DCC... There Is Still Music Left to Write (2019) - full transcript

... In 42 degrees ...

[ALARM BLARING]

[Music]

Come in... Zone 18!

I'm picking up this very clear sound.

[Man's voice]

We're getting a signal from Zone 18.

All we know is that it's

some form of music.

Some very clear music.

[Louis Armstrong singing "Cheek to Cheek"]

Heaven...

I'm in heaven...

[Man's voice]

It's a sound -- very clear sound actually.

We're picking it up everywhere now.

[Opera Music]

[Man's voice]

We're getting signals from all over the world.

[90s Dance Music]

[Male Journalist]

What kind of signal is it?

Can you tell us anything?

[Politician]

I can only assure you that

we're in complete control of the situation.

We'll continue to analyze this global phenomenon.

When we know, you'll know.

[ALBERT BALENDRAN -- DCC COLLECTOPHILE]

Why is DCC a little bit more superior than CD?

So... My reasoning comes back from my experience listening to vinyl.

Everybody knows that vinyl has more

rich and warm tones.

The timbre is real bright and it gives you an airiness in the sound

So I discovered the same experience

when I listened to a DCC.

Even though it's digital, the digitization of music

represented by that... is so much warmer.

It's closer to a vinyl than listening to a CD.

[JEREMY HEIDEN -- MUSICIAN AND FORMAT FANATIC]

DCC is different from other formats I've recorded on,

because it's a cassette that has the

sound quality of a compact disc.

And it also incorporates so much artwork...

because you can fit a lot of paperwork into

the DCC case.

So I can design this as if I'm designing a vinyl.

[GIJS WIRTZ -- DCC MASTERMIND]

In the 80s I was asked to...

produce a business plan for Digital Audio Tape, DAT.

I came to the disappointing conclusion that

DAT actually would never work for Philips.

[JAN TIMMER -- FORMER PRESIDENT, PHILIPS]

You have to have people in the hardware industry...

join the system.

And that's where the problem arose.

Because Sony, our... with whom we created

the Compact Disc system...

had a clear preference.

It became clear to me, while banging some

walls down...

that you had to approach the whole problem in a

completely different way,

and that was where the concept of

DCC was born.

[BRAM HOOGENDOORN -- DCC ARCHITECT]

A system that would be backwards compatible

with compact cassette.

That was also very difficult because...

Philips... we had to do it because Philips thought...

not to introduce another new cartridge system.

[GERARD LOKHOFF -- SYSTEM ENGINEER]

One of the core problems that Lorend [Vries]

was struggling with...

was the difference between CD and DCC.

You have to understand CD only has

one sampling frequency,

and DCC had to accommodate three

different sampling frequencies for the audio.

And it wasn't until I was sitting behind a desk,

an antique desk at my home...

working as we at that time did,

trying to solve all the problems that we had...

that I realized that we needed to make a clear split

between an audio subsystem and a data subsystem,

where the audio was encoded in one part

and the data, basically raw bits,

were recorded on a tape in a

separate system.

That turned out to be a key decision,

because it led to the...

to a core patent, which eventually became

part of all MP3 decoders.

Although the ear is incredibly sensitive to

lots of things that we pick up in sound and music,

It is completely deaf at other places where

louder sounds are masking away...

the capacity for human beings to hear

weaker, parallel sounds.

Which means that in the old systems we were

delivering a lot of coding room...

to sounds that you would never hear.

and if we could free that coding room to

what you were really hearing,

we could of course save a lot of space and

get everything handled on tape.

But in parallel, It turned out that we could even

achieve more than the CD quality

Even significantly more than CD quality.

So we have to find out if it was possible

to go to a frequency of 200 kilobits per second.

Which was basically the capacity we could offer.

And it was a lucky shot because we found out that...

compression with around 200 kilohertz

delivered a very good sound quality.

DCC was important for me.

This was a period of massive restructuring,

And we were constantly examining projects...

on their profitability.

