Formats Past and Present
REFERENCE AUDIO – WITHAM ESSEX
BOB’s Review Series - No 56 – Formats Past and Present
Well, here we are, not so much a review, more of a wander back in time to look at some of the domestic music replay formats that have come and gone or stayed with us through generations of audiophiles supported by some of the most influential manufacturers of audio equipment. It’s thanks to the dedication, thirst for knowledge, willingness to experiment and the wherewithal to admit defeat by those very special designers, R&D teams and manufacturers who have always push the boundaries of technology that we are where we are today. I can only guess at what wonders are still to come.
As an avid audiophile I have over the years been an early adopter of most formats designed for the reproduction of music and although some of them predate even me it’s possible younger audiophiles may not have heard of let alone seen and used some of the amazing formats that have been developed over the last 50 years or so. I thought it might be nice to write a brief history of some of those I have owned and used since the 70’s. Until the pandemic changed all our lifestyles, I held annual music evenings at home for friends where we would get together and listen to music for an evening using whatever Hi-Fi equipment was in my system at the time. On one such occasion I was able to set up and demonstrate 10 different formats and I’m sure I bored everyone by keep playing the same tracks but on different replay formats. I wonder if you can guess which format everyone there, without any collusion or influence from me, preferred above all the others? **Read on to find out. This format review event took place about 15 years ago now and at a time before streaming was a big thing and at a time when I had all ten of them available and working.
I hope you will forgive me for any errors, omissions or mistakes I might make with this quick precis of formats. It is only intended as a brief introduction to the physical formats from the early 1970s through to the early 2000s and not to be a definitive review, just some of the formats I’ve owned and used during that time. It’s intended to be format rather than product specific and please remember that I’m by no means an expert in this field, just an enthusiast who has been around the block a few times.
Ten formats, some have come and gone, and some remain, but all were cutting edge when released for public consumption. Unfortunately, those wild innovative times in the 70’s and 80’s are long gone but not forgotten. Don’t read anything into the order in which I have chosen to discuss each format other than they are roughly in chronological order.
- The LP Turntable – The turntable replaced the cylinder as a music format in the early 1920’s although it had started to appear as early as 1912. These early records were all made of shellac and mostly played at the speed of 78rpm although poor and differing mains voltages and mains frequencies of the time meant that these albums were often played a little faster or slower than intended. In the early days RCA Victor and Columbia Records were the main protagonists especially for the later invention of small and microgroove records which were pressed on vinyl rather than shellac and which started to appear commercially shortly after the second world war. These new vinyl albums were mostly played at 33.3 RPM and were pressed initially in the new 12” format replacing the earlier 10” shellac discs. RCA Victor seemed to place all their eggs in the one basket of 45rpm records and pressed mostly on 7” discs whereas Columbia preferred the 12” long play alternative. However, these early discs only played for around 10 minutes per side until the microgroove cut albums that we all use today came about which extended playback to around 20 minutes per side. In 1949 Capitol and Decca adopted the LP format and RCA Victor finally capitulated and joined the 12” LP format. Whole books have been written on the history of turntables and vinyl so please look to these for an in depth and more accurate view of both. Turntables and Vinyl sales reached a peak in the 70’s but underwent a rapid decline in the 80’s following the introduction of CD in 1982/83. A decline that continued through the 90’s before gathering pace again in the 2000’s as younger generations discovered vinyl records and the older generations rediscovered their old turntables and record collections stored in the attic for years and brought them back into use. In 2022 vinyl sales exceeded those of CD for the first time, but don’t get too carried away as those vinyl sales are still massively less than they were back in the day and this refers to value of sales and not units sold and partly reflects the high price of new vinyl today.
