From D. Smith
Milton Keynes
The Recording Industry Association of America has proposed the BBN system
for adding coded information about copyright to music CDs (Technology, 2 March,
p 22). Some of us try to reproduce music from CDs and other sources as
realistically and as close to the original performance as possible. One of the
great things about CD is its potential 90-plus decibels of signal-to-noise
ratio. Now along comes BBN to reduce this to 19 decibels, right across the
middle of the audio frequency band.
Some years ago, the equally ridiculous Copycode system was rejected because
it quite audibly ruined sound quality. Let us hope this updated version will
suffer a similar fate. After all, why go to all the trouble of developing
high-quality systems such as CD only to throw away their quality advantage? We
might just as well have stuck with a cheap analogue cassette-playing system.