[DAVID HILL -- TAPEMATIC UK]

We were the only company

that was manufacturing machinery

to manufacture DCC cassettes.

Personally...

There was already the CD...

prominent in the marketplace.

There was also the MiniDisc that had had some

teething troubles...

with the compression and how it worked...

The problem for me is that I didn't quite understand,

personally...

where DCC would fill the void.

We had a problem that DAT would never see

pre-recorded software.

It was of no interest for the music industry.

And it was very expensive...

and in no way near the price levels of

what Compact Cassette was doing.

So there I was facing the problem that

DAT wouldn't work for Philips,

that DAT probably wouldn't work at all.

At the other hand. The music industry

could be interested in supporting a recording format.

The other thing which is...

which I learned during those days,

because of my contacts in the music industry,

was that...

They had a lot of detailed marketing information,

specifically Polygram,

the Philips daughter, now called Universal...

on which kind of consumers were buying what.

And what we saw is that there was a distinct kind of

difference between two groups of consumers,

And we for that reason called it also a

dual carrier market:

People buying either on disc or on cassette... on tape.

The differences were very significant.

If you had a disc buyer --

initially the vinyl record buyer and

later the compact disc buyer --

you would typically talk about somebody buying...

initially in his first year when he bought a new

CD player or a turntable...

Something like 10 CD's or records...

and then gradually every year it would slow down.

But he would go to the music shop

and he would have a keen interest in...

building up his own kind of musical library.

Whereas if you look at a cassette buyer,

you would see that they would probably buy

only one or two cassettes per year.

The fact that both markets,

when they were fully developed,

are equally significant,

is that there were so many cassette players.

It's probably the most successful product we've ever

launched as a consumer electronic industry,

and certainly at that moment.

Because when we looked into the market at that time,

We had around a billion cassette players

in use in the market.

Which means that there were something like

five cassette players, I think, per household,

worldwide in the civilized world.

At the start of such a venture --

this was also the case with the Compact Disc --

You cannot be sure of the numbers.

We... For instance with the Compact Disc,

we didn't do any market research.

We simply believed in the product...

Without initially being able to put numbers to it.

We couldn't foresee... We believed in the product.

But we couldn't foresee then

that it would become a worldwide success.

The same happened with DCC.

You had to believe In the future of the DCC,

you had to spend the money upfront...

without being sure that you could earn it back.

We were in the midst of huge

restructurings of the company,

but it was my belief that no company can

survive with restructuring.

You have to find new products.

You have to find new challenges,

also for people.

And we had the brains,

we had the people who could do it.

Because Compact Disc was a major achievement,

but in terms of audio compression,

the demands for DCC were even higher than that.

And it was quite a brilliant job of our engineers

to have succeeded in doing it.

Like all the other gadgets and products

we make in the industry,

also music carriers follow a normal life cycle pattern.

Normally products would live something like...

in the marketplace... like five to ten years,

and that 10 is already long.

And they would go through a phase that only a

few people buy initially,

and then more and more people would buy...

You reach a maximum sales level

and then it would decline again...

and people lose their interest.

In the music industry, with music carriers,

you will see the same phenomenon.

But the major difference is

that it will last a full generation.

Music is effectively collected by a generation.

As soon as they build up their music collection,

they hang on to it for the rest of their lives.

And so we would see life cycles which would

last as long as 30 or 40 years...

and because they last so long,

people tend to totally forget about the phenomenon

that you have a... like with every other product...

a phase that it is popular and innovative and hot.

Then it becomes a commodity;

it reaches its maximum sales levels...

and then it starts to lose interest and drops down.

And that happened dramatically with the

long play record in the seventies.

The record industry started to complain

and blamed the problem on all kinds of phenomena...

like home taping, and the radio having

too popular shows...

and [deejays] not talking through [records]

and what-have-you.

But in reality it was nothing else than that

the long play record was at the end of its life cycle.

And the music industry got into this very serious

financial crisis because of that.

