DOCSLIB.ORG

What Works for Us Clark & Sandy Godfrey June, 2003

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
What Works for Us Clark & Sandy Godfrey June, 2003 Using Technology to Manage Your Music What Works For Us Clark & Sandy Godfrey June, 2003 As you might have guessed from the title, this session is supposed to cover how Sandy and I are using technology to manage our sound, and to describe the setup that we have found works best for us. It would be fun to do (and maybe fun to see) just a “Show and Tell” session, but that probably wouldn’t be of much lasting value. It would be much better to talk about how and why we use the equipment we do. On the other hand, while I’d love to teach everybody all about amplifiers, mixers, computers, digital music, sampling rates, compression, hyper-linking and databases, I don’t have a full semester. And besides, not everybody cares, anyway. So I’ll compromise by taking this half-hour to do my Show and Tell, and put most of the technical stuff into handouts that those who want to know more can take with them to digest at their leisure. We’ll touch briefly on a few technical tidbits, but only briefly. Background You are familiar with signal sources, mixers and amplifiers already – you just might not realize it. Signal Sources are things like microphones, phonograph cartridges, and mini-disk players. Those all produce an electrical signal that corresponds to sound, but that signal is pretty weak. We’ll call that a low-level signal. Signal Low L Source evel Si gnal Line Level Power High Level Speaker Mixer Amplifier Low Level Signal Signal Signal Signal Source A Mixer takes these low-level signals, mixes them together, and makes them stronger – it amplifies them – and produces a line level signal. It also gives us a means of controlling them using volume and tone controls. A Power Amplifier takes the line-level signal from the mixer and makes it strong enough to drive a speaker. The ubiquitous Hilton turntables have a signal source (the phonograph cartridge), a mixer (the part with all the knobs and jacks on the front panel), and a power amplifier (the part you don’t see that boosts the signal to 75, 150, 200 or even 300 watts) all in one box. Our Equipment We have re-arranged the boxes that these components are in. Our signal sources include a microphone and wireless, of course, but (Surprise!!) we’re using a laptop computer as our music source. Our current laptop is a Toshiba Satellite 5005-S504. It is a fairly modest machine by today’s standards – 500Mhz processor, 30Gb disk, 256Mb of RAM – but it does have a nice 15 inch screen. We paid about $1500 for it a year and a half ago. Since we don’t need a turntable, we’re using a Bheringer Eurorack UB502 mixer. It is very compact (about 5” x 7” x 2”) and is available for $50 from www.audio-midi.com. It has 5 single- channel inputs (or two stereo plus microphone), tape inputs and outputs, main and earphone outputs, plus level, balance, and tone controls. And even a primitive level meter. In short, it has more flexibility than we need, in a very small package We’re using a stand-alone mixer, but we’ve buried the power amplifier inside the speakers. We’re using Bose Lifestyle Powered Speakers (that’s as close to a model number as they get) that measure 6 x 6 x 9 inches, and have a threaded socket in the bottom that mounts on a standard camera tripod. They are available for $300 from Bose; you can sometimes find them for less. One speaker is fairly conventional but the other has a power supply and a 30 watt amplifier inside. The speakers are pretty efficient, so that is all the power we need for most situations we find ourselves in. I’ll never sound a convention hall with them, but I’m seldom called upon to do that. And the music they produce is a real pleasure to hear. With this setup, we can put everything we need for a dance or class into one medium-sized suitcase (with wheels and a pop-up handle), including microphone, wireless, speakers, music, cue sheets, notes, and assorted power bricks, wires, extension cords and connectors. To cue at a square dance, we bring just the laptop and a microphone. We plug the laptop’s output into the caller’s rig, using a Hilton “booster” for older turntables. It will also surprise few of you to learn that along with the laptop computer we use DanceMaster to organize and play the dances. DanceMaster is a computer program that helps us select dances to play (before or at the dance), displays the cue sheets, plays the music, works with a remote control, and even keeps track of where in the dance we are so we can’t loose our place. It keeps a history of what dances we’ve cued and when and where we cued them, and tells us what dances are due to be “refreshed” at each place we cue. DanceMaster isn’t the only way to cue from a computer, of course. (We feel that it is by far the best way, but we’re prejudiced.) The “Hyper-linked Cue Cards” handout describes how to connect cue sheets in your computer to sound files, so that once you open your cue sheet you can play the music with a mouse-click or two. Recording Getting music off of its native vinyl and into a computer is rather like getting it onto mini-disks, except that with