His Master's Digital Voice

Computer records glorify sound by the binary numbers

That poor mutt on the RCA label. For half a century he has been sitting by the victrola, one ear cocked to the horn, checking out the sounds with the same expression on his earnest face, as if he expected the machine to throw him a bone. He has weathered considerable changes: shellac to plastic; hand cranks to separate components; 78 to 45 to 33; mono to stereo and, most recently, a skirmish with quad. There is a revolutionary change coming up, however, that bids fair to wag his tail and pin his floppy ears back.

Digital recording--a process that radically improves the sound of conventional phonograph records and could eventually make them obsolete--may be the single biggest sound advance since technicians discovered that two speakers were better than one. "I won't say when it will happen," says RCA Records Division Vice President Thomas Z. Shepard, "but digital is definitely on its way." Robert Ingebretsen, vice president of a digital recording company called Soundstream, Inc., compares conventional record listening to "looking out a dirty window: you can see, but not perfectly. Listening to a digital recording is like looking out the same window, clean." Soundstream's enthusiastic president, Thomas G. Stockham Jr., who has been working on the process since 1958 and may be called its U.S. pioneer, puts it simply: "Digital recording to sound as writing is to language. A thousand years from now, digital recordings could still exist in their original quality."

All this euphoria is not the moon-gazing of laboratory visionaries, nor a spiel for still another arcane piece of audio equipment. Digital recordings do sound amazingly better, even in the hybrid form available today. Recording apparatus is beginning to be widely used, though hardware for full playback is not yet available outside the lab. Even heard on conventional equipment, the new hybrid records bring a full panorama of sound rushing from the speakers. In rock, digital is like scoring a studio seat next to the microphone. In classical, the sound is like a symphonic apotheosis. Floors vibrate; paint could crack; leases may be broken.

This is how it works. Even the best records available today are recorded by the analog method invented by Thomas Edison about a century ago. With analog, sound is reproduced by recording the vibrations made by the sound waves, which were collected by young Tom and his associates through a horn, and then directed to a needle pressed against a metal cylinder wrapped in tin foil. The sound waves caused the needle to vibrate and to trace a wavy groove on the soft surface of the cylinder. This is kindergarten stuff, even allowing for the introduction of magnetic tape in the late 1940s. Most music now is recorded onto tape; when that tape is transferred to a master record, loss of quality inevitably occurs. Even if the master is excellent, acoustic impurities are picked up, the "surface noise" that frays the nerves of the audio freak like nails on slate.

Digital recording shows up analog recording for the late-Victorian process it is. The new technique does not attempt to record directly the vibrations of sound waves. The sound is picked up by microphones and fed through amplifiers to a computer, which then translates the waves into a series of numbers representing the character of the wave form. These numbers are stored as binary "words." Then, when the recording is played, the computer translates these numbers back and the re-created sound waves cause the membranes of speakers to vibrate--possibly with joy. In any case, those vibrations from the numbers are music in spanking-clean form. There is no perceptible distortion, because the sound waves stored as numbers are not changed by the imperfections of magnetic tape or record surfaces.

Digital recording may flood the market, but the deluge will be a little slow in coming. There are only a few companies with digital recording capability; Soundstream, Inc., is probably the best known in the U.S. Its classical records are available mostly in the kind of audio stores the owners like to call salons. A couple of these hybrid records--like The Cleveland Symphonic Winds lighting into Handel, Bach and Hoist (Telarc Records)--played at decent volume on a quiet evening could clear an entire neighborhood. "These hybrid records are not as good as full digital recordings," says Telarc's Jack Renner, "but they are a great deal better than conventional recordings."

They are also a good deal more expensive--at least for the time being. A digital disc goes for roughly twice the price of an average album. "I don't see why digital recordings have to cost $15," says RCA's Shepard, who is preparing to undercut the competition with a $10 digital record of Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in hot pursuit of a Bartok concerto. Warner Bros. Records, Inc., will bring out its first digital record next month, Ry Cooder's lively excursion into rhythm and blues, Bop Till You Drop. Warner is thus the first major American record company to release a nonclassical digital album, one that proves digital will make everything sound better, whether it has sweep or whether it has soul.

Some imperfections remain. Cooder, crazy about the sound, nevertheless reports that the digital console was mechanically ornery. Moreover, digital's full potential is muffled because recordings must still be transferred to conventional analog records. Playback equipment is a way down the road--maybe five years, maybe a little longer. Before the next decade is too far along, however, the audiophile down the block with all the latest equipment may be able to whip out a record smaller than a conventional 45 and put it on a machine that will scan its data with a laser. The sound will produce, in the owner, a guarded but rather smug smile, and in the envious listener the impression that his old conventional rig at home produces the tonal qualities of two Dixie cups and a thread.

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