CD, for that reason, in the end, when it was accepted,

grew very quickly into that gap.

Basically, the music lover could again start to collect

his favorite music on a fantastic new format.

The Musicassette was effectively going

ten years after the vinyl record in its life cycle.

And indeed in '88/'89 we saw and expected the

Musicassette go over its top and start to decline.

So we warned the music industry --

some of them saw it themselves ---

It was wonderful that CD was growing so quickly,

but if they had no replacement for the music cassette,

they would again run into serious financial trouble.

So there was a significant interest in the music industry

to look for a replacement. And that of course could

help us in a very effective way to

launch the new digital cassette system

if indeed it would provide...

a successor for the music industry for the

pre-recorded music cassette.

And that's where the cooperation with the

music industry was secured.

So the combination of doing something to

copy protection,

and the fact that they were indeed aware of the need

to start working on the replacement

made them a partner in the project.

After the demonstration with Mr Timmer

we at Philips, we started with

starting up IC design, etcetera.

And then also we had to look for a partner in Japan.

Sony was a little bit angry about not using

the R-DAT system for audio.

So they said "no" to DCC.

So we went to Matsushita and we gave the

same demonstration to Matsushita.

That was also successful and so

Matsushita decided to go on with DCC.

And my personal thoughts are that the decision

was also a little bit forced by...

the experience with Compact Disc, because...

In the past also Compact Disc was proposed to

Matsushita before it was proposed to Sony,

and Matsushita said "no" at that moment

And now they thought "we don't want to miss the boat

for the second time, so you can call on us also...

"We go on with DCC".

At that time the music industry -- basically CBS --

came with a proposal...

that everybody making DAT players should install

a device that could detect a certain tone...

which they would inject into the music.

And if that tone would be detected,

it was a copyrighted pre-recorded CD.

And then you...

The machine should stop making a recording.

That was a theme that had come up with the

Compact Disc as well.

We even had a big international meeting in Vancouver.

I shall never forget.

That was before the music industry had

embraced the CD system.

And that was...

centering on the possibility of...

preventing copies to be made.

Obviously the consumer electronics industry were

absolutely not prepared to...

go that far and make it

totally impossible to copy anything.

But technically this could be circumvented quite easily.

At that point. I came with a proposal to

make an alternative system.

Which has later been called Serial Copy

Management System,

where consumers could make a first-generation copy.

But the copy it would make,

would effectively block further copies.

So that at least it could be contained --

the amount of copies.

We got increasing support to indeed get kind of an

SCMS system.

I was very enthusiastic.

Coming from the music industry,

which was my previous job,

I immediately recognized the potential.

And particularly...

Not only was the sound much better,

but I had also said...

you have to modernize the presentation.

The cassette has to become sexier than it was.

There was no doubt in my mind that the

packaging of the traditional cassette...

wasn't good enough.

It didn't express enough the...

upgraded beautiful version of DCC and...

And this product...

was much more elegant... was much more sexy.

And cost a little bit of money but that was worth it

And I thought that I came up with a beautiful solution.

This was a little bit too simple.

A little bit too...

And certainly too old-fashioned

And we had learned with Compact Disc

how important packaging was.

Mr Timmer told us...

that he wanted to have

a nice-to-have item.

So a cartridge that could cost something

but it would have a nice...

picture on it and a small booklet with an explanation.

the same as with the Compact Disc.

The system had to be up and running in 1991.

And that was probably the most difficult part

of the project.

It was the first to do what was later being explained

as "concurrent engineering".

A kind of project where we would do research,

pre-development, development and manufacturing...

in parallel.

And... It had its positive and negatives.

I'll give two examples: ...

on the thin film heads operation we suffered

enormous setbacks.

But on the coding side, making a --

what we in those days still called a

compression... a new compression algorithm...

We were far more successful

than we ever had expected.

So things rolled completely different from...

how you expected them to go in the beginning.

A cornerstone of the plan was to make use of

an existing thin-film head plant.

