Mat Taylor Shows Off a Vintage Philips DCC Album with a Unique Feature: Live Song Lyrics
An unexpected feature of an otherwise unremarkable Bee Gees album gives Taylor, and the staff at the DCC Museum, a lyrical surprise.
YouTuber Mat Taylor has dug into a forgotten piece of storage technology, the Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), shining a light on a little-used feature which offered the ability to store and read back live song lyrics — so little used, in fact, only a single known cassette ever bothered.
"Just a few weeks ago I met up with Ralf [Porankiewicz, curator and director] from the DCC Museum and he dropped a few interesting things off with me," Taylor explains by way of introduction to his latest video. "[This] is an album: it's the Bee Gees' Size Isn't Everything, and as far as albums go it didn't really meet with much success. As far as albums go not really all that remarkable, but as far as DCCs go this one has something on it that is unique to this particular DCC."
Philips launched the Digital Compact Cassette format in 1992, after developing it in partnership with Matsushita and in direct competition with Compact Disc development partner Sony as both sought to bring a reliable yet affordable digital recording system to the home. The players used a nine-track magneto-resistive head to read tapes with digital or analogue audio spread across eight of the tracks, with the ninth used for auxiliary information — and it's here that the Bee Gees' album stands out from the competition.
In many commercially-produced DCC albums, the ninth track was used to hold song titles which would scroll across the player's display — automatically switching when one song comes to an end and the other begins. Size Isn't Everything, though, took the technology one step further and added live lyrics — and was, to the DCC Museum's best knowledge, the only album in DCC's short-lived history to do so.
"Nobody knows why this is the only DCC that has the lyric data included on it," Taylor notes. "Perhaps this was a test and the data was left on there by accident.
"The only way we managed to find that the lyrics are on here at all is because every time a new cassette is added to the DCC Museum's collection they run it through a series of tests, and it must have been a surprise to see this information appearing on the screen on this particular tape after running through dozens of different cassettes."
Taylor's full video is reproduced above and on his YouTube channel, Techmoan; more information on the DCC Museum is available on its official website.