Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music by Greg Milner

Author:Greg Milner [Milner, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847086051
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2011-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Following the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, researchers at NHK, the Japanese broadcasting service, began looking at ways to improve analog tape technology. After concluding that there were really no improvements left to make—tape was as perfect as it could get—a team led by Heitaro Nakajima turned their interests to digital technology. The gigantic machine they built had no practical worth, but Nakajima was hooked. When he compared the sound with an analog recorder, “it was [as] if somebody had removed a veil out of the way.”

Norio Ohga, a high-ranking Sony executive and classically trained opera singer, had had an uncannily similar reaction to digital audio (for him, it was like “removing a heavy winter coat from the sound”). So when Nakajima went to work for Sony, Ohga wanted him to continue his digital research. Sony cofounder Masaru Ibuka, however, thought it was a dumb idea, so Ohga had Nakajima work on it surreptitiously. Nakajima instructed two of the forty engineers he supervised, Toshitada Doi and Senri Miyaoka, to work on a digital recorder. What they came up with sounded okay, but like Nakajima’s original digital recorder, the size of this one—roughly that of a refrigerator—made it an impractical consumer device.

In 1975, Sony released the Betamax videocassette machine, and Nakajima saw a great opportunity. The signal-to-noise ratio of the Betamax made it ideal for digital audio, so without changing the makeup of the machine, Nakajima’s team adapted a Betamax to process a digital audio signal. Two years later Sony began selling the PCM-1, a PCM processor that could be used with any Betamax to create a digital audio recorder. Herbert von Karajan, Hitler’s favorite conductor and a friend of Sony cofounder Akio Morita, pronounced it the best-sounding audio device he had ever heard.

Ohga decided the next logical step was to replace tape with some sort of digital disc. Led by Doi, a Sony team developed a disc with a thirty-centimeter diameter that could hold a whopping eight hundred minutes of sound. Ohga called Lou Ottens, a colleague at Philips, the Dutch company that had developed the compact audio cassette (what we now call simply the audiocassette) in the sixties. For several years, Philips had been conducting cutting-edge research with optics and lasers, and in 1975 introduced the Laservision video disc, which turned out to be a complete flop. After Laservision’s collapse, Ottens decided the optics work should continue in pursuit of an audio disc, reasoning that, unlike video, there was already an existing music consumer base that would embrace a good optical disc.

Philips’s working prototype was 11.5 centimeters in diameter, which struck Ohga as a good size. He proposed that Sony and Philips collaborate on inventing the perfect digital audio disc. Sony could bring to the table its expertise with digital audio issues, while Philips could share its work on optics. Beginning in August 1979, a team of engineers from both companies began shuttling between Eindhoven and Tokyo. (As the prototype of the player took shape, it was given its own first-class seat on KLM.

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