To begin with, the agreement with Control Data

were made on a very loose basis.

It might have been better to either have

fixed contracts with them on what to do and when...

and who...

or to even buy the whole operation.

And the second thing was that it was not

managed very effectively,

because after a year, we discovered that

Control Data had been doing virtually nothing.

So then Philips had to suddenly go into an operation of

doing research on thin-film heads...

Doing pre-development on thin film heads...

And starting up and building a factory

for thin film heads manufacturing in parallel.

Effectively, we lost two years and ran

out of the time window...

which was initially foreseen for the plan.

There was a general atmosphere that...

In some quarters...

that the cassette was old-fashioned.

And that the future lies with the disc.

[JORN SIEMONSMA -- EARLY ADOPTER]

The first time that I saw DCC was in 1992...

on the Philips booth and that was

at the Firato in Amsterdam.

[TECHMOAN -- DCC REJUVENATOR]

Now the first time I saw DCC...

was just before it was launched. It was at a

Hi-Fi show in Manchester.

So that would have been in '92 or perhaps

just at the start of '93, I'm not too sure.

This was a show that was open to the public.

Although there was a room off to one side, which is

where the DCC and the MiniDisc was demonstrated...

Head-to-head effectively at the same time

because we were being launched together.

I'm not sure whether I got into this room

in the capacity of pretending

I was a member of the press, or a Hi-Fi retailer...

I used to do a lot of things like that at the time:

pretending I was something more important than I was,

to get myself into events that showed things that weren't

normally available to the public.

But it could be that this just was an event that was

available to the public, I can't quite remember.

However, I was in this room,

perhaps with fifty or so other people...

And it was all chairs laid out at the front.

There was a person from Philips

and a person from Sony...

demonstrating their respective products.

And I seem to remember they both had a Hi-Fi type unit,

And at the end they both showed a

portable version as well.

But it was mostly concentrating on the

Hi-Fi units at the time.

Sony demonstrated the MiniDisc first, I believe,

and went through...

They showed the products and got it out,

put it in the players...

Showed how the text went on the screen,

showing the titles,

which, you know, was quite a nice thing at the time.

Remember, CD's didn't tend to do that and of course

cassettes didn't do that either.

So that was quite Impressive.

You skipped to a certain track, jump to track eight,

it'd start playing immediately...

Jump back to track two, the name of the title

would come on the screen.

It was all very nice, seemed pretty impressive.

And then the Philips guy did the same thing with DCC

And he put it in, it did the same thing...

titles appeared on the screen

and it was all looking good...

until he skipped to a track.

So he skips to track eight and...

It doesn't do it instantly, like the mini disc.

There's this delay and there's this sound of a

tape player fast-forwarding.

It actually got a bit of a giggle in the room

because everyone's sitting there waiting for this thing...

to get to this track that he selected.

I saw also the Sony booth and looked at the MiniDisc.

But the look and feel of the equipment made me

decide to go for DCC.

[JEREMY HEIDEN -- MUSICIAN AND FORMAT FANATIC]

The first player I ever had...

and the first time I heard about the

Digital Compact Cassette was with this player.

This was a store model that I got at Radio Shack

and local in my area.

[JAC GOUDSMIT -- ULTIMATE DCC NERD]

This is what I call "The Precious".

I bought this at the HCC Dagen in Utrecht.

I saw the superior quality of the reproduction

of DCC cassettes...

And I just fell in love with it...

Because I did not know that there was a

medium on tape...

that was digitized that was able to reproduce

almost to the exact of the original.

I grew up in Eindhoven, the hometown of Philips, and...

Yeah, I'm sure that gave me some sort of bias towards

Philips products and Philips technology.

I've always been a big fan of their technology,

their inventions...

Maybe not so much of their company policies...

But that certainly played a role in my being a fan of DCC.

This passion grew out from zero to sixty

in three months.

This is my portable. This one is quite special to me.

And the reason that it's special is...

I used it for four years on my bike

when I went to college.

