anyone else here from techmoan

This video is fabulous - not because it's so fast paced and exciting and high production value, but because it brings the subject of an already obscure technology to immediate accessibility of the worldwide public. I was and still am an audiophile. I'm not a wealthy audiophile, so like most tech nerds I scrap around for things more than I reach for the heavens. But I always keep an eye on the heights of audio technology, and somehow I missed DCC. Sure I heard of it. Sure I grasped roughly what it was. But with this video my knowledge of DCC has increased tenfold. Thank you DR DCC and thank you to the people who helped make the video. As of the writing of this comment the video has only 587 likes. I think that's a shame. This may not be quick pop fun, but for anyone who cares about audio technology, this video is essential information on the development of digital audio formats. Again - thank you.

We love the sound of the DCC!!! We mixdown our recorded multi track music from our TASCAM DP-32 direct to DCC, and the quality is so good we do not master our final product! You can hear our albums on our KZfaq channel.

I purchased my first DCC-600 from Richer sounds in London in 1992. I was delighted with the wonderful warm sound that was superior to my Philips 900 series CD player. I was very sad to see the withdrawal of DCC from the market. With the absence of DCC came the structural change to the Phillips organisation and the final blow to the European electronics industry. The demise of Phillips as a record label struck a death knell to the classical music recording industry. I hope that the DCC can not only be revived but also show the way for new innovations in the music industry. Making quality and love of music and culture at the heart of its future developments.

I wanted a DCC machine back in the early 1990s but couldn't afford one. I eventually bought into minidisc but my last machine packed up and I decided to sell all the discs a few years ago. DCC always appealed to me and glad to see people are still enjoying it to this day. Keep up the good work.

I vividly remember buying my first DCC recorder. It was a Philips DCC600 and I was so thrilled at the time. Nowadays I still own a DCC951 and with reasonable care I managed to keep it up and running. I must admit that, being tape based, it's definately not as convenient as CD or Minidisc but it will forever hold a warm place in my heart.

Fantastic video! found it via TechMoan, Big music nerd and always loved DCC - its a fantastic platform, but back then my friend group found both DAT and DCC hard to adopt, therefore never taking either up. There one and only issue - both still required you to re-wind and fast-forward, though far faster than normal cassettes it still had to be done, regardless the tech benefits, sound quality, really, really nice packaging, backward compatibility the re-winding and fast-forwarding was still there, meaning my friends didn't see the many many benefits, that one 'con' - re-winding and fast-forwarding meant they would never accept it - and never did, defiantly a real shame Phillips had a fantastic product, I love it and really wish things had of gone differently for sure! :') M.

After seeing the Techmoan video about DCC, I've gotten a DCC730 and it sounds fabulous! Thanks for the documentary, it is very interesting.

Great video and good tot see a proud Jan Timmer. I still remember when i got mij first DCC 600 and made a copy of a CD that i was so enthousiastic because it was so perfect :-) Btw i still have the DCC 600 but the drawer does not open anymore.. Besides the DCC i also had a Philips VCC Video 2000 recorder and Laserdisc player.

Great documentary with include, I think, all the right views of the technics, the people behind the sene , the other formats and the why. Many thanks, I'll go put a DCC cassette in my Philips 951 DCC and go listen to some music. Thanks Philips and al their inventors.

One of the most painful aspects of being a user of consumer electronics is format or platform failure. I think literally every discontinued and unsupported format and platform has a "cult following" to this day, putting out software and content for it and even physical media. The problem is _when it's proprietary_ there is no hope of new players or devices being made, nor authorized pre-recorded media as opposed to enthusiast releases on re-recordable media. The lesson to be learned, if any company is willing to learn it, is that if you're going to introduce a new platform or format, _MAKE IT OPEN SOURCE_ (both the hardware and the format) so that if you fail, others will be able to continue to make devices and release software for the format. I understand this will seem crazy to conventional corporate decision-makers, who will perceive this as spending enormous funds on R&D only to let other companies take advantage of your expenditure. But as we have seen on this and countless other occasions, the conventional approach of trying to use R&D to create proprietary innovation to "lock in" device-makers, content-creators, and consumers into a closed format, to milk them with licensing fees or the like, is actually the higher-risk strategy. Planning to fail might seem like you're admitting you WILL fail and setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy but in fact the opposite is true. The possibility of failure is well-known to everyone, haunting the prospects of the platform, spooking consumers. Ignoring that specter does not banish it from the minds of consumers; if anything it increases their fears. The best way to reassure them is to address it directly and forthrightly in head-on fashion. Since consumers fear the pain of being abandoned by a canceled format, they will be MORE likely to buy in and take the chance if they are assured that, thanks to open source licensing of the player design and the format, it will never truly die. That there will always be some low-cost producer in China or somewhere making new hardware and media for it, perfectly legally, no "jailbreaking" or shady violations of IP needed, which legal legitimacy in turn will also encourage non-shady, more visible and trusted brands, to continue to support it as well. With open-sourcing everything guaranteeing immortality and robust market in place indefinitely, this will encourage consumers and content creators and device makers to buy into the format in the first place and thus help PREVENT its failure.

