Mind you, this is on the
average for a CD player, which is far superior to even the best $5000+ LP
rigs.

Actually panasonic made a digital recorder that used vhs tapes. The
first models were all 16bit and later they came out with a 24bit
model. BAse cosr of these units were 1,999.

What brought this up?

If it's relation to my response to why AFM on VHS and Beta is not a good choice
for serious music recording, then you seem to be confused.

Note that I said AFM, not PCM. There's a big difference.

As for VHS cassettes being used for multi-track digital recording: yes. I am
aware that there are professional digital recorders that use VHS cassettes,
including a couple of such decks I've observed by Alesis and Panasonic.

However, the key word is DIGITAL, where the limitations of AFM ANALOGUE
recording do not apply.

The same can be said for any industrial quality vhs hifi deck.

VHS AFM Hi-Fi will never compare to Compact Disc. The initial audio quality
definitely suggests it to sound like CD quality, but if you give hi-fi decks a
serious listening you'll find that it will pale in comparison to a reel-to-reel
audiotape deck running at the fastest possible speed in an overall evaluation.

AFM hi-fi uses heavy compression whereas digital recording doesn't rely on
compression to achieve its rated specifications.

The w&f
on my commercial vhs editors is below .003%.

Digital recording achieves w&f that is below measurable thresholds. The low
w&f of AFM hi-fi is for the simple fact that the audio is turned into a
frequency modulated carrier before being multiplexed either between the luma
and chroma carriers with Beta hi-fi or written directly on the tape as a field
before the video track is layered on top of it in VHS hi-fi.

Hi-Fi does not write the audio directly on the tape like a stationary head
would. It's written in exactly the same way a video signal would be written on
a VCR, using the same relative write speed of the helical drum as would be used
with video, which is 1800 RPM for NTSC.

And anyone can tell you that fm stereo modulation gives very smooth
frequency response.
With fm modulation there is NO crosstalk.

In the case of Hi-Fi VCRs, this is because each channel is written as a
separate field.

Your using vinyl lp's as the benchmark against cd's. OK
But your forgetting DBX vinyl discs.

Which is not in common use. Plus, the use of an aggressive compander does
present its own problems, like "breathing."

LP has to try and achieve higher fidelity by doing more to the audio signal
than you would need to if digital recording and reproduction were used.

I was at the CES show way back when a linn itok, a dbx unit abd a
vavled amp beat the socks off sony's best digital entry both to the
ear and the scope.

And who set up these tests?

You missed the point that 16bit encoding schemes just don't have what
it takes to capture all the ambients in most recordings.

Again, do you know what you mean by 16-bit encoding?

Sony and the other pioneers of 16bit realized this limitation.
Comb filters indiscriminately filter out some of the sounds as noise
resulting in that "thin" or "shallow" sound you get from 16bit.

Bull****.

Poor sound quality can be attributed to bad analogue stages or the use of
brickwall analogue filters in place of digital oversampling filters.

I carefully checked every digital unit available when they first came
out, since I felt that was the way studio recording was definitely
going to go.

"When they first came out." A-ha!

Yes there is equiment out there that mimics the sound quality of tube
amps.

I prefer something with sound quality that is flat and accurate with minimal
coloration, not something that mimics a coloration.

Yes I have some "snob" level solid state amps that do stunning work,
once again the average consumer can't pay 10,000 or more per channel
for quality sound.

And I have a $900 receiver which I bought for around $250 which also gives, at
least to my ear, very clean and accurate amplification.

I normally use klipsh for my home theatre and have been a firm
believer that JBL make's some of the best quality drivers you can buy.

What about other brands of drivers?

Infinity? Cerwin-Vega? KEF? And many more that I won't care to list?

Yes there are bleeding edge "low mass" woofers and god knows what else
coming out these days.

Stuff like KLH, Jensen, and Pioneer.

But the veverage consumer can't spend in the
order of 50 to 100 thousand for a home system.

And one doesn't have to.

In the words of Julian Hirsch, the benefits of audiophile-grade components are
"less than obvious."

Yes you can get some, hence the need to tweak the tubes.

Of find a way to make a tube amp work faster.

I looked at Panasonics latest offering a couple of months ago, A flat
screen plasma going for just under 3,000, still too costly for the
average consumer.

First off, you ignored the point I made here. I was mentioning the price drops
for ***CRT*** based HDTV devices! CRT, as in CATHODE RAY TUBE. CRTs are also
called PICTURE TUBES! Sony had invented a FLAT SCREEN DIRECT VIEW CRT, called
the FD Trinitron, A.K.A. VVega.

Plasma, I feel, is not the wave of the future. Not just price but also for
reliability and cost of service.

