Music to Our Ears

The concerted effort by the recording industry to block the sale of digital audio-tape machines in this country appears headed for a well-deserved failure.

An engineering study by the National Bureau of Standards, made public this week, found that the industry’s plan for crippling the machines to prevent tape pirating would diminish the sound quality of the tapes and could be easily circumvented besides. This should clear the way for the importation of these machines into the United States. They have been available in Japan for a year.

Digital audio tape is to conventional audio tape as compact discs are to phonograph records. The tape provides near-perfect reproduction of sound without any background noise or hiss. The recording industry has feared that if such equipment got into the public’s hands, copying would be widespread, and sales of prerecorded tapes would plummet.

In an effort to prevent this, the industry proposed an anti-copying system. All prerecorded tapes and compact discs would have a specific frequency of sound electronically removed, and all digital audio-tape players would be outfitted with a device that looked for that specific frequency. If the frequency was missing, the machine would turn off its recording function.

The industry insisted that listeners would not notice the missing frequency, but the National Bureau of Standards has now concluded otherwise. The quality of prerecorded material would indeed be diminished. Furthermore, it found, the whole copy-prevention system could be bypassed for as little as $100. End of debate.

The basic issue here is one that the U.S. Supreme Court decided several years ago in the video-tape case. Home taping for private use is not a copyright infringement. But the recording-industry people are still trying to fight that battle.

It’s time that they gave up their efforts to block technological progress. Digital audio tape is a reality. If consumers want to buy these machines (they carry a hefty price tag), they should be able to. The recording industry can make money selling digital tapes to them.