I am always fascinated by old one off obsolete media formats for both video and audio.

Great video! Thanks for the time travel Friday moment 😊

Brilliant documentary, one of the best I’ve seen. It was very informative getting the views of the guys who worked on dcc as well as the thoughts of the man at the top. I will definitely watch this again. Thanks for posting.

My compliments to the team that worked on DCC.

I still have my DCC (900 series first edition) and i use it still frequently. It was in a way a great machine, but a bit to slow with searching tracks and sadly you couldn’t record normal cassette. But glad I was buying one ,and it was those days really expensive but worth the money.

fascinating video, very well put together, very enjoyable to watch - thank you also sent here by techmoan

Very cool. I’ve heard this referenced by others but just watched it myself. Bravo

What a treat to hear Braam's voice again. One of the highlights of my career was being privileged enough to work for and with him!

Amazing, Fantastic!!! Thank you very much.

Techmoan sent me :)

This was a great doc! no bullshit and no overproduced fluff to keep short attention span viewers interested, that stuff can be annoying.

In 1995 i stood between the decision in purchasing a DCC Recorder or a MiniDisc Recorder. The price for both decks was almost the same, also the price for media was similar. My choice here was MiniDisc. It has the same convenience as the CD and the medium was so much smaller which makes small potable player possible. Just compare a Sony MZ E3 from those days with a portable DCC Player. So i spent 650 German Marks on a Sony MDS 303 incl. 5 MiniDisc. After Philips has given up DCC 1 year later, the second hand markt was flooded with cheap devices. Just for fun i bought a Philips DCC900 and a DCC730, also a portable one and car stereo. Empty media was still available in some stores, i remember seeing them in Media Markt in Krefeld, Germany, at the end of the 90s.

just came here because techmoan did a review of the DDC boxset (cheese sandwich) video. looking forward to the documentary, thanks for putting this out there.

Really Great Documentary, It's Was Very Entertaining To Watch And Really Enjoy.

Well done Ralf! You have a big fan here too 🇦🇷

Great documentary! I have also the one that heard about DCC and your work from TechMoan :) Maybe someday I will also join DCC community ;)

I still love it. Great documentary!

Great documentary on DCC. However, I mention the following, so kids wont be fooled again:- "Everyone knows vinyl has more rich and warm etc" ... er .. no .. not everyone likes or even prefers scratchy old "records". They can be (expensive) fun, tactile and artsy, but they are by no means superior to many other formats. At the end of the audio day, "records" are just another distro. DCC, now that's a different matter entirely.

27:19 He's using what looks like an Aspire tank for vaping. I had that tank, it was very nicely built for a vape product and had smooth hits. The coils were also very nice.

What a great documentary!

fantastic documentary

I remember buying my machine from Radio Shack back in 95 when they were clearing them out. I still have that thing in my music room and works still. Too bad it got out the gate too late.

Well done. Love it. Masterpiece

Amazing documetary, it lets me know more about DCC story. I think the DCC will be more pouplar at that time if they could also record "ACC". However, the marketing determines the result. But DCC is still a great format, an unique sound better than CD.

Super documentary!

Amazing content!

So it probably used MPEG-1 layer 1 or 2 audio. Interesting.

Great video!

One single piece present in my vintage cassette collection: LEE RITENOUR's Festival Greetings from CHILE.

Techmoan and Jeremy Heiden sent me ;)

...and here from techmoan - again!

