Digital Compact Cassette

The Digital Compact Cassette was an alternative to the old analog Compact Cassette, which was also a Philips development, developed by Philips and Matsushita, introduced in 1992 and discontinued in 1996.

The Digital Compact Cassette was initially referred to internally as S-DAT (Static-heads Digital Audio Tape) because of its similarity to the professional DAT recording system. DCC players were capable of playing the conventional analog Compact Cassette; recording, on the other hand, was only possible on DCC tapes.

Compared to the conventional analogue Compact Cassette (CC), the DCC offers a much better sound quality due to the following technical details:

• Frequency range for 48 kHz DCC recordings 20 Hz to 22 kHz - in comparison, analog CC 20 Hz to 18 kHz (under ideal conditions such as the use of pure iron tape and at -20 dB)
• signal-to-noise ratio of a DCC > 92 dB - in comparison the analog CC > 50 dB (for the band type chromium dioxide)

Like MP3 or the MiniDisc, this medium also uses data reduction. For this purpose, a system called "PASC" (Precision Adaptive Subband Coding) was used, which compressed the piece of music to about 1:4. PASC is almost identical to MPEG-1 Audio Layer 1 and works with a data rate of 384 kbit/s.

In contrast to the direct competitor product - the MiniDisc - this system had no initial problems with sound quality. However, shortcomings in terms of handling stood in the way of further distribution. Finding a song in the middle of a 90-minute cassette could take more than a minute. Features found on the MiniDisc (deletion of a track in seconds, arbitrary shifting and, above all, the fast control of tracks) could not be offered by this medium due to the system. However, the system also offered the possibility to enter title and artist; on some finished cassettes even lyrics were displayed. Despite lower prices and significant advances in operation ("TurboDrive" drive, 90-minute cassette rewound in one minute), the DCC was not able to establish itself.

The combination of the Portable DCC Recorder 175 with a standard Windows PC was revolutionary. This meant that as early as 1995 it was possible to transfer tracks directly from the audio recorder to the PC's hard disk via the PC's parallel interface, to edit and archive them, or to operate the audio recorder directly from the PC using software.

There were also DCC streamers to use DCC for backup as well. They disappeared from the market together with DCC.

In the mid-1990s, the company wanted to establish this system (18-bit resolution) in studio production due to its excellent sound characteristics, but this failed. Eventually, development and production were discontinued in 1996.

With regard to long-term stability, the DCC system has to contend with similar deficiencies that are known from analogue cassettes: The tape is subject to constant wear and progressive degradation, which despite digital error correction in extreme cases leads to the fact that after many years of recorded DCC whole passages show dropouts or the tapes can no longer be played. The tape abrasion is deposited as dirt on the sound heads.