http://gizmodo.com/264077/super-hi+vision-makes-your-hdtv-obsolete-already

http://www.victor.co.jp/english/press/2009/3xd-ila.pdf

http://www.engadgethd.com/tag/shv/

In the world today, many people come home from a long day of work, kick off their shoes and relax in front of their television to watch their favorite programs – everything from movies to sitcoms, cartoons and TV series, with plenty of commercials in between.  But how many people watch their beautiful high definition programming and consider what has been done in the last century to get us this far?  Television has fascinated the world and been an integral part of people’s lives for many years now.  TV commercials are placed in regular programming breaks as another method of advertising that is very effective, due to the number of televisions in a standard middle to upper class home.  We have really come a long way in the development of television in a comparatively short amount of time, and it shows no signs of slowing down or stopping.

This paper will focus on a new and upcoming development called Super Hi-Vision television.  As if HDTV couldn’t get any better, the Japanese (of course) have developed a newer way to watch TV or even use your computer in your home.  With an even higher resolution than HDTV and more pixels to display, the picture quality is said to be the best way to view anything next to being there in person.  Thought your HDTV was great already?  You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Farnsworth’s Creation

The first completely electronic television was invented by a man named Philo T. Farnsworth.  Born into a Mormon family in 1906, he was always interested in technology, and excelled in chemistry and physics in high school.  In 1922, the farmboy discovered that one could use a cathode ray tube to generate an electrical television signal without the need for a mechanical scanning device.  In the mid 1920′s, Farnsworth invented an image dissector that would scan an image and create an electrical output.  A similar device operating in reverse was used to project the image onto a picture screen.  This image dissector focused an image onto a layer of caesium oxide, which emitted electrons proportional to the intensity of the light. Only a small portion of the electron stream passed through a small opening to the electron collecting plate, representing a single point of the television image. Electromagnets were then used to focus and deflect the electrons so that the total image was sequentially scanned.

In 1927, Farnsworth’s image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a straight line, at his laboratory, but it wasn’t until 1934 that he gave the world its first public demonstration of an all-electronic television at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.  Unfortunately, Farnsworth’s cameras needed too much light, thus halting his work on the dissector.  In October 1939, after losing an appeal in the courts and wishing to go forward with the commercial manufacturing of television equipment, RCA agreed to pay Farnsworth $1,000,000 US (the equivalent of $13.8 million in 2006) over a ten-year period, in addition to license payments, to use Farnsworth’s patents.  It wasn’t until the early 1950′s that color television was perfected and introduced to the general public.

CRT and LCD/Plasma TVs

For many years following Farnsworth’s first development, including even today, televisions were made with a cathode ray tube.  The cathode ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen, with internal or external means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam, used to create images in the form of light emitted from the fluorescent screen.  Color CRTs use three different electron guns (for the three primary colors) to create images with hundreds of color tones.  Typical CRT televisions have always been heavy and bulky, but that’s what was available at the time and what the average person had in their home.  In 1969, the Japanese state broadcaster NHK first developed consumer high-definition television with a 5:3 aspect ratio (as opposed to the 4:3 square picture on many standard CRT TVs).  This was not launched publically until the late 1990′s.  In the early 1980′s, the first HDTV demonstration in the United States was held, and several systems were proposed as the new standard for the US, but the bandwidth was much too high due to the quality of the picture.  It was realized then that only a digital system could bring the desired results to this type of television, but nothing was developed yet.

Initially, the 5:3 aspect ratio had been the logical standard to use for HDTV, but due to the influence of widescreen cinema, an aspect ratio of 16:9 had emerged as a viable compromise between 5:3 and 1.85 widescreen cinema format.  Today, our LCD and plasma HDTVs are increasingly popular due to the incredibly clear and vivid picture quality, and the 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio eliminates the need for the old pan-and-scan scenes in movies watched on a standard definition television.  A common resolution used on HDTVs today is 1366×768 pixels, or a 1 megapixel image.  The larger the television, the more pixels that are available for a sharper image.  Since the United States’ first experience with HDTV, it has come a long way, and has taken about 15-20 years to become popular and more common in homes.

Super Hi-Vision

Within the last few years, NHK has gone at it again, and has developed what they call Super Hi-Vision (SHV), also known as Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV).  This new format has a resolution of 7680×4320 pixels (16 times the resolution of HDTV today).  The Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications will be starting a public-private partnership to develop technology for SHV with hopes of an international standard being set, in addition to broadcasting with it beginning in 2015.

