"DigiCard", a credit card like CD-ROM format, was introduced to the section's year's first technical meeting held on January 17, 2001.
To an audience of 20 gathered at Seijyo Club, Tokyo, Mikiya Kuroda of JVC talked about tiny square but rotational cards developed by his company. Standard-type is 86 x 58mm holding 30MB data capacity, and a trading-type is 89 x 63mm for 67MB. Both types have a 15mm center hole for rotating on conventional CD-ROM drives. Further, there developed a partly recordable card called "HYBRID", the card functions as a CD-ROM plus CD-R, of which a total capacity is 22.1MB. Finally Kuroda noted a wide variety of possible applications of the cards, which included personal IDs, business cards, member ID cards, giveaway cards for introducing corporate profiles, promoting products or services and the like.
EIAJ Standard CP-2150, "Methods of Measurement for Digital Audio Equipment" was the topic of the February meeting held at Seijyo Club, Tokyo. Masamichi Furukawa of Kenwood Corp. explained features and a background of the standard to 26 members and guests attended the meeting. CP-2150 standard is a revision of EIAJ Technical Report CPR-2101 issued in 1990 for digital audio amplifier measurements, that was later adopted by IEC as IEC 61606.
According to Furukawa, the new standard CP-2150 was intended to cover measurements of not only amplifiers but also disc players, recorders and all other equipment handling digital audio signals, and to deal with linear digital audio signals of up to 192 kHz sampling frequencies, 24-bit word length, further, inclusion of IEC/PAS 61883-6 interface in addition to IEC 60958. Measurement methods for compressed digital signals were excluded from the scope, as that were considered to be still in a progressive stage. In the proceedings of the standardization, specific attention was paid to the problems inherent to digitized sine-wave signals, as such a peculiar relation between signal frequency and sampling frequency; producible data quantity depending on the signal frequency; determination of signal level calculated in reference to an ideal waveform before conversion; difference between peak and effective values caused as a quantization error; measurement of distortion and definition thereof and so on.
"The new standard offers to the industry a common ground for measuring today's advanced digital audio equipment, that enables fair comparison of their specifications in catalogs and the like." Furukawa concluded.
On April 20, taking an advantage of their grand opening, nearly 60 members and guests of the Japan Section made a technical tour to SME's newly built studio complex in Tokyo containing 5 recording, 12 mastering and 9 authoring studios. After a brief by Takashi Watanabe of SME (Sony Music Entertainment), visitors were allowed to peek freely into the ultra modern facilities.
On May 24, Amsterdam convention was reported to 24 section members gathered at the Seijyo Club by Hiroaki Suzuki, Masahiro Fujimoto, Akira Fukada and Yoshizo Sohma who attended the convention. The reporters covered major events and features of the convention, among them Suzuki explained details of workshops showing slides. Excitement was the fellowship granted to 3 section members Akira Fukada, Eiichi Miyasaka and Hiroaki Suzuki.
Convention Officers:
"DD (direct drive) Stick Speaker" was introduced to Japan Section's technical meeting held on July 19 at Seijyo Club, Tokyo. Jiro Nakaso of JVC talked and demonstrated to 24 members and guests a unique structure omni-directional speaker unit developed by his company. The speaker features a 9 X 1 cm semi-cylindrical diaphragm provided with four recesses for reinforcement, and is coupled to a pair of elongate voice coils. The voice coils each having the same 1 cm width are laid out along the semi-cylinder and welded together at their opposing ends to directly drive (DD) the diaphragm. "Because of the semi-cylindrical diaphragm having such a small diameter of 1 cm and reinforced by the recesses, the speaker exhibits smooth frequency and omni-directional characteristics up to 10 kHz (down 4.5 db at 90 degrees), and gives an excellent sound localization used as a stereo pair for such as home-theatres" Nakaso concluded.
AES 19th International Conference for "Surround Sound" held in June 2001 in Bavaria, Germany was reported by Akira Fukada of NHK to 30 members and guests gathered at the Seijyo club Tokyo on September 27. Fukada and his colleagues Mick Sawaguchi and Kimio Hamasaki of NHK, presented and participated in various seminars and panel discussions. At the September section meeting, Fukada generally covered various subjects and issues discussed in the conference, then focused on those interesting subjects that included alternatives to 5.1-ch, room simulation system, natural 5.1-ch music recording, advanced mixing, talk-back for musicians in the studio using virtual environment sound delivered from speakers instead of conventional headphones, the panel discussions on status quo surround sound and technical tour to the ORF studios.
On December 20, Junichi Yoshio of Pioneer reported the 111th AES NYC Convention and the associated standard committee meetings to 26 members gathered at Seijo Club, Tokyo. "The convention was postponed due to the September 11th tragedy causing some exhibitors to drop out, nevertheless, the programs were very significant for all of us" Yoshio noted first. As the day's attendances were unfamiliar with activities of those committees, he reported in detail the discussions of the standard committees of which he was a current member, focusing on digital audio interfaces as an important issue for high-resolution audio transmission by quoting the work for the professional use of IEEE1394 interface in SC-06-02. Yoshio then briefed activities of the respective working groups, noted openness of the AES-SC rules and scopes as well.
Thereafter, he covered discussions of the workshops and the paper sessions, telling current technical trends such as a high-resolution multi-channel sound and etc. He commented that these topics became more realistic and practical issues as we had DVD-Audio and SACD as currently available formats. he encouraged the audience to purchase CD-ROM documents of the workshops and sessions if they had an interest in such subjects. Lastly, Yoshio presented his snapshots in slides to show the exhibits. Subsequently, Steve Sohma who also attended the convention, noted the pleasing event of granting a fellowship to Yoshio. Meeting was adjourned to a traditional "End of the Year" party.