the computer we have a lot more flexibility. Instead of a Hilton, we use a hi-fi turntable for recording our music. I feel that it sounds better, and it is gentler on the precious vinyl. It isn’t variable speed, of course, but we can adjust the speed when we play the music back, so that is not a problem. For recording cues, we use a tape deck that has a microphone input – we don’t use the actual tape for anything; the deck just gives us a place to plug the mic into. The turntable and tape deck are both connected to a Yamaha Stereo Receiver. That provides the mixer function – it amplifies the weak signal from the turntable, and lets us select either the turntable or the tape deck to record from, and adjust the volume. The Line Output from the receiver is connected to the Line Input jack on the desktop computer. We use the desktop for recording music in part because it has a line input - very few laptops have Line-In jacks these days. Also, it is convenient to be able to leave the “recording studio” set up permanently, and having the files on two separate computers provides a nice backup mechanism. Technical Note: It is possible to use the microphone input on a laptop computer for recording music, but because that input is very sensitive, it is easy to “overdrive” it – to feed it too strong a signal – and wind up with very distorted sound. Another danger is impedance mismatch, which we won’t get into here except to say that the mic input is usually a high impedance input. Driving it from a mixer can probably work well enough, if you can get the volume very low. The earphone output of a minidisk player is low impedance. If you connect the earphone output of a minidisk player to the mic input of a laptop, this mismatch leads to a significant loss of (usually) low frequencies, even if you get the volume levels right. It might take a lot of careful experimentation to get good sound. Hilton sells a small “booster” which can help fix level and impedance mismatches of this sort. (About $50). While I’m recording the music on my computer, Sandy is usually typing her quick cues into her computer. Then I hand her the mic, and play the music file I just recorded. She reads her cue sheet and cues the dance into the mic while I record her voice. We record the music and cues in separate files for two reasons: 1) that way the music sounds better when played alone (and it can even be recorded and played in stereo, to sound even better) and 2) DanceMaster lets us adjust the timing of the cues relative to the music when we play them back. When we are finished recording, I copy both sound files into her computer, she creates a database entry for the dance, synchronizes the music and voice files, and copies everything into the laptop. Once we got used to the system, it doesn’t take very long at all to set up a dance. Software Of course we need software to record sound on a computer, and the preferred tool is a program called a “sound editor”. It is like a word processor for sound files – it lets you get the stuff into the computer, edit it, save it to disk, and “print” (play) it. We use a program called Cool Edit 2000 - $70 from www.syntrillium.com. (Note: Cool Edit is now Adobe Audition and costs about $300. GoldWave (www.goldwave.com) is a good alternate choice). With Cool Edit, before we can record a song, we have to specify how accurate a recording we want. One of the handouts covers some of the specifics of digital recording, and explains what decisions have to be made at recording time, and what some of the trade-offs are.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Early Years of the Acoustic Phonograph Its Developmental Origins and Fall from Favor 1877-1929
    THE EARLY YEARS OF THE ACOUSTIC PHONOGRAPH ITS DEVELOPMENTAL ORIGINS AND FALL FROM FAVOR 1877-1929 by CARL R. MC QUEARY A SENIOR THESIS IN HISTORICAL AMERICAN TECHNOLOGIES Submitted to the General Studies Committee of the College of Arts and Sciences of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of BACHELOR OF GENERAL STUDIES Approved Accepted Director of General Studies March, 1990 0^ Ac T 3> ^"^^ DEDICATION No. 2) This thesis would not have been possible without the love and support of my wife Laura, who has continued to love me even when I had phonograph parts scattered through­ out the house. Thanks also to my loving parents, who have always been there for me. The Early Years of the Acoustic Phonograph Its developmental origins and fall from favor 1877-1929 "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snov^. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go." With the recitation of a child's nursery rhyme, thirty-year- old Thomas Alva Edison ushered in a bright new age--the age of recorded sound. Edison's successful reproduction and recording of the human voice was the end result of countless hours of work on his part and represented the culmination of mankind's attempts, over thousands of years, to capture and reproduce the sounds and rhythms of his own vocal utterances as well as those of his environment. Although the industry that Edison spawned continues to this day, the phonograph is much changed, and little resembles the simple acoustical marvel that Edison created.