Since this technology is still highly experimental, NHK researchers had to develop their own prototype completely from scratch.  They used an array of 16 HDTV recorders to capture test footage in a demonstration in September 2003.  The SHV camera was built with four 2.5in charge coupled devices (an analog shift register that enables the transportation of analog signals through capacitors controlled by a clock signal), each with a resolution of 3840×2048.  They used a spatial pixel offset method to increase the resolution to 7680×4320.  Recently, Aptina Imaging announced the introduction of a new CMOS Image sensor that was designed specifically for the Super Hi-Vision project.  This system was demonstrated in November of 2005 by NHK as a live relay was transmitted over a distance of 260km using a fiber optic network.  Fiber optics must be used with Super Hi-Vision due to the incredible bandwidth necessary and the blazing speed of fiber optics.  24-gigabit speed was achieved with a total of 16 different wavelength signals.

On New Years Eve, 2006, NHK demonstrated a live relay of their annual music show Kohaku Uta Gassen over IP from Tokyo to Osaka.  This was shown on a 450in screen.  All SHV video must currently be shown on a screen that is at least 100in because of the immense amount of pixels needed.  Using a codec developed by NHK, the video was compressed from 24 gigabits per second to 180-600 megabits per second and the audio was compressed from 28 megabits per second to 7-28 megabits per second.  Uncompressed, a 20 minute broadcast would require roughly 28 terabytes of storage.

And what would an immense picture be without immense sound?  Super Hi-Vision uses 22.2 surround sound, also developed by NHK.  Think of it this way: a typical 5.1 surround sound system uses 5 speakers (center, front right/left and rear right/left) and 1 subwoofer; hence 5.1.  Knowing this, 22.2 suggests exactly what you think.  That is, 22 various speakers and two subwoofers.  There are nine speakers above ear level, ten speakers at ear level, and 5 below ear level, including the two subwoofers.

Conclusion

As a lover of HDTV, I personally can’t wait to see what Super Hi-Vision really looks like in person.  Many have commented that since such a large screen is necessary for SHV, it will not be practical for home use, since your television screen will be an entire wall in a room of your house.  Also, 22 speakers?  Who would ever need that many speakers to watch any regular TV program?  One must consider that it took a number of years for HDTV to be refined for home use, and since SHV is still highly experimental, I feel that the proper advancements will be made, and one day (most likely sooner than later) SHV will be a great advancement in personal entertainment in the world.

Works Cited

History of Television – Wikipedia

HDTV – Wikipedia

Super Hi-Vision – Wikipedia

22.2 – Wikipedia

NHK Website

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Hi-Vision

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/11/television.bbc

http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/14/33-megapixel-super-hi-vision-ultra-hdtv-could-be-on-the-air-in/

http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/trev_2009-Q0_SHV-NHK.pdf

Videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am_azZxTFOI&translated=1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7617702.stm

The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before.  The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this extraordinary integration of capabilities. Today, we use the Internet for world-wide broadcasting capability, an endless source of information about any topic imaginable, and a medium for interaction between individuals and their computers regardless of their location in the world.

The creation of the Internet has had a great effect on the world.  People can purchase any item imaginable from any country in the world, using sites such as eBay, or from a businesses’ personal website.  Most personal (and business) credit cards and bank accounts can be managed using the Internet.  One wonders how anyone was able to live life fifty years ago without a PC and an internet connection.  With the advancements in technology that we see every day, it is almost unimaginable.

This paper will discuss the science behind wireless internet and how it actually works.  Data being transferred between two computers with no wires?  How can that be possible?  This was a concept that was unfamiliar to the common man until the mid 1990′s, when it first began to become popular.  WiFi (which stands for Wireless Fidelity, the technical name for wireless internet) is just another invention that enhances the technological capabilities of the world today.

The Birth of the Internet

Originally stemming from the creation of ARPAnet, the world’s first operational packet switching network, the Internet has grown substantially over the past twenty years.  The word “internet” is defined as a network of networks that use TCP/IP and spans the entire world.  The idea behind ARPAnet was that a system could communicate with more than one machine by breaking down information into datagrams, and then reassembling them into packets. These packets were able to be routed independently of other packets.  ARPAnet was created by a group of people working with the United States Department of Defense for the purpose of communication over computers, which, in the 1960′s, was pretty advanced technology at the time.  The packets that ARPAnet was able to make contained the information that was to be transferred to another terminal and able to be read by another human at some other terminal in an area that was very far away from the original.  The first ARPAnet link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on October 29, 1969.  By December 5, 1969, a 4-node network was connected by adding the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Building on ideas developed in ALOHAnet (a computer networking system developed at the University of Hawaii), the ARPAnet grew rapidly.  By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added about every twenty days.