All Dinosaurs talking, exceptions of course. It would have been so easy to create CD-Audio Recorders with a lot less money if they had taken PASC to the CD and PC. Billions went into the development of a cassette and the HEAD that had to be a thin-film marvel. while CD-R was quickly made available to consumers the option to burn CD's came quickly thereafter. Remember that VHS became very popular despite it's low visual quality, but consumers loved the fact that you could use Longplay that had even lower visual quality but enabled 6-8 hours of recording and playback on CRT (Television) sets. If Philips had made a LP (4x) setting with CD it would have been a no-brainer for most. Even a simple 4 bit ADPCM compression system (that is the fastest way to use compression with almost no calculation or CPU power at all) would have increased the recording/playback capacity of the CD to 5 Hours with almost no degradation of sound quality or dynamic range. They didn't do it, yes they made CD-TEXT but that is about it with CD. Still in 2021 people are amazed what ADPCM sounds like if they try to use it for the first time on a PC to record stereo audio through a capture card. Microsoft optimized this CODEC even further and it doesn't disappoint at all. The revival of the Analog cassette is probably even bigger than that of DCC, if they really wanna revive DCC Tech giants should build new devices and sell them with state of the art components all inside a single chip. Probably Arduino could do just that.

Warmth and the ritual to find it in music formats.

I wonder if the guy at 23:54 is the Jac Goudsmit from the DCC-L form. if it is he used to run a DCC-L user form on the net.. i remember chatting with him off and on along with many others. When i got into the dcc game it was just about at its end. back in 1997 or 1999 i believe. I had a radio shack deck too along with a Philips deck too. By the time i could find some cassettes for it both of my machines start messing up on me and none of the repair places in town knew how to work on them because the format was so new. I eventually trashed my units. One start messing up on its own. The Philips one i found out later that someone i knew put a metal tape in there and after that the machine started messing up. And i remember now the owners manual said do not play metal tapes in there. And the person i knew did. i was so upset... lol I am laughing now but it wasn't funny to me then. I was really hoping that the dcc format would have lasted alot longer but it didn't. And now i do not rush buying new formats of anything until i know it has caught on by the masses. I loved the format while i had it and it worked. But i won't be pumping any more money into it unless it has mass support!! Great documentary by the way!!

I had never heard of DCC until I watched Techmoan, looking at the DCC museum there were not too many titles of interest to me. There were not too many Heavy Metal or Punk titles, if any.

Genial!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I did not know DCC had a better sound than CD!

Reminds me so much of Imation's LS-120 SuperDisk and Sony's HiFD. Backward compatible with the previous standard format but died quickly because it was beaten to the market by an earlier-arriving rival that filled the market niche (Iomega's Zip Disk) and established its own network effects. But the rival even at its height failed to fully replace the previous standard media and then was in its own turn killed by USB drives, flash drives, and direct downloads.

I find this format and the technology behind it really interesting, however, I got to agree with one of the people in this documentary. I don't know who in his sane mind thought that a sequential reading format (aka no random track access) could have any chance by 1992 when the CD was already a thing and optical random access media was clearly the future.

When I remember the "Phoebus cartel" it makes Jan Timmer look even more like a Bond villain.

Techmoan sent me here

I purchased a Philips DCC Deck and Portable at the time the format was introduced. The reason I chose DCC over Minidisc was: (1) the DCC deck cost about $400 (US) while lowest cost Minidisc Deck cost $1,000 (US), (2) blank DCC tapes cost about the same a blank Minidisc but had a longer recording time (90 minutes vs. 74 minutes), (3) it was backwards compatible with the compact cassette (CC) and (4) it was supposed to have better sound quality than Minidisc. I wasn't going to use them as a replacement for the CD or vinyl, but as a replacement for the CC. For me DCC was a great improvement over the CC and I wish it had succeeded.