    [Show full text]
  • The Lab Notebook
    Thomas Edison National Historical Park National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior The Lab Notebook Upcoming Exhibits Will Focus on the Origins of Recorded Sound A new exhibit is coming soon to Building 5 that highlights the work of Thomas Edison’s predecessors in the effort to record sound. The exhibit, accompanied by a detailed web presentation, will explore the work of two French scientists who were pioneers in the field of acoustics. In 1857 Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented what he called the phonautograph, a device that traced an image of speech on a glass coated with lampblack, producing a phonautogram. He later changed the recording apparatus to a rotating cylinder and joined with instrument makers to com- mercialize the device. A second Frenchman, Charles Cros, drew inspiration from the telephone and its pair of diaphragms—one that received the speaker’s voice and the second that reconstituted it for the listener. Cros suggested a means of driving a second diaphragm from the tracings of a phonauto- gram, thereby reproducing previously-recorded sound waves. In other words, he conceived of playing back recorded sound. His device was called a paléophone, although he never built one. Despite that, today the French celebrate Cros as the inventor of sound reproduction. Three replicas that will be on display. From left: Scott’s phonautograph, an Edison disc phonograph, and Edison’s 1877 phonograph. Conservation Continues at the Park Workers remove the light The Renova/PARS Environ- fixture outside the front mental Group surveys the door of the Glenmont chemicals in Edison’s desk and home.
    [Show full text]
  • THE DYNAMIC RANGE POTENTIAL of the PHONOGRAPH by Ronald M
    THE DYNAMIC RANGE POTENTIAL OF THE PHONOGRAPH By Ronald M. Bauman his article describes a new transmission standards of even lower added to the quietest passages by the approach for analyzing the quality than our current CD standards. cartridge-preamplifier combination dynamic range of the phono- Unless these standards are dramatical- should be essentially inaudible. graphic playback system, in which the ly upgraded (in terms of information Similarly, the cartridge-preamp sys- cartridge and preamplifier are treated content), we may never have a source tem should be able to clearly repro- as an integrated system. I analyzed of music for our homes that sounds ducd the loudest sounds on record the dynamic range potential of several better than the phonograph. without distortion, compression, or combinations of phono cartridges and Are analog records inherently better clipping. preamplifier amplifying devices and in some sense? Your ears may already The same should be true of CD compared the results to CDs. be telling you that analog can sound playback. The quietest passages Additionally, I speculate about the better than today's digital. I will should be reproduced without added drawbacks of frequency domain char- provide quantitative reasons this may noise or distortion of the rnusic acterizations of musical audio compo- be so. caused by amplitude steps, or sam- nents and suggest that the time pling intervals that are too coarse, or domain may be a more natural frame Qualitative Requirements by filter phase shifts and ringing. The of reference for audio instrumentation The subtlety of detail in the grooves of loudest peaks encoded, as for analog development.
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter 186 NOISE
    Chapter 186 NOISE §186-1. Loud and unnecessary noise §186-3. Permits for amplifying devices. prohibited. §186-4. Stationary noise limits; maximum §186-2. Loud and unnecessary noises permissible sound levels. enumerated. §186-5. Violations and penalties. [HISTORY: Adopted by the Village Board of the Village of Albany 5-11-1992 as Sec. 11-2- 7 of the 1992 Code. Amendments noted where applicable.] GENERAL REFERENCES Disorderly conduct -- See Ch. 110. Parks and navigable waters -- See Ch. 198, §198-1B(2). Peace and good order -- See Ch. 202. §186-1. Loud and unnecessary noise prohibited. It shall be unlawful for any person to make, continue or cause to be made or continued any loud and unnecessary noise. It shall be unlawful for any person knowingly or wantonly to use or operate, or to cause to be used or operated, any mechanical device, machine, apparatus or instrument for intensification or amplification of the human voice or any sound or noise in any public or private place in such manner that the peace and good order of the neighborhood is disturbed or that persons owning, using or occupying property in the neighborhood are disturbed or annoyed. §186-2. Loud and unnecessary noises enumerated. The following acts are declared to be loud, disturbing and unnecessary noises in violation of this chapter, but this enumeration shall not be deemed to be exclusive: A. Horns; signaling devices. The sounding of any horn or signaling device on any automobile, motorcycle or other vehicle on any street or public place in the village for longer than three seconds in any period of one minute or less, except as a danger warning; the creation of any unreasonable loud or harsh sound by means of any signaling device and the sounding of any plainly audible device for an unreasonable period of time; the use of any signaling device except one operated by hand or electricity; the use of any horn, whistle or other device operated by engine exhaust and the use of any signaling device when traffic is for any reason held up.
