Melbguy1
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Hi guys, here is part 3 re-posted with permission from DCS 
..
From its raw beginnings to the future as it is being made – in the third of this four-part feature we focus on the harvest years of Compact Disc…
By the mid nineteen nineties, Compact Disc was king. Newspapers waxed lyrical about “the death of vinyl”, while CD prices fell enough to make Blur, Oasis and Simply Red singles affordable on silver disc. For normal consumers the format was perfect, giving a new-found freedom from record warps and jammed cassette tapes. Whereas in the eighties it had been a lifestyle accessory alongside Filofaxes, red braces and Hugo Boss suits, it was now a true mass-market medium. In hi-fi, it was being taken seriously too; mid-eighties Bitstream machines were far smoother sounding than their multi-bit predecessors, and the format began to lose its reputation for harshness.
“I’ll be honest,” says dCS Director of Design Andy McHarg, “at that time we weren’t particularly interested in hi-fi”. In the mid nineties, our 950 DAC was causing a stir in the Far East, despite it being designed for recording studios. “At the time, the company was split into two parts with two difference focuses – one was military contracting, and the other was studio recording stuff. I did a bit on both so had to sign the Official Secrets Act! But we were seeing lots of Japanese hi-fi guys contacting us, telling us how much they loved the sound of the 950, but also that it was ugly to look at and very hard to set up. Of course, it was a pro audio product, and therefore pretty unforgiving. It was then that we realised that we could put our new technology in a nicer box with a better visual experience, and that’s how the dCS Elgar was born.”
Elgar was the first ever high resolution consumer hi-fi DAC. “It was a real surprise for many people, to see what CD could do. For hi-fi civilians it made many think again about digital audio and absolutely flew off the shelves,” remembers Andy. “We showed that there was more to making a great hi-fi DAC than a fancy box. Inside we used our Ring DAC technology, and that was the real marker to lay down to the market.” The hi-fi world was never quite the same again, and the interest in hi-res digital audio blossomed. By the late nineties, many audiophiles fully expected a brave new world of 24-bit, 96kHz audio to be the norm in the new millennium. The news that DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) was being developed, and had the capability to carry five channels of 24/96 PCM, or stereo 24/192, thrilled people.
By 1997, the hi-fi world was awash with talk of a new ‘super CD’ – and then along came two at the same moment. DVD-Audio and SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc) both used the new disc storage technology to carry far more information than CD ever could – making it possible to store higher resolution music. DVD-A was the spiritual heir to CD in one sense; it carried better quality music coded in PCM. SACD was the natural successor to CD in another, because it contained both a standard CD layer playable on any CD machine, and a hi-res DSD layer too. Direct Stream Digital gave a similar 100kHz bandwidth to DVD-A, although it was more noisy. Still, it didn’t require the ‘brickwall' filtering of PCM, which was a real benefit in practice. Arguments raged between fans of each format, but suffice to say neither format was just right; DVD-Audio was especially fiddly, because it couldn’t play on standard CD machines and even on DVD-A players required the use of a TV to navigate its menu.
“In truth,” says Andy McHarg, “we were the first company to come to market with DSD equipment and also first to market with hi-res PCM. So when we saw the two competing disc standards come out almost at the same time, we were quite excited because we thought we could cover both of them very well. We thought this would be our chance to take over the world, because we had everything in place for it! But unfortunately both standards died spectacularly. So yes, it was annoying, but that’s when the computer side of things began to be attractive…”
As the hi-fi world sat back and watched its Holy Grail – the high resolution digital audio disc – flounder in Western markets, the music industry found itself assaulted by the very first time by computer audio. In 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America ended up in the US High Court with Diamond Multimedia, manufacturers of a new flash memory-based portable MP3 player called the Rio PMP300. The RIAA claimed it was a ‘recording device’ but the judge begged to differ – and the download revolution started in earnest. It was just as much of a game-changer as CD, yet had come straight out of the blue…
..From its raw beginnings to the future as it is being made – in the third of this four-part feature we focus on the harvest years of Compact Disc…
By the mid nineteen nineties, Compact Disc was king. Newspapers waxed lyrical about “the death of vinyl”, while CD prices fell enough to make Blur, Oasis and Simply Red singles affordable on silver disc. For normal consumers the format was perfect, giving a new-found freedom from record warps and jammed cassette tapes. Whereas in the eighties it had been a lifestyle accessory alongside Filofaxes, red braces and Hugo Boss suits, it was now a true mass-market medium. In hi-fi, it was being taken seriously too; mid-eighties Bitstream machines were far smoother sounding than their multi-bit predecessors, and the format began to lose its reputation for harshness.