However, there are HDTV sets that use CRTs, both direct-view and
rear-projection. You also have rear-projection LCD displays which are simple
and very lightweight and don't cost much more than a CRT rear-projection set.
Also, Sharp manufactures their Aquos line, which are flat-panel LCD, not
plasma, displays.

The one company that is really devoting their efforts towards making plasma
displays is Pioneer. All the others, on the other hand, are not limited to
just one kind of display technology for making HDTVs.

An HDTV display doesn't automatically equal a plasma display. A flat-screen
display doesn't automatically equal a plasma display.

It's a stand off between consumers and the
industry, we learned the hard way during the 80's with over priced
vcr's.

With the kind of effort that was put into VCRs back then versus today, the
price seems to have a justification.

Try building an $80 VCR that uses a die-cast chassis, using high quality
components, modular circuitry designs, parts that are usually from Japanese
suppliers instead of Chinese and Taiwanese suppliers, using a design that
demanded more materials than what's used with today's designs, and built using
labor that's not so cheap to be virtually slave labor.

Also, try integrating a lot of components into an LSI in the 1980s where such
integration was not developed for practical use quite yet.

Plus, the 1980s saw a lot of new introductions to VCRs. The introduction of
the front loading system, the introduction of hi-fi audio, the introduction of
the first one-piece camcorder, the introduction of VHS HQ, the introduction of
VHS-C, the introduction of Super VHS, the introduction of ED-Beta, and the list
goes on.

These developments required R&D, so R&D did, indeed continued throughout the
1980s. R&D costs money, and those costs are passed on to the consumer through
the products they buy. In addition, you also have marketing, business
operations, and taxes which can further increase the price the customer has to
pay.

In addition, during the early 1980s, Sony and Universal were still at odds over
the Betamax case, with the potential possibility that the Supreme Court could
rule VCRs an illegal device in the USA. That kind of makes that business feel
risky, perhaps to the point where you try to sell high to get back any money
you may lose in case VCRs are suddenly declared illegal. Also the MPAA was
debating on the implementation of a copyright tax on VCR sales if the court
ruled in their favor but did not rule for an outright ban.

If you had any inside knowledge of the design and manufacturing
industry you'd know that even taking in R&D costs initial technology
sales have always been boosted to high.

Because there is risk in introducing a new product. The product may bomb, so,
in a rather unusual way of thinking, they assume that charging high prices will
allow them to recoup some of their losses as some people will still buy it.

The vhs deck wasn't new technology when it was released, just
implementation of tech that had exsisted for nearly a decade.


The revovling drum had been around since the early 60's.

They've been around since the 1950s, with the introduction of the Ampex VR-1000
VTR, which used four rotary heads in what is known as the Qudraplex system.

Magnetic tape technology even longer.

Duh! It replaced magnetic wire recorders for dictation!

1/2 inch video tape was invented by JVC under contract from Panasonic.

... by stealing key ideas from Sony's 3/4 inch U-Matic system when Matsu****a
was licensed to make U-Matic equipment.
They also stole the M-load idea from Sony, which Sony was considering with Beta
but couldn't perfect in time, so they went with the U-load configuration which
is easier on the tape, but mechanically complex to implement.

Betamax came out in 1975 while VHS came out in 1977. One of Sony's primary
fallacies in the failure of Betamax was not the format, but their inability to
trust third parties. For instance, they turned away Hitachi because they
didn't want to alienate Matsu****a. They also caused RCA to playball with VHS
when Sony demanded too much in terms of licensing costs and refused RCA the
ability to make changes that would allow Beta to be more marketable to the
Americans.

As a matter of fact, RCA did some things for VHS that JVC did not approve of,
such as the introduction of the LP tape speed for the USA market (not to be
confused with the LP speed for PAL VHS). But, what they did certainly helped
to push the VBT-200 SelectaVision to greater sales than Betamax in the United
States.

For places like Europe, and particularly Great Britain, JVC had greater
influence with Thorn-EMI than Sony did. Thorn-EMI, being one of the biggest
media distributors in Europe, naturally favored VHS. More software was
availble on VHS as a result for both rental and purchase, which led people to
abandon Betamax in that market. Of course, it doesn't help that VHS came out
earlier than Beta did in Europe.

(It's always been the marketing
strategy of Panasonic to allow Sony to rush out their half formed
hardware designs then trumpimg them with something better at a lower
cost.)

That could also explain how they chagrined RCA when they introduced their CED
system to Matsu****a, only to be countered with JVC's VHD system.

The first CD players were crap. A friend ran out and bought the first
Sony offering. The motors and laser crapped out in the first year.
Ultra cheap materials and manufacturing. Hardly worth the 1,300 he
paid for it.