    [Show full text]
  • Minding Our Words: Audio Responsibilities in Endangered Languages Documentation and Archiving
    Taiwan Journal of Linguistics Vol. 6.2, 59-78, 2008 MINDING OUR WORDS: AUDIO RESPONSIBILITIES IN ENDANGERED LANGUAGES DOCUMENTATION AND ARCHIVING David Nathan Abstract Linguists are addressing the predicted the loss of many of the world's languages through an emerging discipline called Language Documentation, which focuses not on theory but on data, and how the data is acquired, represented, presented, and preserved. For most endangered languages, which are not written, much of this data is audio, and unlike many corpora it is likely to be local, particular, opportunistic, and uneven. New questions are raised, such as: what audio data counts as a record of a language that is likely to disappear? how can coverage and quality be measured? for what purposes and by whom will the data be used? For those of us documenting languages, there are four key audio-related issues: audio quality, its accompanying symbolic data, the usage of data for practical purposes such as language revitalisation, and the need for enhanced sensitivities and protocol in audio access and distribution. Language Documentation has benefited from the knowledge and experience of other disciplines, but perhaps it is now sufficiently experienced to offer some useful advice to others. This paper surveys these issues, and also describes the funding, teaching, archiving and publishing activities of the Endangered Languages Project at SOAS. 1. INTRODUCTION Today the world is facing the impending loss of at least half of its languages. Many linguists are addressing this challenge through an emerging discipline called documentary linguistics. Documentary linguistics (also called “language documentation”) focuses on data, and how data is acquired, represented, presented, and preserved, in contrast to the analytical and theoretical concerns of much of linguistics.
    [Show full text]
  • Press Release
    ( ( ( ( F i r s t S o u n d s ) ) ) ) making the earliest audio recordings accessible to all people for all time CONTACT: Meagan Hennessey David Giovannoni [email protected] [email protected] The World’s Oldest Sound Recordings Played For The First Time A group of researchers has succeeded in playing a sound recording of a human voice made in 1860 – 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Roughly ten seconds in length, the recording is of a person singing “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” – a snippet from a French folksong. It was made on April 9, 1860 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on his “phonautograph” – a device that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp. Scott never dreamed of playing back his recordings. But this morning, the dream Scott never had will come true. A cadre of audio historians, recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the First Sounds initiative has transformed Scott’s smoked-paper tracings into sound. They will premiere Au Clair de la Lune at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University this morning. Examples of sounds evoked from French and American phon- autograph recordings made between 1857 and 1878 will also be played publicly for the first time. First Sounds historians Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni began their search for surviving phonautograph recordings, or phonautograms, in the fall of 2007. In October they studied 19 examples held by the Edison National Historic Site, made in 1878 by Edison and his associates to study the noise of the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad in Manhattan.