It was a 22-mile ride every day.

So it's maybe 2,000 hours that I used it

in all the time.

And it never left me down.

I think they mentioned the prices and they were

way beyond anything I'd ever be able to afford.

Though the DCC, from what I experienced, is a

superior format compared to a CD player...

in the reproduction of the sound...

it still failed to continue its legacy

throughout the years.

It had a short-lived lifetime from the early 90s

and died here in America in '96.

It didn't really offer me anything I needed.

I mean I had a CD player and I had a cassette player.

And I had a cassette Walkman

and that was all I needed.

I could record off the radio onto cassettes

and listen to those in my Walkman...

I could get cheap cassettes in the stores.

More often than not, the reason I bought a cassette

was because it was cheaper than a Compact Disc.

Sometimes I couldn't afford to buy the CDs.

I bought a lot of import albums.

I believe that, you know, marketing was

part of the issue.

CD was a booming industry.

Everybody had a CD player.

Everybody could do CD recording.

Actually, we should have been concentrating much more

on having much earlier the cheaper models...

and the boom-boxes in the market place.

We were already running a little bit in the trap that the

coding quality was so dramatically good...

that the whole projects had started to focus,

maybe even too much, on the high-end market.

I never saw any DCC presence in the stores

in the area that I lived.

I used to go to work in Manchester,

I used to go around the shops...

virtually every day, just to pass a bit of time

at lunchtime.

Never saw any DCC equipment

or DCC tapes in any stores.

I even worked in Manchester's HMV store.

The flagship store for Manchester.

If they would have released that five years earlier...

it probably would have established a

great foothold in the market.

The big question is: What went wrong?

One thing I already mentioned was of course that

we were running out of the time window.

The whole problem with the heads...

and although we fixed it in two years

basically meant that we were losing two years.

The second thing which we absolutely had not foreseen

was the cost price of Compact Cassette,

and the further life of Compact Cassette.

Cassette mechanism manufacturing went to

one big plant...

which was producing cassette mechanisms

365 days per year.

And that meant that, to our enormous surprise...

Cassettes became at a cost price reduction

of 30 to 50 percent in the market place.

So we were suddenly facing a

completely unforeseen price gap...

between cassette mechanisms and

DCC cassette mechanisms.

Because cassettes started to, so massively now...

penetrate the market that you would find them

in toys for children and literally everything.

You would get them for free with all kinds of educational courses and they were literally thrown around...

Because they no longer cost anything.

And that had an effect on the whole cassette market...

dying out slower than what was expected.

So if you look in retrospect to what went wrong...

The real competitor of Digital Compact cassette

was not MiniDisc, as some people claim.

But it was the Compact Cassette itself.

We couldn't compete with Compact Cassette.

The third thing which we have overlooked or

couldn't basically know in those days...

is that, to innovate at a time of problematic sales

in the trade...

That happened with Compact Disc extremely easy.

But this time we would go to the music trade...

at a time that they were very successful

in selling Compact Disc with ever-growing quantities.

So where we were successful in convincing the

music industry to support the whole operation...

with Digital Compact Cassette and

releasing a lot of titles...

the music trade proved to be a lot harder.

There you will find people who understand the story

and want to cooperate and they did help a little bit.

But they think much more on a day-to-day basis.

And if something doesn't move within a week, they start

to already push whatever they have in inventory...

more back into the shop.

So what we saw is that instead of

prominently promoting DCC in all the music stores...

it very quickly went into the dark corners of the shop

and was ever shrunk in size.

Simply because they were earning a fortune out of

Compact Disc in those days and they didn't need it.

So it's probably necessary to innovate

something like that...

not when it's before the top of the market, but after.

And when there's a little amount of pain in the market and a need to go for such an effort.

A project that has cost a lot of money

-- we invested a lot of money in DCC --

and didn't show...

a quick enough upturn in sales...

Then you come to the conclusion that

it is not worth it to continue.

