Did Sony invent any of this or just buy the rights and make money from them ?
They also "invented" the Walkman battery door, the analog section of the D7/8, S-link, SCMS, and all of the other things mentioned in earler posts. My 35" Trinitron died 2 years after plunking down $1000 for it, long past it's less than standard 90 day warantee.
And don't miss the Serial Copy Management "feature" that Hi-MD will include. I love to give data bits of musical information to copy protection schemes that don't apply to my use of a product.
IMHO, Sony's market is not us.
If they called the shots, a taper's section would not exist.
They wanted to market prerecorded DATs with SCMS.
CDs overtook it, plain and simple.
We inadvertently benefited from what they would call "their loss."
Sony is not your Uncle, trust me.
It is a very, very big foreign interest taking US jobs and dollars abroad.
No, but my uncle used to work for sony.
Yes, they invented (developed) quite a lot of the CE toys you use today, or at least made them better. They also made some that were technically superior, but weren't so popular (Betamax, which came out BEFORE VHS, was a better format than VHS, quality wise). Some others I didn't mention:
The portable transistor radio
Home video reel-to-reel (my grandpa had one, the CV-2000)
The portable transistor TV
The CCD chip (the "eye" of a camcorder)
The Betacam (the first camcorder)
the 3.5" floppy
The Li-Ion rechargeable battery
The JumboTron
And don't give me that "buy american" crap, either. You and I both know that if we wanted to keep foreign product out of the tapers' section, there would BE no tapers' section. Tascam, Sony, Casio, Creative Labs, HHB, Schoeps, DPA, Neumann... can you think of any American made DAT's or HD recorders that don't cost as much as a CAR? Can you think of ANY, period?
Don't forget that SCMS was a reaction to Congress' pressure on the Consumer Electronics industry to keep people from copying CDs or DATs perfectly over and over again. They could have just made DAT analog in only, but that would be besides the point of having a DAT int the first place. Do you remember (or can you?) how LONG we waited for DAT, once they announced they had made prototypes? YEARS, because of this very issue. Don't blame Sony for SCMS, blame Jack Valenti and his buddies at the RIAA!!
So my point is, you would not have even heard of DAT unless SCMS was part of it.
The DRM on the Hi-MD is likely to prevent you from ripping a CD to MD (using USB) and then distributing it. JUST like SCMS. With SCMS you get to make at least one perfect copy. So make a backup of your CD. Big f'in deal.
The SCMS is one of the features that draws the line between consumer (d7/8) and Pro (da-p1, etc) audio. Notice the price range difference. If Sony marketed a Hi-MD without SCMS, it would be a rack mount unit and cost $1000.
Anyway.... My point originally was this: Sony has made some mistakes. So have many CE (Consumer Electronics) companies. But instead of just doing what everyone else is, they consistently come up with new categories of products and create markets for themselves. Sure, I've had 2 MD car players go south on me. I've had just as many Pioneer and Alpine units go bad too. Toys will break. Including Sony's.
My kit doesn't have any Sony product in it right now. But there's room.
Topic: Mini-Disc with TEETH (Read 15718 times)