Loading ...It’s probably not that hard to believe, but I was certainly amused by the fact that in the ’70s, the music industry tried to copy-protect its vinyl offerings by pressing a high-pitch frequency into albums that somehow ruined the “putting it to tape” process. The big problem? The more you listened to a record, the more this analog-rights management degraded: “Repeated plays of vinyl dampen the ability to reproduce high frequencies, and it seems that often the spoiler signal was either audible during regular playback, or didn’t have sufficient impact upon recordings. Either way, after a few plays it was destined to disappear due to regular wear and tear on the record’s groove.” [Currybet, via No Rock And Roll Fun]
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I can narrow this down for the poor guy: the failed copy-protection for analog sources dates to the late 1980s — I know, because I remember reading about it in either High Fidelity or Stereo Review at my high school library (had to be there; I’ve never subscribed to either mag), and that would place this whole adventure between 1985 and 1989.
The reason I remember those two mags covering this short-lived controversy is that the audiophile community (one I pay attention to only glancingly) was furious about this idea, not because they liked taping music so much as they despised the idea of any audio degradation, even theoretical.
IIRC — and this might be apocryphal — the dénouement of the whole thing happened when a hardcore audio scientist/nerd at one of the publications produced a gotcha! moment: a record where the addition of the high-pitched signal eliminated the entirety of, like, a woodwind in an orchestra or some-such. The lab working at the RIAA’s behest conceded the point, and the effort was dropped.