Guess What Year
[Thanks to "5" contributor Jeff Kent who sent us this excerpt from a very prescient 1984 interview with the late Frank Zappa in the pages of Digital Audio Magazine. - KJ]
Speaking of videos, what do you think about the possibility of distributing digital music on the cable TV systems?
Well, actually, I made a proposal and tried to raise some money to do that exact thing--with a couple of extra wrinkles. I almost managed to do it, but the problem we came up against is the bit stream rate on the cable. It's too slow.
But if you can put it onto a VCR, why can't you put it through a cable channel?
It's a matter of quantity -- how much time. What are you going to do, just send it down the pike in real time?
Why not?
What I had proposed was a computerized data bank system. You could dial up a number to order a digital album, pay with your credit card, and you'd have it. Just plunk it onto your Sony PCM-F1 or whatever. The system would have to operate faster than real time, otherwise you just couldn't distribute enough music. But the facilities to do that don't exist. To send an album down a wire in real time is possible, but that means everybody has to listen to the same thing at the same time, so it's just like radio.
It gets to be a matter of scheduling, but it's a way of distributing music and charging people.
So you send something down the line digitally, and it gets played back on little tiny speakers in a little tiny room where they can't turn it up enough to have it do anything with the volume, and then what have you got? You just reduce the hiss for everyone. You still have to squash the bandwidth to get it through all of that stuff, so it's really kind of preposterous. See, if everybody in the country had a chance to listen to music on the monitor system we have in this studio, and could hear what things really are supposed to sound like, it would be a different story. But people get accustomed to what they hear it on -- and what they hear it on has been EQed to their taste. They turn the bass up, then turn the treble up, and it totally deforms anything that was originally on the record anyway.
