At 10:03 AM 5/10/00 -0400, David Beierl wrote:
><Rant on>
>
>At 00:56 5/10/2000, Doktor Tim wrote:
>>something specious. If you hold them to a serious specification the
>>Japanese can do very good work. I haven't yet received a Mercedes box with

 >Major Snip<

>Phillips in the Netherlands built a dictating machine in 1957, using a
>novel tape format called a cassette.  In order to stimulate demand, they
>very wisely kept rights to the design, but let anyone use it and build
>machines for it, with the specification that a Phillips cassette recorded
>on any machine must be readable on any other.  The Japanese took this
>convenient but very much dictation-quality design and turned it into a
>hi-fi recording medium that completely replaced the reel-to-reel format for
>consumer use (they had some help, primarily from Ray Dolby).
>
><Rant off>
<RANT on>

Being in the pro A/V field (yeah, I know, another oxymoron) we use an
amazing amount of Japanese made equipment.  Our rule of thumb is that if it
is small, and has a really large bunch of electronic parts, the Japanese
stuff is usually better.  The one exception is our single disk CD
players.  We use a German made Tascam ( Teac but with a bigger price tag )
CD player that blows away everything else.  This is only to point out that
no country has a monopoly on quality or shoddiness in any field.

By the way, the standard VHS video tape format was invented by Zenith in
Chicago.  They sold the rights to JVC when they thought that there wasn't
going to be a market for home video recorders.  VHS came out way before
Sony's Beta format, but no one bought them until porno was made available
in both formats.  Sad but true.  Also, the 1st video tape recorder was made
by Ampex in the 1960s.  It used a 2" wide format and was the broadcast
standard for almost 20 years.  Ampex is also an American company.

<RANT off>

Chris Smith