Again, what did you expect for a first generation unit? I would bet that if he
went with Philips' first CD player, he would have had the same problem.

Also, the Sony CDP-101 timeshared one DAC between two channels, which
introduced a nasty 10 millisecond phaseshift to one of the channels.

Denon fixed this problem by introducing a delay so a timeshared DAC design
could be acceptable. You also have a dual DAC design, one DAC for each
channel, which is what I would prefer.

Years later I bought a Tandberg unit for use in the studio for 1,800.
Swiss made and still running strong, but then it was made to squeeze
the most out of the cd's played in it.

How about Revox or Studer?

You have to take into consideration not just the tech side of the
issue but the people side as well.
Corporations are run by greedy no talent *******s that want to get
rich yesterday. They're the ones who ultimately decide what the
release price of a product will be. And what corners will be cut in
manufaturing and design.

Well, duh again! That seems to be the prevailing attitude with Ford, GM, and
Chrysler.

RCA was like this and where did this get them: into receivership with the
French.

What's wrong with win2kpro?
XP is the bane of my business with all it's short comings.

I didn't mention Windows 2000 Pro. I said Windows98 Second Edition.

I went with Windows XP because the computer it's running on is for home use. A
lot of programs that I would use, like many games such as "The Sims," WILL NOT
RUN on Windows NT 2000.

I can't use 98SE or Millienium because my computer has over 1 gig of RAM. This
requires a modification to one of the INI files to cut down the file cache size
in order to allow it to run properly. Without the modification to the INI, the
computer would crash everytime I tried to install the nVidia nForce2 mainboard
drivers.

In addition, the clock speed is in excess of 2 GHz. 98SE and ME are not
designed to run on a system that fast. As a result, I had nothing but
bluescreens everytime I ran the computer.

With XP PRO, those problems went away. Plus, keeping my OS updated helps, as
well as performing housekeeping every week, such as scandisk, defrag, virus
scan, and spyware scans.

People oft confuse need and want and tend to go for the latter.
I always ask myself if I really need something.
That's the only reason I have much of the electronics I do have.
For business reasons(I do video/film work).

Well, then I have to say that you are far better off than other people when it
comes to saving money.

While you went with a Sony dvd I purchased a Daewoo that offered more
in features and performance.(It's a clone of a commercial unit made by
panasonic.)

And how did you come to this determination?

Did the Daewoo use a custom drive assembly that uses brushless motors for both
the spindle and pickup kicker motor?

Was the drive interface actually proprietary instead of being standard IDE?

Was the media board composed almost entirely of Matsu****a components with some
Analog Devices components?

Did the power supply actually use Matsu****a 105 celcius caps and used
Matsuhita branded components?

I've worked on a lot of so-called bargain electronics and have been appalled at
the lack of quality that's built into these things.

I bought a Sony not because of its name but because I knew what I was getting.
So far, I'm not disappointed because four years since I bought it, it's still
working like new.

I believe that true frugality starts with knowing the difference between true
value and being penny-wise but dollar-foolish.

It's good to save money, but it's bad to be a cheapskate.

Working as a professional, you ought to know that.

Can you really say that Sony is superior quality?

Yes. Your milage may vary. But, with professional video equipment, Sony kicks
ass. They are more expensive, but they make the best displays, the best video
recorders, the best camcorder rigs, and they even developed 24P DigiBeta video
used to make "Star Wars: Episode 2" with specially developed Panavision lenses.
ST:AOTC was filmed entirely on videotape during prinicipal photography. The
money saved on film development costs, film stock costs, and time is
tremendous, so this technology definitely has potential for more
budget-conscious purposes when it's perfected further.

My only complaint is that, yes, parts can be hard to find for Sony. The same
can be said of Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Panasonic, and JVC however.

Particularly Panasonic. Try to look for parts for a professional Panasonic
video deck that's only a few years old.

And particularly Mitsubishi. Why else did they earn the name "Mitsubitchy?"
Maybe because they've had some problems with electrolytic failures in a huge
slew of their own products for the longest time.

Neither have turned out the quality products that made their name
famous in quite some time.


Depends on what you buy. If you buy their low end stuff, then yes, you are not
getting something that's decent. If you buy something that's a little more
upscale, then you will get something that's decent.

As for audio, Sony isn't my cup of tea except for their ES line. I would
rather go with Yamaha or Denon but I do like Sony ES. In terms of CD players,
Sony ES had some CD players that are considered some of the best the format can
offer. But, of course, you have other choices from Rotel, AMC, Audio Alchemy,
Parasound, Acurus, and Shanling. - Reinhart