The main problem for me was the limited flexibility of stationary formats against the development of audio codecs. DCC's PASC used a codec (MPEG1 Layer 2 or MP2) at a fixed bitrate that was good enough for the average listener yet fell victim to the very same flaw that MPEG1 Layer 3 (MP3) still has. Which is fixed blocksize that makes transparent encoding of transients rather difficult. Also, not using variable bitrate (which is in the MPEG specs) additionally limited DCC's sound quality potential as a sacrifice for predictability in playtime on blank media. Sony's ATRAC wasn't any better off mind you. And then audio enthusiasts discovered that a computer with decent hardware offered the ultimate flexibility with lossless encoding, a free choice of superior lossy encoding formats like AAC, digital recording to harddisk without SCMS hassle and whatnot. DCC came too late and too early at the same time. But I am glad that these formats did survive, although I was a DAT/MD guy back in the day.

They are really great "ACC" Analogue compact cassette player

Today I'm sad, sad for not having phisical media, now we stream everything, DCC is not a failure, DCC just didn't went mainstream because was more expensive then other formats, but right now, every media is ded, DVD is ded, CD is dying, and blu-ray is in life support by the PS5, that I believe it will as soon as PS6 dropped de BD Drive permanently.

I still have the 951, had bought it new from the store years ago, buy lots of albums and unused sealed tapes, the sound was great in the beginning, and not even had used it a lot, and after a while, it always says clean head, I use the special DCC cleaning cassette with no success and no sound also not on headphone, it seems those DCC machines had bad capacitors in it I have heard, I remember paying a lot for that machine and spent lot on tapes and pre-recorded albums, when it works it sounded great, but it did not last for long, the old stuff from Philips with the screw flaps (370 DC,pre amp 280, pickup, speakers, etc) the first have bought off Philips made in Belgium is still in use and works, think it must be around from 1978, but that DCC 951 not even lasted for a year or so

Like techmoan, I never saw DCC for sale in a store in the UK. Did see Minidisc though.

I am from Eindhoven so Philips was second nature for us. DCC was a nice system it had its merits but technically it was inferior to DAT because DCC was a compressed format and DAT wasn’t. For portable audio it hat it’s merits too but Minidisc was much more compact for this so. The normal compact cassette at the time was really cheap and could be played anywhere so it was in competition with its older brother. I had the portable player at the time which was ok but quite big and the 951 to record the music, it’s was a fun little system that unfortunately didn’t work.

Thanks for Hungarian translate!

DAT is still king for me.

wow!Well made film!

This was a great film, as it fills in a lot of gaps about the format’s genesis and failure. The interviewees are, well, one deluded person after another. Only two actually even touched on why DCC failed. The creators of DCC didn’t (and apparently, still don’t) understand the characteristics that made CD take off, and DCC fail. Random access is a huge one, and the robustness of optical media is another. So while better sound quality of DCC over CC was certainly welcome, the sound quality of CC was good enough for the on-the-go listening situations where it dominated (Walkmans and cars), and for people who valued random access or better sound quality, portable and car CD players were used. MD was the first format to actually combine all the advantages of the CD with all the advantages of the CC. DCC just didn’t manage that. It was a good technology, but a mediocre product. What I also find sad is that Sony shot itself in the foot by releasing MD too early. They irreparably damaged the format’s reputation by releasing machines with the premature first-gen ATRAC encoder whose sound quality was audibly inferior to CD. So when the second generation encoders came around, a lot of people didn’t give MD a second chance, having totally written it off. As for DCC, in retrospect, Philips should have just scuttled DCC and embraced MD, as they surely were aware of what Sony was up to. (Yes, I’m an unapologetic MD fan, though of course I listen to nearly all music from MP3/AAC these days. I’ll leave for another day my rants about the other mistakes Sony made with MD, resulting in Apple, and not Sony, being the vanguard of the modern digital audio player.)

A lot of things played into the failure of DCC. Technically, DCC was a fine product and was a great update of the old Compact cassette. But the timing...? Ooof, that was way off. DCC had to face off against somewhat inexpensive (re-)recordable CDs and the Minidisc - both formats with one all-important feature: near-instant random access to tracks. With Minidisc you could even rearrange the order of the tracks and with certain recorders even use the format as a 4-track recorder designed for music production. And later the MP3 format came along, which in the late 90s became successful due to the rise of the internet and various pirate sites offering popular music for free. In the end it would eliminate the need for physical media with now limited capacity. The rise of obsolete media probably comes - as stated in this documentary - from a human need to hold something tangible and to feel a kind of ownership. But I bet there's also a bit of nostalgia to be reckoned with here. I myself have returned to laserdisc, despite it being an inferior format compared to 4K. While nostalgia certainly does play a little part in my return to the format, it's now mostly about getting movies unavailable on later formats and/or movies which are versions no longer available for whatever reason - the original pre-altered Star Wars trilogy being the most obvious one to get.

thats the guy you want to open your documentary with?

