Sony PCM-1600
A two-channel 16-bit processor that turned a U-matic video deck into a digital recorder a working studio could actually buy.
Overview
The PCM-1600 was not a tape machine. It was a processor - a box that took analog audio, ran it through Sony's pulse code modulation system, and handed the resulting binary stream to a video recorder for storage. That mattered a lot in the late 1970s, because a studio didn't need to buy a purpose-built digital recorder. It needed a processor and a U-matic deck, and video hardware was already sitting in production houses and broadcast facilities around the world. Sony's own advertising made the point bluntly: the PCM-1600 was "actually available for delivery today," not six months out or whenever the bugs got worked out.
The pitch was direct-to-disc quality without the direct-to-disc limitations. Digital recording was widely assumed to be the future of record making, and the PCM-1600's claim was that the future had arrived and you could book a session with it now. Sony's marketing copy put the two-channel unit's dynamic range at greater than 90 dB, frequency response at 20 Hz to 20 kHz, total harmonic distortion inaudible across the audio spectrum, and wow and flutter unmeasurable. Those last two figures were the real argument. A processor with no transport of its own has no capstan, no reel motor, and no mechanical speed variation to fight. The wow-and-flutter problem doesn't exist in the digital domain, and the deck doing the storing runs at video speeds with video tolerances.
The system's error correction came straight out of computing, where losing a single bit can mean millions. Sony engineers built a correcting code that detects and restores dropped-out information automatically. Video recorders were already close to immune to dropout in the first place, so the company argued the chances of dropout ruining a session were effectively negligible. And because the PCM-1600 wrote binary code rather than audio, tape hiss and print-through were non-issues. There was no noise reduction and no bias and equalization realignment before every session. Recording-Engineer (December 1978, p.106) reported Sony's own figures for the system: frequency response flat within +0.5/−1.0 dB from 20 to 20,000 Hz, crosstalk better than −90 dB, and wow and flutter described as immeasurable.
Editing went through the video chain rather than the audio chain. Working with two Sony video recorders, a standard Sony video editor - the BVE-500A or the newer DEC-1000 - covered the editing needs of a digital session. That was an unfamiliar workflow for engineers who had never spoken video, and the learning curve was real. One early adopter, writing in Recording-Engineer, recalled the first sessions as a braintease of sync, E-to-E, and input questions, with the advance guard of digital audio spraying shag carpets with antistatic gas to stop pops and ticks from appearing in recordings. Tape analyzers, fast synchronizers, and format standards all arrived late to digital systems. The first digital editors were slow and clumsy and didn't improve quickly, largely because manufacturers weren't selling enough product to fund the work.
What the PCM-1600 did have going for it was adoption. Frankford/Wayne Mastering in New York installed one for in-house disk mastering and outside rentals, and was described as the first independent disk mastering facility on the East Coast to buy the Sony system. The Metropolitan Opera used a PCM-1600 to record its "Live From The Met" telecasts, building a digital/video library of performances including Othello, Elektra, Don Carlo, Un Ballo in Maschera, and Manon Lescaut. They were engineered by Peter Jensen of Digital Recording Systems, who had bought the PCM-1600 a year earlier and recorded for RCA, CBS, and Vanguard in that first year. Fedco's remote truck used a PCM-1600 for the Miles Davis album We Want Miles, recorded simultaneously with analog in June 1981. Bruce Botdick saw an ad for the PCM-1600 in a trade magazine, caught a five-minute demonstration of the prototype DAE-1000 editor at the AES Convention in Los Angeles, and ended up using a system on the Star Trek - The Motion Picture soundtrack.
The limitations were understood at the time. Botdick, interviewed in Recording-Engineer, acknowledged the analog proponents' complaint directly: most music has harmonics well above 20 kHz, and the sampling rate plus the anti-aliasing filter required to keep the pass band below half the sampling frequency chop those harmonics off. You lose a little of the "air" at the super-top, he conceded, but you gain so much elsewhere that it balances out. He said this in 1979, having just bet a major film soundtrack on it.
Sony followed the PCM-1600 with the PCM-1610, announced at the 67th Audio Engineering Society Convention. It added a SMPTE time code generator, a switchable transformer/transformerless function on inputs and outputs, and a variable mute time selector for protection against bit errors. The 1610 offered a choice of 44.056 or 44.1 kHz sampling and remained compatible with tapes made on the PCM-1600. It weighed 77 pounds, measured 17 × 10½ × 18¼ inches, was rack mountable, and sold for $25,000.
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