Sony would have been of great help of course,

because they have a...

very significant marketing experience

in launching innovative products.

Philips... We all said the best thing that

Philips ever owned, was the relationship with Sony.

They have, in that sense, a much better understanding

on how slow a market can react...

and how long you have to hang on.

They should have asked the consumers

what they wanted.

I think a great problem with the DCC in the eyes of

many people who bought it -- or didn't buy it --

was that it couldn't record analog cassettes.

I think the comeback of the digital Compact Cassette

was going to happen...

just like the comeback of every audio format

that we had out and we kind of love.

The digital compact cassette was...

I knew it was going to come back,

but I didn't expect it to be like this but...

professionally releasing a new title on the DCC format

is, I believe, what is really sparking...

a lot of the newer interest in this.

Because if you really liked the Digital Compact Cassette,

you now can buy brand new titles...

2017 and beyond on your favorite formats.

A lot of people miss the old formats and miss

having their own media and not just...

downloading their songs.

I think people like to have something tangible.

And... well, if we get a video channel like TechMoan

that pays attention to DCC...

I think that really helped with with the revival of DCC.

I first heard about...

the revival of interest, I was surprised.

But also...

It gives me also a feeling of satisfaction that...

probably my initial reaction, years back...

that there is potential -- there was...

there would be potential in DCC...

came true after all.

You know...

That comes back to pride of ownership.

The DCC museum is really making the comeback of the Digital Compact Cassette exciting.

So, Dr DCC came in the picture and he started in

doing his own investigation...

how to revive and restore all the players.

When TechMoan released his video talking about the

Digital Compact Cassette...

in oddity formats, that probably was one of the

number one promotional reasons...

that explains this comeback.

[TECHMOAN'S VOICE]

"Every now and again, I put out a video...

"featuring a few unusual recordings I've collected

over the previous months.

"Well, this video is going to be the third in that series...

"and in this one I'll be featuring the latest release

on Digital Compact Cassette."

And the good thing about DCC is that perhaps

it didn't last that long.

So there aren't that many things to collect.

There aren't that many different players,

there aren't that many different tapes.

So if you're interested in collecting something,

it's quite a nice thing to collect.

You know, it's not an infinite amount of things to buy.

Say, for example, you just decided...

"Rght, I've got to start collecting Compact Discs".

Well, you could take the rest of your life, doing that!

"Now, they do an outstanding job with these.

It's like stepping back in time to the 1990s...

"when you take the shrink-wrap off one.

"And I've mentioned before how much I like

DCC's packaging and how well it all fits together...

"But now I've had more time to think about it...

"I've got to say that out of all the pre-recorded formats

I've held in my hands,

"DCC is the most pleasing to me

"it's just so well thought out."

it's a little bit sad, but the resurgence of the format

is amazing.

I think it's exciting. Everybody still has them.

You can still find a lot of these and the collectors are really...

With the internet out the way it is, the

collectors are really going crazy.

It's fun. It's fun to have this format

because it's exciting...

and now everyone can learn about

what we pretty much missed out on.

So these are new DCC tapes!

Unbelievable!

Production date 2017.

How is it possible?

It is very unusual to be to be confronted...

with something of your... in your past...

that I never knew would happen.

So I will listen to this...

Today I like to record from blu-ray,

especially live music.

Sometimes I make also mix tapes from vinyls,

12 inches for example.

If I make those recordings it's for me easy to use

to do plug and play.

So I can directly listen to the music in good quality.

Why collect?

Well... Simple enough for me.

Because I really love the format.

It is part of me that keeps the drive of collecting,

because I discover new things...

from collecting DCC cassettes.

And... You know, I even collect artists that

I have no idea who they are.

The success of...

Let's call it electronic delivery systems,

like Spotify and others...

is embraced...

very largely by the young generation.

But it has the psychological disadvantage...

that music becomes a kind of commodity.

A push of the button, there it comes.

But it's not yours, it's in a computer somewhere,

to which you have access.