    [Show full text]
  • Trenton 9-7-1967 As § 3- 2 of the Revised General Ordinances
    Chapter 167. NOISE [HISTORY: Adopted by the City Council of the City of Trenton 9-7-1967 as § 3- 2 of the Revised General Ordinances. Amendments noted where applicable.] GENERAL REFERENCES Barking dogs — See Ch. 21, § 21-7. Peace and good order — See Ch. 201. Nuisances — See Ch. 171. § 167-1. Prohibited noises. It is hereby declared to be a nuisance and it shall be unlawful for any person to make, cause or suffer or permit to be made or caused upon any premises owned, occupied or controlled by him/her or upon any public street, alley or thoroughfare in the City of Trenton, any unnecessary noises or sounds by means of the human voice, or by any other means or methods which are physically annoying to persons, or which are so harsh or so prolonged or unnatural, or unusual in their use, time and place as to occasion physical discomfort, or which are injurious to the lives, health, peace and comfort of the inhabitants of the City, or any number thereof. § 167-2. Loud and unnecessary noises enumerated. [Amended 2-5-2004 by Ord. No. 04-6] The following acts are declared to be loud, disturbing and unnecessary noises in violation of this chapter, but this enumeration shall not be deemed to be exclusive: A. Radios, televisions, phonographs. The playing of any radio receiving set, television, musical instrument, phonograph or other machine or device for the production or reproduction of sound with louder volume than is necessary for convenient hearing of the person so playing, using or operating such instrument or device and any persons who are voluntary listeners thereto, or in such manner as to disturb the peace, quiet and comfort of neighboring inhabitants.
    [Show full text]
  • A Secret History of Phonography
    W&M ScholarWorks Articles 7-2008 A Secret History of Phonography Christopher DeLaurenti College of William and Mary, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/articles Part of the Other Music Commons Recommended Citation DeLaurenti, Christopher, "A Secret History of Phonography" (2008). Articles. 23. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/articles/23 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Secret History of Phonography Christopher DeLaurenti Published in The Believer, July/August 2008, p. 54 then revised and expanded October 2008 and February 2012 Why listen to misery and murder? On June 21, 1996, Claude Matthews smuggled his microphones into the Center for Animal Care and Control in Manhattan and captured the gallows yelping, baying, and whining of doomed dogs. The resulting album,DogPoundFoundSound (Bad Radio Dog Massacre, might be the most brutal yet profoundly moving recording you will ever find: You hear peals of yapping and barking, then a strange sudden pause; a tiny, crouched snippet of contented “oohs” flow from a distant radio. A heavy door rolls open. A dog howls again, begging for freedom (or at least attention) and the chorus of barking resumes. DogPoundFoundSound… also marks an obscure, though crucial milestone in the history of field recording. Field recordings began with Thomas Edison. In 1877, after several attempts by other inventors, Edison perfected the phonograph, a portmanteau of the Greek words for “sound” or “voice” and “writer.” Emile Berliner patented the turntable gramophone in 1887, and soon thereafter ethnographers traveled the world recording the music and language of “primitive” peoples.
    [Show full text]
  • Digital Audio Antiquing
    HELSINKI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Department of Electrical and Communications Engineering Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing Sira González González Digital Audio Antiquing Final project. Espoo, June 7, 2007 Supervisor: Professor Vesa Välimäki HELSINKI UNIVERSITY ABSTRACT OF THE OF TECHNOLOGY MASTER’S THESIS Author: Sira González González Name of the thesis: Digital Audio Antiquing Date: June 7, 2007 Number of pages: 54 Department: Electrical and Communications Engineering Professorship: S-89 Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing Supervisor: Prof. Vesa Välimäki Historical music recordings have many different types of degradations. These deficiencies are introduced both in recording and reproduction techniques, worsening the quality of the final music file. In this thesis, a study of these degradations is conducted, analyzing their sources and characteristics. The implementation of the defects is carried out using different audio signal processing methods each time, taking into account the nature of the degradation, the available data and computational resources. Finally, these synthetic degradations are applied to a CD- quality music file in an attempt to simulate phonograph, gramophone and LP recordings. Keywords: acoustic signal processing, degradations, digital filtering, historical recordings, interpolation, music, restoration i Acknowledgements This thesis work has been carried out in the Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing of TKK, Helsinki University of Technology. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Vesa Välimäki, for giving me this opportunity and for his help during the whole working process. Also, I wish to thank Ossi Kimmelma and Jukka Parviainen for providing me much with helpful material and for their patience while explaining all their code to me.
