Sony PCM-701ES
Overview
The PCM-701ES is the professional sibling of Sony's PCM-F1, an EIAJ-format digital processor that encoded 16-bit audio into a video signal for recording on consumer videotape hardware. The F1 was the portable consumer machine. The 701ES was the one that ended up racked in mastering suites and post-production houses, and the trade press of the mid-1980s treats the two as a pair: "the F1 - or one of its successors such as 701 or 501," as one contemporary account of London post-production put it. The 701ES did not replace the bigger PCM-1610 CD-mastering system so much as undercut it, and contemporary equipment profiles listed the unit at a manufacturer's price of $1,500.00 (Audio, September 1983, p.52). According to HHB, the UK pro-audio dealer that distributed the unit, Sony Broadcast initially worried that selling the F1 and later the 701ES would cannibalise sales of the far more expensive 1610-based mastering rigs. It didn't happen. The EIAJ format, as HHB later reflected, introduced thousands of professional users to digital audio who would never have spent the many thousands of pounds required for overtly professional hardware - and many of those customers graduated to large-scale digital multitrack gear afterward.
The 701ES got you into digital. The F1 system's input and output levels sat at roughly 0.5 V on phono plugs, nowhere near line level, so third-party boxes like Audio+Design's were built to adapt the levels and to fix a timing problem baked into the format. The F1's left channel ran 11 µs behind the right. That meant digitally transferred F1 material was no longer truly mono-compatible once it hit a 1610 with its two discrete D/A converters. Audio+Design's fix was a switchable 11 µs delay in the right-hand input channel, with a matching compensation in the left replay circuit and stickers to mark tapes that had been treated. It worked in theory. Due to a misunderstanding somewhere along the line, the first batch of modified PCM-701 units, where A+D's device was built in, placed the delay in the wrong leg. Rather than restoring time coincidence, those units recorded signals 22 µs out of step. A+D rushed out a second gadget to undo the damage, but for some users it was already too late: their recordings had been made and mastered with a 6 dB loss of HF in mono. Mastering houses took to checking phase on an oscilloscope and recording a 10/12 kHz tone at the head of F1-format tapes alongside the usual 1 kHz reference. Even 1 kHz will show up a timing error on a scope, but an HF tone makes it obvious on a phase meter and audible by simply switching the monitoring to mono.
In the professional chain, the 701ES was an interface and a bridge. HHB's digital mastering service used the 1630 as its core, but offered a range of interfaces allowing two-way digital communication between the 1630 and the lower-cost PCM-F1 and 701ES, which cut post-production costs significantly. Rental houses listed it alongside the 1610, the JVC VP900, the dbx 700, and the Soundstream as one of the formats they could convert to and from. Clone Systems, a realtime cassette duplication plant in County Durham running a hundred Nakamichi BX300Es off a central console, replayed its PCM digital production masters, stored on Betamax cassettes, through Sony PCM-701ES or PCM-F1 adaptors. An A+DR (Audio+Design Recording) system listed the Sony PCM 701ES as required third-party hardware, with an additional ADR interface available either with the system or user supplied. When DAT arrived, the trade press called it "much more than a convenient replacement for the PCM-F1 and PCM-701ES."
One specification gets pinned down here because it circulated widely and wrongly: the 701ES is an EIAJ-format processor, not a domestic R-DAT machine, as the period equipment profile in Audio (September 1983, p.52) makes clear. Later write-ups conflate the two. The distinction mattered in practice, because domestic R-DAT decks generally would not record at the CD sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz without serious modification. That was a problem when a digital transfer to a CD master was required. The F1 and 701ES, by contrast, could make direct transfers into the 1610/1630 system using the readily available digital interfaces of the day. That interface path is what kept the 701ES in service long after newer and cheaper digital recorders appeared.
The 701ES also has a place in the Sony digital lineage. HHB's account puts it in the chain that ran from the PCM-F1 through to the professional 1630-based systems, and the trade advertising of the period made the same point from the other direction. Sony's ES line was marketed as a family descended from "the people who brought you the digital player, digital disc, digital processor, digital mixer, digital recorder, digital editor."
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