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Re: I was almost there but closer

> At the time, we were told that there were three constraints: the
> disc had to fit in a DIN-standard car dashboard cutout; the
> president of Sony wanted Beethoven's 9th on one side; and the
> technology had to be ready to go, not "we're working on it."

I attended both Philips' April 1979 technology demonstration in
Eindhoven, Holland, where the disc was smaller and used 14-bit
encoding, and the spring 1981 Sony press conference in Salzburg
Austria, where the disc size was increased to its definitive size
and the coding was increased to 16 bits. This was the event where
Herbert von Karajan and Sony's Akio Morita jointly announced that the
increase in size was to allow enough playing time to accommodate
Beethoven's Symphony 9.

The increase to 16-bit words had been opposed by Philips, but was
made possible by Sony's Toshi Doi, who developed the necessary strong
error correction/concealment algorithms. (Dr Doi in more recent years
was the man heading Sony's robot dog project.)

The impression I was given at that time was that 16-bits and 48kHz
sampling was very much the leading edge of technology. Studer's Roger
Lagadec, who later worked for Sony, told me when I interviewed him
for HFN magazine in 1982 that many engineers wanted higher data
resolution but for the intended purpose, which was to replace the
Compact Cassette as a mass-market music carrier, 16/44k1 was more
than sufficient.

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile



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