And I think music is so personal...

that this misses out on the important point...

of pride of ownership.

And if I see now the resurgence of vinyl and

cassette and so on...

I think this is because there is a part of the population...

who want to own something.

Who want to be proud of it.

Who want to consider it their own taste,

their own collection.

It's almost like a camaraderie

between me and this format.

Because I want... first of all to... you know...

to bring this back to life...

When I was approaching the twentieth anniversary of my first album, we were going to do kind of a retrospective...

definitive collection of everything I've done

into one package.

And I designed that around the vinyl.

I knew I wanted the vinyl, and I knew I wanted cassette

and I want a Compact Disc...

But I really wanted MiniDisc,

and playing with mini disc I realized...

if we're this far...

Let's put them on every format I can find.

And DCC was an amazing journey...

cuz we didn't know how to do this.

So these are the signals that go between the

DCC-175 and the computer...

that it's connected to with the DCC link cable,

and what you see here on the screen is...

The bottom three tracks are the PASC signal,

output from the tape.

This is the PASC input from the tape,

and this is a clock signal.

...Give me some more information about how

DCC tape is encoded.

My wish for the community is that we can

find this information and use it...

to do things like create prerecorded DCC's...

And do other things that are impossible

with the existing DCC recorders.

If I had the opportunity to give my design ideas...

to basically capture all those bits

from the cassette itself...

and have a flash memory built in the player itself...

so that you don't have to keep using the tape.

You can save some onto a flash memory

onto the machine itself.

Well, as far as machines go, I've got a total of five.

There's one that's in the Hi-Fi downstairs, the

main one that I use. I think that's a DCC-91.

It's a narrower one. And that's the reason it's in there,

because it fits in the Hi-Fi rack next to something else.

I've got restricted space. So I was searching for that one for quite some time. It seemed to be quite a rare model.

However, it isn't the best one

The best one is probably this one over here,

the DCC-951.

Although I believe it's got the same internals as this one,

which is a DCC-730.

But this one just seems to be a little bit more reliable.

I've also got the DCC-175, the portable,

and then I've got the DCC-600 here at the top...

which I've got because the Cassettes go

in the drawer sideways.

I just found that a little bit interesting.

So these are really backup machines;

I've got one main one downstairs.

As far as the amount of players I have...

Well, I started with the Optimus...

back in RadioShack days in '96-ish...

Then I would look for ones that I would just find...

The Technics I liked because they had interesting face features.

The Philips had so many variants which were

exciting to find...

Right behind me, we have the Marantz

which is the Cadillac of the line.

I have a Philips up top...

I loved it because it was compact... small.

It was so cute!

We have the Technics because I like the face of it.

Everyone has a place in my collection.

One of the reasons, of course, to help in this endeavor...

is that I think it was completely unfair that

after the project was stopped...

Which was a drama for a lot of people who had worked

their butts off to make this a success...

and really really tried so hard to make this a success...

that they were basically being stalked by all these people

who had been standing at the sidelines...

"Ah, you did it completely wrong" and "you could

see this coming from the beginning"

And you always have this crowd which

themselves won't move ever.

And the aftermath will tell you what

everybody has been doing wrong.

I was very disappointed when Philips stopped

the DCC project in 1996.

I tried to forget everything about it.

I felt sorry for the guys that worked on the project...

and all the money that has been evaporated.

A year ago, Ralf asked me to be interviewed over DCC,

But my first reaction was:

"DCC is dead and buried for me".

But then he told me about a group of enthusiastic fans

in California who established a DCC museum...

and he showed me some movies on YouTube.

How could I refuse any longer?

Now the time has come to revive the past.

I phoned the Philips Patent Office and asked them...

if they had raised some money with the patents of

PASC and DCC.

And they said "Yes, a lot!"

Then I asked "How much money you have raised?"

Well, I got some lawyer on the telephone...

And he told me "It's not our policy to share this

information with third persons".

So you can imagine I was a little bit irritated,

and I decided to do some detective work.