“I’ll be honest,” says dCS Director of Design Andy McHarg, “at that time we weren’t particularly interested in hi-fi”. In the mid nineties, our 950 DAC was causing a stir in the Far East, despite it being designed for recording studios. “At the time, the company was split into two parts with two difference focuses – one was military contracting, and the other was studio recording stuff. I did a bit on both so had to sign the Official Secrets Act! But we were seeing lots of Japanese hi-fi guys contacting us, telling us how much they loved the sound of the 950, but also that it was ugly to look at and very hard to set up. Of course, it was a pro audio product, and therefore pretty unforgiving. It was then that we realised that we could put our new technology in a nicer box with a better visual experience, and that’s how the dCS Elgar was born.”
Elgar was the first ever high resolution consumer hi-fi DAC. “It was a real surprise for many people, to see what CD could do. For hi-fi civilians it made many think again about digital audio and absolutely flew off the shelves,” remembers Andy. “We showed that there was more to making a great hi-fi DAC than a fancy box. Inside we used our Ring DAC technology, and that was the real marker to lay down to the market.” The hi-fi world was never quite the same again, and the interest in hi-res digital audio blossomed. By the late nineties, many audiophiles fully expected a brave new world of 24-bit, 96kHz audio to be the norm in the new millennium. The news that DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) was being developed, and had the capability to carry five channels of 24/96 PCM, or stereo 24/192, thrilled people.
By 1997, the hi-fi world was awash with talk of a new ‘super CD’ – and then along came two at the same moment. DVD-Audio and SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc) both used the new disc storage technology to carry far more information than CD ever could – making it possible to store higher resolution music. DVD-A was the spiritual heir to CD in one sense; it carried better quality music coded in PCM. SACD was the natural successor to CD in another, because it contained both a standard CD layer playable on any CD machine, and a hi-res DSD layer too. Direct Stream Digital gave a similar 100kHz bandwidth to DVD-A, although it was more noisy. Still, it didn’t require the ‘brickwall' filtering of PCM, which was a real benefit in practice. Arguments raged between fans of each format, but suffice to say neither format was just right; DVD-Audio was especially fiddly, because it couldn’t play on standard CD machines and even on DVD-A players required the use of a TV to navigate its menu.
“In truth,” says Andy McHarg, “we were the first company to come to market with DSD equipment and also first to market with hi-res PCM. So when we saw the two competing disc standards come out almost at the same time, we were quite excited because we thought we could cover both of them very well. We thought this would be our chance to take over the world, because we had everything in place for it! But unfortunately both standards died spectacularly. So yes, it was annoying, but that’s when the computer side of things began to be attractive…”
As the hi-fi world sat back and watched its Holy Grail – the high resolution digital audio disc – flounder in Western markets, the music industry found itself assaulted by the very first time by computer audio. In 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America ended up in the US High Court with Diamond Multimedia, manufacturers of a new flash memory-based portable MP3 player called the Rio PMP300. The RIAA claimed it was a ‘recording device’ but the judge begged to differ – and the download revolution started in earnest. It was just as much of a game-changer as CD, yet had come straight out of the blue…
