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RH1 ancient and modern DCC

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aportlock

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I managed to get this rather ancient but very good condition Phillips DCC recorder. It is hooked via the optical lead to my RH1. The quality of the DCC is outstanding and i believe it gave minidisc a run for its money in the mid 90's (for a short while). The RH1 was bought last weekend in London every shop I went to said they had run out of stock as they sold very well and are waiting for new stock.

The other picture is my CMT SE9 and a strange device I got for £5 off ebay.

Just thought I'd share the pictures with you, they are taken with my Sony MZ-DH10P. the RH1 is my main recorder but the DH10p is used as the playback device. Can't live without that lovely colour screen.

Cheers

Allan

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Thanks. I still have a working Philips DCC-170 (and 2 Philips decks). The sound of DCC was considered to be excellent since they were introduced. There was also a version of the DCC-170 (the DCC-175) with a computer interface, you could edit the audio directly. The 1/8" inputs and outputs on the DCC-170 are combination units that supports analog, optical and coax. Yes, all 3 on both input and OUTPUT. You can play an analog cassette and use optical out to record from.

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what is that Sony device? the last pic...

I believe its a Sony DataDiscman, It played electronic books and 3 inch audio cd's. This model seems to have a built in organizer, calcuator, clipboard?? and columns game. Its the most bizzare gadet I have seen but does play very good quality cd's. I think this one originated in 1993/4.

Allan

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DCC, in my opinion, far outclassed MD in terms of sound quality when they were introduced. DCC used a variant of MPEG-1 Layer 1 called PASC at 384kbps, which is a very simple compression scheme and didn't suffer from the same sort of artifacts that plagued early ATRAC (15kHz lowpass, ringing, metallic sound, pre-echo, etc). As time went on, ATRAC got better and Type-R/S probably isn't much different than PASC. If ATRAC had reached Type-R levels right away (and hardware/blanks had been a little cheaper), I don't think DCC would have been around for even as long as it was (discontinued: 1996).

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Thanks. I still have a working Philips DCC-170 (and 2 Philips decks). The sound of DCC was considered to be excellent since they were introduced. There was also a version of the DCC-170 (the DCC-175) with a computer interface, you could edit the audio directly. The 1/8" inputs and outputs on the DCC-170 are combination units that supports analog, optical and coax. Yes, all 3 on both input and OUTPUT. You can play an analog cassette and use optical out to record from.

I initially used the SE9 to archive my old cassette collection to MD. When I got the Phillips DCC170 the quality with analouge tape was far superior to the SE9.

The SE9 has a very basic deck no dolby etc but the DCC has playback Dolby B and makes a very good analouge source for my RH1. The few DCC albums I have will transfer okay on the optical but no track names are saved. I have been on the look out for the 175 but I think they were only available in the Netherlands.

Allan

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I managed to get this rather ancient but very good condition Phillips DCC recorder. It is hooked via the optical lead to my RH1. The quality of the DCC is outstanding and i believe it gave minidisc a run for its money in the mid 90's (for a short while). The RH1 was bought last weekend in London every shop I went to said they had run out of stock as they sold very well and are waiting for new stock.

The other picture is my CMT SE9 and a strange device I got for £5 off ebay.

Just thought I'd share the pictures with you, they are taken with my Sony MZ-DH10P. the RH1 is my main recorder but the DH10p is used as the playback device. Can't live without that lovely colour screen.

Cheers

Allan

I'm drooling, what a neet find, it's fun finding stuff like that,

Bob

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The quality of the DCC is outstanding and i believe it gave minidisc a run for its money in the mid 90's (for a short while).

Philips did a fine job on their PASC and to my ears was worlds apart from MiniDisc for many years. I dunno how they would compare today but it's pretty irrelevant now.

The two formats were so different, I think only a minority chose them on sound quality (and DAT was always around). By 1997, CD-R started to get affordable, too...and the rest is history. IMO, Philips made a terrible mistake sticking to tape. Sony asked them to co-develop what would be MiniDisc but they refused. Oh well.

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Philips had a good reason for developing tape, backward compatability. Cassette was still very big in 1992 and all DCC units played analog tape, and did it very well (they used magneto-resistive heads to read analog signals). Dolby B was on all portables, Dolby B and C on all decks. Auto reverse was required on all DCC decks (you could not flip over a DCC tape) and the full servo decks moved tape quite smoothly and quickly. Later decks had "turbo drive" and would move tape very fast with smooth stops.

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Philips had a good reason for developing tape, backward compatability.

Yeh, I owned a deck...

None were as fast as DAT, tho. There was a big debate within Philips as to whether they should go disc or tape with their product. Active discussions, etc. Many in the company wanted disc, but tape won over. There was an interview with Jan Timmer at the period it was released in one of the magazines. I forget which. I remember the guy basically decided on the backward compatibility as something people would like when transitioning from analogue tape to "digital recording". Turns out he was dead wrong.

Anyway, the product choices they made with DCC ignored the fact there was a BIG shift to CD by 1992 (I boght my first CD unit then, too), and people will never find tape attractive in a new product after experiencing instant track access. Though they loved to trumped just how popular cassette was, their statistics were meaningless because of the rapidly shifting sands, so to speak.

Guitarfxr,

There are still DCC tapes (and decks) on ebay .

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Wow , nice find.

Can you still get Digital tape for that , or is it just for Regular tapes now?

Yes, do a search on ebay and there are plenty of new and used tapes.

I came across a web site that showed you how to drill a couple of holes

into a standard tape housing so to make the recording treat it as a digial tape.

Ahh the good old days when HiFi was more hands on....now were did I put that

soldering iron!

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As the proud owner of an MZ-RH1, I wondered if you could clear up a couple of matters relating to this machine before I buy one. Is it possible to adjust the record level during recording, without having to put it in pause/record as is necessary with my old MZ-R90? I have read that it is possible, but the manual is not clear on this.

The other point is this - I understand that when recording in PCM-WAV format, it can be saved to a 1GB data MD and then uploaded to a PC via the USB connection. Have I understood this correctly

Many thanks

Edited by uncleboko
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As the proud owner of an MZ-RH1, I wondered if you could clear up a couple of matters relating to this machine before I buy one. Is it possible to adjust the record level during recording, without having to put it in pause/record as is necessary with my old MZ-R90? I have read that it is possible, but the manual is not clear on this.

The other point is this - I understand that when recording in PCM-WAV format, it can be saved to a 1GB data MD and then uploaded to a PC via the USB connection. Have I understood this correctly

Many thanks

in a nutshell AFAIK yes to both, but I think the RM40ELK remote makes it easier to adjust levels

Bob

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As the proud owner of an MZ-RH1, I wondered if you could clear up a couple of matters relating to this machine before I buy one. Is it possible to adjust the record level during recording, without having to put it in pause/record as is necessary with my old MZ-R90? I have read that it is possible, but the manual is not clear on this.

The other point is this - I understand that when recording in PCM-WAV format, it can be saved to a 1GB data MD and then uploaded to a PC via the USB connection. Have I understood this correctly

Many thanks

Yes you can adjust the levels on the fly.

Also, you don't need to record in PCM in order to upload, you can upload any MiniDisc format (SP/MONO/LP2/LP4/PCM/Hi-SP/Hi-LP) to PC using the RH1. If you are uploading to Mac however, you are limited to the Hi-MD modes (PCM/Hi-SP/Hi-LP).

--

On the DCC subject, I have an Optimus DCT-2000 that works great. I actually use the darn thing occasionally too.

For those interested here are a few pics of DCC tapes (also taken with the DH10P, as the original poster did ;)):

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