It's kinda hilarious how abrupt every transition to and from techmoan's "youtube" style of speaking is. (Good Vid)

Holy shit I want mohawk guy's office...

34:17 So how did you record an album on DCC? Thanks for this big reaserch

Can I take a few inputs from here for my documentary college project ?

There is something to be said about owning your ownthe media and collecting your music that has a great satisfacting which digital music files on a hard drive, or streaming from a cloud never has had. Being able to drop a blank tape, and hit the record button was great rbought great satisaction, (you'd think the people who made VCRs would of caught onto this as I knew many people who had a lot of pride in collecting hundreds of videso they recorded over the years). I'd love to see DCC come back, heck, I'd love to see MiniDisc come back as the portability and durability of that format was like nothing else.

Whoa! Mick Jagger showed up!

I lost track of the bit towards the end about patents and money. Yes, I gather that PASC was/is instrumental in MPEG and other digital compression methods, but what was it that Bram was seeking to discover and was being stone-walled by Philips? Uncollected royalties on patents?

21:22 Techmoan is here

here thanks to TechMoan

Mr. Mp3 is the winner killer!

I use DSCC: Digital SD Compact Chip

Any format change that requires people to upgrade both gear and media will always be a tough sell. I don't know enough about the technical aspects of DCC to know if it's possible, but wouldn't a better solution have been to record digital signals on a standard compact cassette? If you want to use that tech, you'd simply need comparable players.

I looked at the Wikipedia page, and I still don't understand, how can some TechMoan video start a revival. That "revival", if it is really big enough to be called that must have been happening anyway for whatever reason it is happening. BTW if I watched that video when I was 10 I would have had nightmares and evacuated all cassettes from my room.

I was alive when DCC came out and it seemed completely obvious to me, just an average Joe, that it was going to flop. The simplicity and beauty of a Compact Disc... No moving parts. No mechanics. No structure, really. It's like a 2-dimensional flat featureless piece of... almost like a piece of glass. Why on Earth would they have introduced a device with tons of moving parts and a mechanical structure that requires so much more.... Of course I knew CD wouldn't remain king for long. But the answer, even to me back in the early 1990's, was something that looked like a CD, or smaller, and even more featureless. Manufacturing costs couldn't be more reduced than with a Compact Disc. That's as simple a design as there was back then, excluding computer-driven memory, like flash/rom/ram type things. Even computer hard-disks seemed too complicated, to me. The solution for the 1990's seemed obvious... just a more refined Compact Disc. Call it whatever you want, but a CD that could go past 16-bit 44.1, to say, 24-bit and perhaps 48 or 96khz... That seemed the way to go... Not to make a device with numerous parts and a cumbersome physicality. And this is what happened., of course, with DVD, Super CD's, etc... Even Mini Disc was smarter than DCC. Except Mini disc was foolish because it took CD backwards, in my opinion, by sticking inside of a cradle, or plastic shell, a machine had to open to get access. That seemed completely idiotic. I'm not playing Monday Quarterback. These were all my thoughts as a teenager back in the 1990's when DCC and MD were introduced. I didn't get it and thought it was a sideways move at best, but mostly backwards.

The Recordable CD killed it.

Thats a very nice story only in reality DCC standard arrived way to late, Philips somehow was very slow with it and Sony already had invested in MD which was more futuristic and overall a better, more suitable for further development standard. As i remember DCC was kinda mehhh... at its time, usual Type 2 tapes recorded at HiFi decks could satisfy majority of HiFi enthusiasts therefore DCC was not really expected to replace anything... So in my opinion DCC is a good example of wrong and unnecessary R&D investment driven by corporate greed... I’m writing it listening to Billie Holiday tape i’ve recorded from several LP’s on my HK HiFi cassette tape deck... sound perfect! 😉

I think they wanted to make the format too special, it was too complex. Very complex machines, over-engineered. I think Pioneer did a better job with there DNR (digital noise reduction) so you can use all kind of tapes around and doesn't need a new format. Improves also the sound quality of existing tapes, very close to CD quality. This also doesn't require a new expensive mechanism, new head and still compatible with other cassettes. Exactly what Philips wanted, compatibility. DNR is not perfect however you will never know what happend when others started to implement it, how the technique improved over time. A cheap alternative for digital with almost the same specs (except W&F of course). The recording is still analog however this DCC format has still an analog feel to it and that's the reason why people don't believe the in the format. Like Techmoan said: Skipping to the next track makes people giggling. I never understood the effort they put into this semi-new format, clever and in some ways brilliant however impractical.