After 22 years I was able to find some old colleagues

that were involved in the aftermath of DCC...

And I asked what has happened with the

patents of DCC.

And I got some information about what happens

with the patents of DCC after 1996.

[GERARD LOKHOFF]

Over the years I've been involved in a number of

court cases.

The most notable one was

a visit to the US Patent Office...

because one of the companies contested the fact...

that the patent...

the core patent of the MP3 format was valid.

I was not concerned about the money when I was doing

the architectural work on DCC.

but now it was a time for

retribution of the DCC project...

for all the people, including me,

that worked on the project.

[GERARD LOKHOFF]

The core elements of the patent, and

why became so important for mp3...

is that it describes how you can fit three different

sampling frequencies for audio...

-- one of which which is not a very nice multiple

of one of the existing normal bitrates.

DCC was a starting point of many basic patents...

that could be used in all kinds of

audio data compression systems.

So a lot of money could be raised.

And that decision to make a data subsystem

and an audio coding system...

was key to Philips being able to play an

important role in the mp3 format.

The PASC encoding of DCC was the base of the way

we listen to digital audio every day today.

I think it was about half a billion dollars.

It has to be shared partly with Le Centre Commun

d'Études de Télécommunications et Télévision in France

and Das Institut für Rundfunktechnik in Germany.

It has been haunting me until I stopped

working for Philips...

It's a pity that this money was not enough

to prevent the demise of Philips Consumer Elecronics.

For Mr Timmer's comfort, a lot of money could be compensated.

I recently learned that Phillips and the two partners

received an Emmy Award in the year 2000...

for MPEG Audio Layer 2.

And that Layer 2 is a direct descendant of the

PASC system of DCC.

Why is it not that well-known that filters played an important role in the MP3 standard setting?

I guess it has to do with the way we are in

[the province of] Brabant.

We are not like the Americans that open about our achievements.

This is what innovation is. It can be successful.

It has a high rate of being not successful.

It has been partial successful, because some elements

have been certainly a success for Philips.

And they should be absolutely totally proud of of what

all of us have achieved in those days.

What would have happened if I hadn't bought my player

and tapes?

You see the fact I collected them and made that

video about it...

That has had this knock-on effect with other people.

But it's also had an effect on me because...

after getting quite a good number of views

on that particular video...

I started to concentrate more on

other old formats...

and items that people might not have seen before...

move away from the kind of videos I was doing before.

That then helped the channel to grow and

eventually meant that I could give up my main job...

and just make videos for YouTube.

So it makes you wonder if I hadn't bought the

DCC player...

Would I still be working at my old job or not?

It's just one of those "Sliding Doors" types of moments.

So, yeah, maybe I do owe quite a lot to DCC.

I also wish to compliment you

for your perseverance, for your belief in DCC.

And for spending so much time on...

yeah... revitalizing interest in DCC.

And I'm very grateful for that.

It is a living memory of my time in Phillips.

...But they still demonstrate the same type of

enthusiasm we had in those days.

Listening to the music and using the devices.

Because it was a wonderful thing to simply

have with you when you were on the move.

DCC was a wonderful project with many innovations...

and after 25 years thanks to the initiative of Ralf,

it was revived and I am now prouder than ever before...

I see it as a highlight in my engineering career.

Captioned by

Jac Goudsmit.

Okay, stop the &%@ing recording!

BLBLBLBL...

The base encoding of DCC was PACE...

PASC! I know.

So a substantial amount of money could

be erased by uh... because of the many...

...Really was an amazing format...

data and... expression... Crap. You can cut it.

[In Dutch]

Carly [Turro] is the actress who played the main

character in "Homeland", right? Her name was Carly too.

[Loud mechanical sounds of DCC rewinding]

That's odd sounding!

Yeah... for a cassette!

I'd better stand further away...

The bit rate to...

[LOUD MECHANICAL NOISES]

[NOISE CONTINUES]

[MORE NOISES]

[THE NOISE GOES ON]