at all) to economically and practically address (shortcomings overcome with DCC later on, I'd reckon, as the technology progressed by then), to make it a format that would be a practical alternative to analog cassettes. As DCC aligned itself to be, featuring analog cassette playback compatibility. I wonder if this prototype could also play analog cassettes.
And a possible lack of a copy protect system for this prototype could've definitely kiboshed it from being developed and released. Just look at the whole outrageous fit the RIAA pitched when DAT came out in America around 1987, leading up to SCMS and the Audio Home Recording Act. :)
I'd love to know some more detail on this device. The video doesn't mention compression. In 1982 the best modems could get 2400 baud (bits per second) from a 3.4 khz phone line. Extending that math to 8 channels at 16Khz gives only 5.6 khz frequency response with 8bit samples. Its possible this device was using cutting edge modulations that would be seen in modems for a few years. Modems eventually maxed out at 56Kbaud (really 53 IIRC). Trying that math might get to 2 channels of 11khz audio and 12bit samples. Pretty mediocre digital audio. The MP3 style compression was still 8 years away. There were earlier speech-oriented compression schemes. Even a 4 to 1 compression scheme might give another 2 bits per sample.
Well she said the cassette runs ‘faster’ - probably very very much faster 😊
The copy of a copy of a copy can sound exactly the same?! Publishers rejoiced!
Music labels got really stressed when they saw this, I'm sure! This is probably one of the reasons this format wasn't brought to market. The later DAT recorder did have a 'protection' against direct digital copying if I remember correctly.
Wait 'till they find out about "bit-rot".
@@MacXpert74 You could always record a CD onto DAT via normal line level analogue and the resulting copy was audibly indistinguishable ... so then, if you wanted, you could make infinite copies of that immaculate version if you were intent on piracy. The paranoia of the music industry was always greater than the risks in reality.
loved this programme, growing up in the 80s thursday was good tv on BBC Top Of the Pops and Tomorrow's world double bill
It’s funny now we have Digital that some people want vinyl and cassette tape 😅
Not many amongst those who had them the first time around. That's one bit of nostalgia I can do without - along with film cameras.
These are the idiots who think that hissy analog is pure, while digital produces square waves.
I get why vinyl has had a resurgence. During the height of CD’s popularity there were still proponents of vinyl and decent turntables where still being manufactured.
But I don’t understand this recent cassette revival. As a pre recorded tapes played on a high end player would sound inferior to a CD on an entry level hifi. And the stopped making decent cassette players 30 years ago.
And a year after this... CD! lol