SHARP/OPTONICA RT-X1 (1981) | PCM Elcaset

The Tokyo Audio Fair from 1981 offered a lot of PCM sound. A lot of the equipment was presented as about to start production soon and some of them were already being manufactured in small series. The closest thing was PCM sound on tape. Truth is that PCM sound on video tape was already a reality. In that case, the Japanese manufacturers have managed to agree on a standard for the data format for consumer electronics, and this was the "14bit standard" (an important thing to remember for the future development of CD). With 14-bit quantization, you get about 85 dB quantization noise (error signal), which corresponds to 0.006% distortion at full output. However, note that the errors of the stages are constant regardless of the output. This means that the distortion gradually increases with reduced signals to finally amount to 100%. In the context of this technological buzz one of the manufacturers at the forefront of Digital audio development was Sharp with it's high-end brand, Optonica. However their proposition, a PCM tape recorder based on the recently introduced ELCASET ended up as nothing but a prototype model. This was the Sharp-Optonica PCM cassette deck RT-X1 from 1981. The picture you see is a colorized version created by 1001hifi using as source a black and white photo from various hifi magazine show reports from 1981.

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