    [Show full text]
  • Bill Klinger; Association for Recorded Sound Collections
    CYLINDER RECORDS: Significance, Production, and Survival Bill Klinger Association for Recorded Sound Collections This document is a response to requests for comments and data that might help to inform the National Recorded Sound Preservation Study. It describes the significance of cylinder phonograph records and offers quantitative estimates regarding their production and survival. 1 Respondent’s Background and Affiliation I write partly as a private record collector and partly as a representative of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC). ARSC is a nonprofit organization, founded in 1966, dedicated to the preservation and study of sound recordings—in all genres of music and speech, in all formats, and from all periods. ARSC is unique in bringing together private collectors, historians, discographers, engineers, and institutional professionals, including representatives of some of the world’s largest libraries and archives. I chair the Cylinder Subcommittee of the ARSC Technical Committee, which developed the ARSC Guidelines for Cylinder Playback Equipment (funded by grants from the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences). I am a Founding Member of the National Recording Preservation Board, representing ARSC. For more than thirty years, I have researched the history, technology, and products of the cylinder record industry. My personal collection currently includes 7,277 cylinder records, of nearly all types and brands. 2 Significance of Cylinder Records Mechanical sound-carriers configured in cylindrical form represent an important part of our recorded- sound heritage, for many reasons: 2.1 World’s Oldest Format for Sound Recording and Playback Thomas Edison’s tinfoil phonograph of 1877—which employed a thin sheet of metal foil, formed into a cylinder—was the first device to successfully “capture” and reproduce sound.
    [Show full text]
  • Notre Dame College Noise Policy
    Notre Dame College Noise Policy Policy Statement The Notre Dame College is committed to providing educational opportunities for its students, as well as supporting collegiate athletic events (both internal organized sports as well as rental of our facilities to other outside groups), multi-generational events, band and music programs, performing arts, just to name a few. The College also recognizes its civic responsibilities in compliance with local ordinances of the City of South Euclid, as well as its desire to respect the living environment of our surrounding residential neighborhood and its occupants, and maintain an acceptable level of sound when generated by a sound generating device (e.g. radio, receiving set, musical instrument, phonograph, loudspeaker, sound amplifier or other machine or device for the producing or reproducing of sound; construction or maintenance machinery; or any other device not otherwise stated, that can generate sound that is applicable to the City of South Euclid Municipal Ordinances) . As part of the Colleges normal business activities and functions, the emission of noise is inevitable, however, the College commits to ensure noise levels are reasonable and within the codified ordinances of the City of South Euclid, Ohio. Purpose The purpose of this policy is to ensure compliance with the Ordinances of the City of South Euclid, Ohio, as well as being civically responsible to our community and surrounding neighborhood when generating noise. Scope: All departments, staff and faculty of the College; all contractual agreements with outside users of our facilities or general contractors; or, vendors who use or operate sounds generating equipment upon the campus.
    [Show full text]
  • Digital Audio Tape Technology: a Formidable Challenge to the American Copyright System Taro J
    American University International Law Review Volume 4 | Issue 2 Article 11 2011 Digital Audio Tape Technology: A Formidable Challenge to the American Copyright System Taro J. Kawamura Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/auilr Part of the International Law Commons Recommended Citation Kawamura, Taro J. "Digital Audio Tape Technology: A Formidable Challenge to the American Copyright System." American University International Law Review. 4, no. 2 (1989): 409-442. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Washington College of Law Journals & Law Reviews at Digital Commons @ American University Washington College of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in American University International Law Review by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ American University Washington College of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DIGITAL AUDIO TAPE TECHNOLOGY: A FORMIDABLE CHALLENGE TO THE AMERICAN COPYRIGHT SYSTEM Taro J. Kawamura* INTRODUCTION The Japanese electronics industry is planning to introduce a major new home sound recording system into the American market. The tech- nological advancement is the digital audio tape (DAT) system.' The system provides on tape the same digital quality sound found only on compact discs (CDs). The appeal of the DAT system stems from the fact that it is the first device offering the capability of recording digi- tally -at home.3 Unlike analog tape technology, reproduction of music * J.D., 1989, Washington College of Law, The American University. 1. See Harrell, Japanese Audio, STEREO REV., July 1987, at 48 (explaining that DAT is the first major audio product to originate in Japan).
    [Show full text]