Just looking at all the standard aging analog cassettes today and the problems they have DCC would have been useless and plagued with more issues than that standard cassette like pressure pads falling off, stretched tape, dried or sticky tape, drop outs. Loss of magnetism from repeated use. Analog tape is still far better than digital tape. When there are any of those issues they are easily repaired or only momentary in the tape path since they are not digitally encoded with slower tape speeds. DAT tape uses a helical scan technology so the data is only missing on a small portion of the tape in a few centimeters instead of inches which means less failures. There are also no pressure pads and azimuth issues that DCC would have since the tape is pulled from that case to the head. For portables they would have been poor because of climate changes like moisture, and heat. The thin tape would stick to the head with a DAT and the DCC would suffer from digital dropouts. I guess the analog cassette wins and has been time and climate tested. I buried a time capsule 40 years ago with a cheap type 0 cassette tape in it. It still played just as good as the day it was made. Try doing that with a DAT or DCC!

How does DCC compare to DAT and Minidisc ?

I don't know why the industry hasn't moved to sdcard albums, the cards must be as cheap as cd's now and you have space for Master Quality Audio, Music Videos, Remixes, High Res Album art. With players that have a screen to show off the art/video/animation. Also a tiny changer could fit 100 albums into a small items with a cool jukebox effect. I like to own music, but CD's are shit. They are large, scratch easily an sonically not good enough and limited on capacity. Tidal has a offline mode but I want ownership, something I can lend, trade, give to people that will work even when I'm gone and don't need an active internet connection. DCC would have the precursor to that experience. It should have been CD -> DDC -> HD DDC -> SD. Somehow we got stuck at CD.

give the next dcc release to anders enger jensen

I think dcc would have had a greater chance at success if it had been back compatible with the compact cassette.

2:06 Joker, 2019.

Genuine question, wasn't DAT released just before DCC ?

Who's making the new dcc tapes?

Is that Mick Jagger in the photos around the 29:00 mark?

@Jovanotti in America con formato DCC al minuto 36:00 ma non sanno chi tu sia...

21:02 Video is out of sync with the Audio.

Why were the certificates written in German?

Dcc 950 sounds much better than next Dcc 951.

Compression and therefor better sound quality, LMAO! I am Dutch and I had DCC and MD, it is utter garbage! That Philips guy talking about CD becoming succes is also talking out of his ass. It was Sony that took CD to 16 bit, Philips wanted it to be 14 bit redbook specs.

Not possible! Buy a good HI-End CD player, CD is uncompressed audio! DCC is compressed audio, even analoge tape sounds better than DCC, using tape on a Hi-End tape deck. I agree, DCC tape recorder’s are using good audio filters, fore sure. But a CD sound beter, because there is more information on a CD. Same discussion with Minidisc, but minidisc was way beter and longer developed then DCC, that’s way in the end minidisc sounded better than DCC, but not better than CD.

They are claiming a lossy compression format at a lower bit-rate than CD, is better than lossless CD, same as VHS is "better" than HD.... what are these weirdos smoking? DCC what 7 years late

Stupid techmoan fans filling the commentary section saying ¨techmoan sent me here¨... I don't care who sent you!!!!!

An unbelievably boring film. Maybe it's not entirely the producers' fault. Even though I have to say, 50+ minutes of interviews with people who either had nothing to do with the format's developement or people who are trying to justify what they did at their company, is a bit too much. The bigger problem, however, is that there isn't much to tell, really. I understand that the DCC Museum wants to promote it, but, to be quite honest, it's never had a "past", it barely has a "present" mostly at numerous youtube "retro-tech" channels who review it, and it definitely has no future, just like any other physical medium.