- Reel to Reel Tape – I reckon it might surprise some to know that of all people Bing Crosby was partly instrumental in the commercial development and success of Reel to Reel. First developed in 1947 by an American audio engineer called Jack Mullin the format was greatly helped by financial backing of Bing Crosby who at the time invested $50,000 in a tape production company called Ampex who manufactured reel to reel tapes of varying sizes and lengths for both commercial and professional use. Machines are of course useless without the tapes to play on them and $50k was a shed load of money to invest back then. Reel to Reel developed through the 50’s but became widely used by recording professional, artists and domestic users in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s where it remained in use until the last players of the age were manufactured in the early 90’s*. Other recording formats such as cassettes were becoming common in the 70’s with greater ease of use, improved space saving and the ability to be used in-car impacted on sales of reel to reel. All the major audio manufacturers of the time had a go at making Reel to Reel tape decks, but Japan, Switzerland and Germany were probably the most prolific and successful with names like TEAC, Technics, Sony, Akai, Tandberg, Nagra, Revox, B&O and Phillips being the most well-known although the UK did also play its part. These machines offered both 2 and 3 head formats for record, erase and playback and monitoring facilities and some with auto reverse capability had 4 or more heads. For the domestic market the ¼” tape width was favoured, and machines could play and record at varying speeds including 3.75, 7.5 and 15 inches per second (ips), the faster the better the sound quality. These machines used either 2 or 4 track recording and playback with 2 track machines playing in one direction only and 4 track machines able to play in both directions or on both sides of the tape. Reels of 7” and 10.5” diameter were favourites for home use. 10.5” reels could hold 3,600 feet (almost ¾ of a mile) of tape and would run for 3 hours at 3.75ips, 90 minutes at 7.5ips and just 45 minutes at 15ips. I still own two fully functional Reel to Reel tape decks, a Revox B77 MkII high speed and a TEAC X-M2000. Professional recording studios used Reel to Reel tape decks to record, master and archive recordings right up until DAT tape took over in the early 90’s. Many of those original master tapes are still held in archives but tape does deteriorate over time and many important original recordings have been lost because of poor storage. Many of course have now successfully been transferred to digital media files and archived for posterity.
Professional tape decks used tape widths far larger than the domestic ¼” format with tapes up to 2” wide being common to allow for multi-track recording. Some also run at even faster speeds of 30ips. In the early days when the Beatles first started experimenting with recordings 4 track machines were common but soon 8 and 16 track machines became available for professional and even domestic use.
Recordings made on magnetic tape always have better sound quality when combined with faster tape speed and wider tape width because the more tape that passes over the heads per second the more information they can easily record and replay music at high resolution. As a comparison a standard 4 track cassette deck running at 1-7/8ips on 1/8” tape (1/16” per side or 1/32” per track) means that in 60 seconds it passes just 7 sq inches of tape over the heads but a reel to reel 2 track ¼” deck running at 15ips will pass 225 sq inches of tape in 60 seconds, hence why they sound so much better than cassette and why the tapes are so much bigger and more expensive. A professional 2” tape running at 30ips will pass 3,600 sq inches of tape in the same 60 seconds. It’s a bit like today’s modern data files saved on hard drives with high resolution formats taking up more space but sounding better and costing more.
*Rumours of a Reel to Reel comeback have been around for years but there are today a couple of manufacturers making new decks again, Metaxas & Sins from Greece are one such company, Analog Audio Design is another and also Ballfinger and Thorens from Germany. Revox started to design a new playback machine a few years ago but its design seems to have stalled. All these new machines are seriously expensive (€10,000 to €70,000) as are blank and pre-recorded tapes. Some new machines are playback only so can’t be used to record and are generally high-speed machines for better quality.
- Compact Cassette – was designed by Phillips in 1963 for dictation use only and was first used for music audio in 1971. Cassettes were for many years the most favoured recording and playback format with sales peaking at 76 million in 1988. It remained popular until the mid 90’s when CD started to take over. Cassette tape runs at just 1-7/8 ips on tape that is just 1/8” (3mm) wide, a fraction of that available on reel to reel running at 15ips, but in its heyday, it could be made to sound very good indeed by tape deck manufacturers, mostly from Japan such as Aiwa, Sony, Pioneer, TEAC, Sony, Akai and Nakamichi and from Germany and Scandinavian Countries such as Revox, B&O and Tandberg. Their demise has however done away with an adolescent memory I have of all those broken cassette tapes with tape spilling out along roadsides everywhere. Those from a younger generation are probably wondering what I’m talking about.
- Elcasete – It’s likely that lots of audiophiles are not aware of or have ever seen Elcaset machines and tapes because it was only around as a viable format for 3 years back in the late 70’s. Invented by Sony in 1977 to replicate the sound performance of Reel to Reel but in an easier format to use it was based on the standard cassette deck format, but the tapes and machines were more than twice the size. It was essentially Reel to Reel tape loaded into a cassette type case. Using the same tape as Reel to Reel at ¼” wide (6mm) and played at 3.75ips it was twice the width and speed of cassette tape. Tapes of 30 and 90 minutes run time were available. Elcasete didn’t however prove popular because of its size compared to the Cassette and by 1980, after just 3 years Sony abandoned Elcasete and apparently all their remaining stock was sold to someone in Finland. I still own two Elcasete machines, a Sony EL-5 and a Technics RS 7500 (a really big machine – see image attached) but both are now in need of a service having been in the loft for a few years. I expect their belts have turned to black goo by now, a restoration project for sure.
