John Chrapowicki wrote:
>
> Just a complete guess, but maybe it's a leftover from the days when possibly
> an automatic End Search was thought by the Sony boffins to have too much of
> a processing overhead with the available technology. Ie. it was thought to
> be too slow or to consume too much battery power to make it default to this
> mode. The MZ-1 was very borderline in its power consumption/battery life,
> and throughout its design, the engineers must have been very conscious of
> this and looked for every conceivable saving (however small). This is in
> contrast to the decks which had no similar power saving requirements and
> size constraints. Maybe in the MZ-1 the electronics required for it were
> not quite sophisticated enough to provide reasonable search speeds & low
> power usuage for it to do it automatically?
I think you're wrong. People call what Sharp and Sony home decks do an
"automatic end search", but really, it is an *absence* of a "last
position memory". Since MD is a random-access technology, anytime the
disc is stopped, the laser sled is stopped and the last position is
"forgotten". An MD portable with End Search adds the "feature" (or IMO,
"mis-feature") of remembering the last position. So when one presses
REC without End Search first, the deck moves the laser sled to the last
remembered position.
It actually takes EXTRA processing overhead to implement the End Search.
> I heard a lot of stories at the time that the first Sony portables were
> rather hurredly 'rushed out' to try to meet DCC head on. Maybe they were a
> little premature. Perhaps a little later, the LSI tecnology had improved
> enough when the first Sharp portable was introduced for their team to
> realise they could afford to do an automatic End Search like the Sony
> decks.?
I think End Search is to do just what someone else mentioned...
artificially simulate a lesser, more primitive technology: analog
cassette tape. I think Sony thought MD portable users would be using
them to replace portable tape recorders and dictation recorders, so they
slapped in extra software to simulate a cassette tape so that the MD
will feel like a cassette to those people.
> John --> who actually believes that the above is total rubbish since the
> overhead is probably neglible anyway ;-)
Yeah, and you actually had it backwards. :) End Search adds (slight)
overhead.
Shawn
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