Agreed. But the fact is, it did work and quite well, under the best conditions....We would eventually have had discrete disc system with fidelity comparable to average stereo releases -- unrecognizable from its primitive beginnings.
Absolutely.
Ortofon would have eventually finalized their CD-4/DMM cutterhead design, we'd have had new generations of CD-4 modulators from which to cut, and if recording had developed on its' original curve, CD's in the form of PCM discs would have co-existed along with CD-4/DMM from reading the piece I found about how Telefunken-Decca GmbH was going to try an experiment returning to CD-4 but marrying it with DMM technology and the 2/3rds mastering speed.
According to the piece, they were going to try mastering their experimental CD-4/DMM titles with an Neumann DMM head at 33 RPM for playback at 45 RPM around the same time as the 45-RPM audiophile box sets were coming out which spread a normal 45-minute LP across 3 or 4-discs and expand the audiophile LP market.
Well, it didn't happen, but supposedly the test pressings are still around for it somewhere, however I wouldn't imagine even at 2/3rds speed that the Neumann DMM head would have been up to the task of mastering CD-4. DMM or not, a Neumann DMM wouldn't be sufficient, but the Ortofon DMM head could do it with a little tweaking.
Supposedly, at the headquarters in Scandanavia, Ortofon still has the original design drawings and specs on how they would have built a CD-4/DMM head if they would have ever built one, and maybe there's even a prototype built.
Would be interesting to find out for sure, but in the research I've been doing pretty much stops there since everybody's pretty much gone from that era.
And even though RCA invented DMM for cutting CED videodiscs, they got it schmoozed away from them for a pretty useless technology tradeoff and then got it sold BACK to them as an ``audiophile'' process.
So, it's no wonder you barely see any American DMM pressings from RCA. They mostly farmed `em out to the normal DMM houses of the period, Europadisk, Masterdisk, Sterling Sound, etc. so that most RCA DMM titles were cut in Germany.
I have a GREAT copy of Chess: The Musical on Record which shows you CAN cut a 90-100 uM groove or deeper into DMM same as a lacquer and not get a lot of noise.
Half the problem with the normal, shallower 50-70 uM cuts in a normal DMM was you couldn't get the volume of a lacquer.
But listen to the DMM of Chess next to a lacquer-mastered version (even a German one if you want) and you'll see why people think DMM would have been the perfect marriage partner for CD-4 with JVC SuperVinyl given the time it needed to develop the technology.