- Compact Disc – CD and SACD – CD was developed jointly by Phillips and Sony in the late 70’s with the first commercially available players appearing in Japan in 1982 and in the UK in 1983. Originally called Digital Audio Compact Disc and soon just referred to as CD this is an optical format disc and is now celebrating its 40th anniversary. A standard 120mm diameter disc could store around 650mb of data playing on a single side for 74 minutes (later extended to around 80 minutes) of uncompressed music. Smaller 75mm discs did also become available to store singles or EP’s, a bit like 7” vinyl but they didn’t really catch on. Known as Redbook CD it was originally launched by Phillips with the strapline ‘pure, perfect sound forever’, a phrase that any would say came back to haunt them. Made from 1.2mm thick polycarbonate the discs have a thin aluminium layer (sometimes a gold layer was used for supposedly better sound) to reflect the laser which reads pits burned into the reflective layer. CDs spin at varying speeds to cater for a constant velocity read rate and speed therefore depends upon where on the disc the data is being read from. Spin speeds of 500 rpm when reading from the centre of the disc and 200 rpm from its outer edge are used to provide a constant linear velocity of between 1.2 and 1.4metres per second. Unlike Vinyl CDs play from the inside to the outside. Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) was again invented by Phillips and Sony and first released in 1999 as a high-resolution disc using DSD rather than PCM as a format. At the time of release it competed with DVD Audio but soon won this war and DVD Audio died almost as soon as it was born, probably in less than 24 months. SACDs continue in production today but are expensive and remain most popular in Japan. They have become known as Scarlet Book standard as they are not Redbook standard discs and can only be played on dedicated SACD Players although some hybrid discs have a specific CD layer that can be read and played on any standard CD player and some SACDs also include a 5.1 multichannel recording. Interestingly many people still think ‘digital’ is all about zeros and ones and think the laser reads 0s and 1s off the disc whereas it reads pits and troughs not too dissimilar to the way a stylus reads pits on a vinyl LP. Not all that is digital is 0’s and 1’s and much that is analogue including modern vinyl starts life as 0’s and 1’s. A lot of what a CD player does it does in the analogue domain rather than the digital because at the end of the day our ears and our speakers can only work in analogue, hence the need for high quality DACs to convert the digital stream to an analogue signal that amps, speakers and your ears can understand. CD remains popular today and although some great names have dropped CD players from their portfolio there are still many making them, and the quality gets better and better.
- Digital Audio Tape (DAT) – Developed by Sony and released in 1987, just 5 years after CD it used technology closely related to video recorders by having rotating rather than fixed heads. Because of its compact size, much smaller than a Cassette tape it was favoured by the professional market who used it virtually exclusively in the 90’s to record, master and archive music files, taking over from Reel-to-Reel mastering. Nowadays of course virtually all mastering is done on computer hard drives. DAT tapes played in one direction only (unlike Cassette which you could flip to play the other side) and tapes came in lengths from 30 to 180 minutes play time. A 120-minute DAT tape is only 200’ long whereas a 120-minute 10-1/2” Reel to Reel tape running at 7.5ips is around 4,500’ long. DAT tape sounded just great, but recorders are no longer made which is a great shame because they are really convenient in use. I have lots of tapes I recorded onto but no longer have a working machine to play them on, eBay is calling.
- Minidisc (MD) – Another Sony invention in the days when their R&D teams were the best in the world and their ingenuity and funds seemingly knew no bounds. Developed by them in the early 90’s and launched in late 1992 these tiny optical discs came in a fixed square shaped protective case measuring just 68 x 75 x 5mm. They were not just a replay format because they could be recorded on many times over whilst offering the convenience of CD but with vastly improved instant access to tracks unlike Cassette and DAT tapes which were linear analogue devices. I loved them and still have a working TASCAM player today. To get the same amount of music on a smaller disc than a standard CD Sony invented and used ATRAC digital compression to achieve up to 80 minutes of music on a very small disc. In use the compression, especially in the later machines from Sony was hardly distinguishable from CD on most systems of the day. By 2011 Sony had sold 22 million MD recorders, where are they all now? Their 1992 launch machines used ATRAC 3, but later years saw the release of ATRAC 4, 4.5, Type R and Type S and this greatly improved the replay quality making MD sound even more like CD. In 2005 Sony launched an extended play version called Hi-MD using ATRAC 3Plus but it needed special players and soon after this MD sales started to decline and in 2008 Sony dropped ATRAC as other codecs were becoming more fashionable and this pretty much condemned Mini Disc to the big audiophile bin in the sky. ATRAC 3 had a bit rate of just 292kbit, but this was still better than MP3, the long play version of MD had a bit rate of just 132 kbit. Today players are no longer made and new discs are becoming harder to find. The later players did sound very much like CD of the day, but should you listen to one on a new system assembled in the 20’s which is capable of high-resolution playback then you could easily tell the difference, audio has move on significantly in recent years. Mini Disc however remains probably the best physical format for record and play ever invented. And just like Cassette and DAT Sony also made portable devices.
- Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) – Whilst Sony went it alone to develop Mini Disc, Phillips went alone to develop Digital Compact Cassette. Their idea was to develop a digital format that looked like a traditional cassette, could also play standard cassette tapes and thereby have an element of backwards compatibility and attract the masses. Phillips released machines and tapes in 1994 to compete with MD but it failed to garner any real public support, it was a complex system prone to mechanical issues and when faced with the increasing adoption of the much more convenient Mini Disc DCC failed within a year. Of course, I bought one! Sounded OK but was fragile to use. Although they sounded good audiophiles of the day didn’t really need or want them. Sony may have lost the Betamax/VCR battle to Phillips but the certainly won the audio recording and playback wars, for a time at least.
- CD Recordable (CD-R & CD-RW) – In the early days of CD HMV in Oxford Street in London installed a CD pressing facility and I remember it vividly. Visitors to the store could wonder at the two brainiacs in white lab coats enclosed in a sterile glass box where they could be seen to press new CDs. It seemed so futuristic at the time. But just 10 years later Sony, Phillips and other manufacturers released domestic machines that anyone who also purchased blank recordable CD discs could record onto at home. No sterile environment and no white coats were needed, and some machines allowed you to copy one disc directly to another, just like twin cassette decks of a previous age. There were two types of discs, CD-R (CD Recordable) which was a record once play many times format and CD-RW (CD Read Write) which was a record many play many times format. CD-Rs needed to be finalised at the end of recording and this fixed them forever, preventing further recording, CD-RW didn’t need to be finalised. Both sounded virtually indistinguishable from the original Redbook pressed CDs. But MP3 was to change all that.
- MP3 (think iPod and other similar devices) – The decline of MD coincided with the release of early MP3 players, made famous by the original Apple iPod in 2002/2003. In terms of audio quality, the high compression rates of MP3 were appalling by today’s high-resolution standards and although mostly everyone agreed with this it was the shear convenience of MP3 that soon did away with all other formats, leaving only enthusiasts to hang onto the older formats. It’s ease of use, convenience, accessibility, portability and novelty was second to none at the time and it coincided with what was thought to be a terminal decline for vinyl. MP3 almost on its own rejuvenated the headphone industry overnight. All the various tape formats were either dead or about to die at the time MP3 first appeared and CD was mainly a fixed format replay only device with none of the convenience or storage capacity of MP3 devices. Fortunately for us all mass storage has now become more affordable with hard drives became bigger and bigger in capacity and cheaper to buy cheaper access to high resolution music has virtually taken over from MP3. Although MP3 heralded a new era in easy access to music, we can only thank the audio gods that the music industry has virtually abandoned highly compressed music the likes of which we will hopefully never see again.
And Today - In recent years streaming music via providers such as Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz and others have become the dominant format for music replay at home and this has led to the development of some great streamers taking full advantage of these high-resolution files. Today 24 and 32 bit PCM files are common with sample rates from 44.1kHz to 384kHz and even 768kHz although few if any files are available at these higher rates. And then there are DSD files which sample the information many million times per second. DSD 64, 128 and 256 are common today but they don’t necessarily improve over standard PCM files, but that’s another story.
Today I mainly use CD and Streaming as my musical formats of choice. I sometimes still use Reel to Reel but none of the other formats I’ve spoken about here. I’ve never been a great fan of vinyl and don’t currently own a turntable and have no plans to get one. In the last 5 years the quality of DACs has improved so much that most digital formats provide standards or replay that could only have been guessed at when Phillips came out with that memorable phrase. And don’t write off CD just yet, sure vinyl may have overtaken it for sales in 2022 but that refers to value of sales (£££) but not numbers of units sold so the number of actual CDs sold in 2022 still outnumbers that of actual vinyl records sold.
**And the best format was – a unanimous decision by around 30 guests at my house on that special evening, a few years ago now, where we listened to all 10 different formats listed above was a resounding unanimous vote for Reel to Reel.
So there you go, 4,081 words reading time you’ll never get back but I hope you found it interesting. Here at Reference Audio we continue to support all the principal formats that are relevant today – Turntables, CD and Streaming so do come and see us if you are interested in upgrading an existing format or are looking for your first venture into something new. We look forward to seeing you.
Bob – Reference Audio – January 2023