Hi, Recently bought a non-functional Philips DCC134 for fun as I'm normally into walkmans/cassette. After belt replacement it works fine, a little high w/f but I haven't done any cleaning or lubrication yet so I'm hopeful it can be improved. It got me thinking though, is DCC a good/great cassette player or is the cassette compatibility a compromise? My initial impression is that it sounds quite good.The head is really different from cassette players.
It depends from what perspective you look at it. As far as functionality goes, it will work just fine with compact cassettes. The wow&flutter figure may be improved by lubricating the rotating parts and eventually replacing the pinch rollers (they look a bit shiny in the picture). However, given these units use a Panasonic AR90 mechanism, I wouldn't expect them to get better than Panasonic RQ-S series in terms of wow&flutter. So if the reference w&f are SONY DD units (and it probably is given the units in your signature), just don't expect this DCC to get w&f below 0.1% WRMS, it's not gonna happen. For critical listening of classical music, it's probably a compromise if we look at it from this perspective. But we do have to keep in mind it wasn't designed for that. Problem is in regard to the head and head wear caused by compact cassettes. That's where I would be concerned. I watched DCC museum YouTube channel and the guy stated multiple times he doesn't recommend using compact cassettes in DCC units due to potential head wear. So what I recommend is watching this YT channel and see what tapes the guy recommends to be used in such units: think chrome ones but don't quote me on that.
Yes, I remember now regarding wear of the head. DCC is an interesting part of music format history I think even though it never gained traction. I have no intention to replace my beloved DC2 for daily music listening, I was just curious if DCC brought any advances in tech for normal cassette playback but then I assume it did not. I will dig into DCC museum YT channel, thanks for the tip.
They actually sell new albums over at the DCC museum. I recall reading the DCC tape is more like VHS tape. A lot of avid DCC users recommend not playing regular (analog) cassettes at all.
I had no idea you could slip a compact cassette into one of those... We had one in my old lab but I never got to play with it. DAT is more like VHS tape with helical scanning. Cool unit, ultra-rare over here, DAT and DCC were mired in lawsuits from the music industry and they kept them from getting any consumer traction, pro models tend to show up from time to time. Sony was so mad they bought Columbia to get a seat at the table.
Backwards compatibility with analog cassettes was one of the selling points. The fact that some tapes damage the head, not much of a selling point. The demagnetizing tapes are the best way to kill a DCC device
I didn't know either. Just a format that combines the worst of both worlds in my opinion. Tons to go wrong. Digital tape always reminds me of the great Galileo mission to Jupiter being crippled with the digital tape drive issue (and stupid folding umbrella antenna from years of storage after that other boondoggle blew up).
It is a kind of novelty for me. I remember when it was launched, never really saw the appeal and minidisc seemed like a better solution. I've never seen any walkman sized DCC players but maybe it existed. It is however an interesting historical point in music formats.
The audio quality is excellent. I don’t hear a difference between MD, DCC and CD albums. The first 2 are obviously compressed.
MD and DCC basically got crushed by CD's, we already had the CD players and nobody wanted to spend all that money to get into recording DCC and MD outside of musicians and kids with cash. Cassettes kind of held on until recordable CDs got big. I think DCC was getting legs around 88 compared to 92 for MD's (read one of the archeaology threads for better dates), so it could/might have been huge. I could barely afford a decent boombox or Walkman back then let alone a $400 USD MD/DCC player. Great find, it would be a grail find for me.
