Panasonic SA-XR10
Keeping it Real
To me so far -- and I've only seen a small fraction of the exhibits -- this year's Consumer Electronics Show has been one mainly of trends and imminent breakthroughs. Only a few actual, available products have piqued my engineering interest compared to the number of product prototypes and promising and truly exciting near-future technologies I've seen. One of the more intriguing and real, available-for-purchase products I've come across was the Panasonic SA-XR10 ($599, July). Compared to everything else that was happening in the truly massive Panasonic booth, this device, a multichannel receiver, was little heralded. It didn't even merit a picture in the Panasonic press kit CD-ROM (I took our picture). But its rated 5 x 100 watts per channel power output from an enclosure little bigger than a laptop computer was surprising. This was possible due to its use of extremely electrically efficient "1-bit" digital amplifiers (controlled by Texas Instruments chips), which enable high output power ratings with neither a bulky and heavy power supply nor with massive and expensive heat sinks. One-bit amplifier technology seems to be taking off in Japan, where an industry consortium has been formed to promote its use. We are at the beginning stages of a one-bit onslaught.


Yamaha 1-bit power amplifier prototype
Yamaha was showing a prototype of a one-bit power amplifier and Sharp was again exhibiting its one-bit technology that's now a couple of years old. Sharp's twist this time was that they were feeding, through a proprietary and copy-protected interface, one-bit data from an SACD player directly into their amps. The SACD data didn't drive the speakers directly, however, but had to be converted to the Sharp output-modulation scheme first. I was amused -- and annoyed -- by the presenter in Sharp's booth who restated the old canard that the 1-bit resampling rates employed (5.6 MHz, 128 times the CD sampling rate) ensure a more accurate reproduction of the signal (which, on the contrary, is limited by the original sampling rate). His talk of "limitless fidelity" was definitely overstating the case as was his showing of the now-standard -- and thoroughly misleading -- waveform graph showing how many more "data" points are handled by the high sampling rate. Someday I'll take such cant up in my column.

     

Going for the Record
Recordable DVDs were coming on very strong, almost as if the manufacturers want to kill off VHS, which would be understandable considering that no hardware maker has profited very much from the videocassette for years. The recordable-DVD format conflict shows no sign of resolution, as there were two separate trade associations with exhibits and presentations, one leaning toward DVD-RW and the other toward DVD-RAM, and Philips was making their DVD+RW recorders, including the model we recently tested, virtually the centerpiece of their exhibit. The resolution of the format war may come from universal players. I came across a Sony model, the DVP-NS900V, which was claimed to play -- hold on -- DVD-R/RW (video mode), DVD-RW (VR mode), DVD+RW, DVD-Video, SACD, CD, CD-R/RW, SVCD and VCD. The only conspicuous missing format was DVD-Audio, which is not surprising considering the player's manufacturer.


Samsung DVD-H40
One twist to DVD recorders was Samsung's DVD-H40 ($599) which didn't actually record DVDs but was instead a combination personal video recorder with a 40-GB hard drive combined with a DVD player. This is one unit whose capabilities were clearly intended to replace the VCR.

     

Toshiba RD-X1 Prototype

Even more on-target was Toshiba's exciting combination of an 80-GB hard drive with a DVD recorder, which had the obviously prototype-only product number of RD-X1. If Toshiba handles the final feature set on this unit correctly, you might be able to edit material recorded on the drive before you record it to DVD. This could get around the distinctly limited and somewhat clumsy editing procedures possible with plain DVD recorders.


Pioneer's High Definition DVD Recorder
Feeling Blue
Tied with digital/satellite radio for most exciting technologies at this show were, for me, the various prototypes of high-definition DVD recorders, all using some form of blue laser. (The short wavelength of blue laser light allows it to be focused down to a much smaller spot than the red lasers used in DVD recorders and the infrared lasers used in CD recorders. And smaller spots mean high recording densities.) I saw units from Pioneer, Samsung, and Toshiba, with the latter company being brave enough to expose its blue-laser mechanism to public view. Panasonic, in a private session with the S&V staff, unveiled its version of a high-definition recorder capable of recording more than 4 hours of HD video on a double-layer disc using a new form of laser. I'm going to save my detailed coverage of this development for my column in the April issue, but I can say here that this is the first consumer product I've seen that uses nonlinear optical processes to generate blue laser light from a relatively inexpensive and long-lived infrared laser. I never thought I'd see this technology at the consumer level since the only other application I'd heard about were lasers designed to zap incoming missiles.

     


Samsung's High Definition DVD Recorder
Now don't get too hot and bothered over high-definition DVD recorders, at least just yet. There are several important barriers to overcome, some political, others technological. As usual, the latter are more tractable and include format standardization (the Panasonic scheme is very different from other blue laser recorder schemes and the latter are all slightly different from each other). A Samsung designer told me that there will be a standardization conference of blue-laser recorders later this year, so the earliest you could expect to see one of these devices on the market would be mid to late 2003. And that's if Hollywood gives at least grudging approval to the new copy-protection schemes that will undoubtedly be involved (so hackers won't break it quite so easily, as happened with regular DVDs). You notice that all the talk is of blue-laser recorders, not a blue-laser prerecorded DVD format. Hell will be half frozen over when Hollywood would willingly issue movies on an HD-quality packaged-media format. Unless they can be absolutely copy protected -- and everybody knows that this is not possible -- the film industry isn't going to give away the store, certainly not when the plain "old" DVD format (how quickly we move on in this industry) is still doing so incredibly well. Since HD recorders will probably, at least at first, record only HDTV broadcasts and satellite feeds for which recording permission has been given in the data stream, they may not find much use.


Sony's MP3 friendly MZ-N707MiniDisc recorder
Playing Cards
In the meantime you can play with such products as the Samsung DVD-A921, a DVD player with a MemoryStick slot on the front panel! This is apparently for playback of still photos and MP3 files stored on MemoryStick flash memory. Outlaw Audio's Model 950 7.1-channel preamp is still one of the few products with full bass management on all inputs ($899), and it will ably feed Outlaw's Model 770, a 7-channel power amplifier rated at a whopping 200 watts per channel. And through the introduction of yet another slew of ho-hum flash-memory and hard-disk MP3 players (none of the latter I've yet seen at this show are as sexy as the Apple iPod), Sony is sticking with the MiniDisc, which is now MP3-friendly with models such as the new MZ-N707 recorder. This may be another format that wouldn't die, kinda like Beta.

  • Day 0 - Press Day
  • Day 1 - Jan. 08, 2002
  • Day 2 - Jan. 09, 2002
  • Day 3 - Jan. 10, 2002
  • CES Photo Gallery
  • Convergence Hits Home
  • HDTV's Slim New Look
  • Inside the Chassis of CES
  • The Last Word