Several branches of the U.S. government, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE) became heavily involved in Internet research and started development of a successor to ARPAnet.  In the mid 1980s, all three of these branches developed the first Wide Area Networks based on TCP/IP.   A Wide Area Network (or WAN) is exactly what it sounds like; a network that covers a wide area.  Wide Area Networks are comprised of many Local Area Networks (or LANs).  Many schools and businesses have LANs that help their computers interact with other computers on their local network, and by being part of a WAN they are able to interact with computers all over the world.  NASA’s network, called NSN (NASA Science Network), connected space scientists to data and information stored anywhere in the world.  TCP/IP is the Internet Protocol Suite, which is a set of communications protocols that is used for the Internet.  It gets its name from the two most important protocols in it; the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol.  These protocols replaced the old protocols in ARPAnet, and throughout the 1980′s various WAN’s all over the world began changing over their protocols to be able to interact with different WAN’s in every country.

LANs Go Wireless

Today, in many homes, we have our own local area networks, which are comprised of wired and wireless computers.  Anyone that subscribes monthly to an internet connection in their home, from providers such as Cablevision and recently Verizon, can use a device called a router to split the incoming internet connection to be used on all the computers in your home.  The router sets up a virtual IP address for each computer on the network so that a user can identify and “speak” to another computer and know to where exactly they are communicating.  Wireless routers allow for many more computers to be added to your network than the 4 wired ports that are provided by most standard in-home routers.  A wireless network uses radio waves to send signals back and forth between your computer and the router, just like cell phones and radios do.  The wireless adapter in your computer translates data from a series of 1s and 0s into a radio signal and transmits it through an antenna.  On desktop computers, these antennas are usually external.  Today, all laptops come standard with a wireless adapter, and the antenna is internal, so you won’t see anything sticking out of your laptop.  The wireless router receives this signal and decodes it, turning it back into 1s and 0s.  From here, the information is sent to the Internet with a physical, wired Ethernet connection.  This process works the other way as well, from your router to your computer.

WiFi radios are slightly different from other radios.  The most common frequencies used are 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz.  This is a considerably higher frequency than the ones used for cell phones, walkie-talkies and televisions.  The higher the frequency, the more data that is able to be transmitted.  WiFi radios use 802.11 networking standards, of which there are a few varieties: 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g and 802.11n.  These standards are implemented by the IEEE, or Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.  The first 802.11 standard was released in 1997, but the first widely used standard was 802.11b.  802.11n is a very new standard that is not very prevalent yet, but most likely will be in the next year or so.  The first standard that was most widely used was 802.11b due to it being inexpensive.  It can handle up to 11 megabits per second.  Today, faster standards are becoming cheaper, so 802.11b is less common.  Currently, many homes have an 802.11g wireless network because it transmits at 2.4 GHz like 802.11b but is much faster.  802.11g can handle up to 54 megabits per second and uses the same OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) coding as 802.11a.  OFDM is a more efficient coding technique that splits the radio signal into several sub-signals before they reach a receiver.  WiFi radios can transmit on any of three frequency bands: 2.4, 3.6 and 5 GHz.  They can also “frequency hop” rapidly between the different bands.  This can help reduce interference and allows more devices to use the same wireless connection at the same time.  When using many wireless devices on one LAN, be cautious of your bandwidth usage.  The more computers that are connected to your network, the less bandwidth that can be distributed between each computer.  This could cause interference or cause users to lose their connection.  Anyone with a wireless network in their home should have their network password protected to avoid outside computers from stealing the internet that you pay for and to help keep your bandwidth high.

Even Faster Wireless??

As mentioned earlier, the 802.11n networking standard is available today, but is rarely used because many people don’t have the capabilities in their computers to use it.  802.11n significantly improves speed and range.  It can reportedly achieve speeds of up to 140 megabits per second.  Theoretically, 802.11g can transfer data up to 54 megabits per second, but realistically it only achieves speeds of about 24 megabits per second.

Today, you can go into your favorite coffee shop, sit down and browse the internet while you have your morning coffee.  Most college campuses are fixed with a wireless network for all students and faculty to use whenever they want.  Many major cities around the United States are beginning to look into citywide wireless internet.  As time passes, having an internet connection becomes cheaper and cheaper, and some people feel that the internet should be free to use to the public.  Some small businesses, such as the coffee shop you were in this morning, may charge you to use their internet, but the fee is usually small and you get unlimited access for a monthly fee, if you frequent the coffee shop often.  The number of WiFi hotspots grows increasingly every day.

Conclusion

So what is in store for us in the next 10 years?  Will citywide wireless eliminate the need for people to have home LANs?  Probably not, considering that many people who have home networks use them to communicate with other computers in their home, or for file sharing and transfer.  Also, having your own dedicated internet connection will ensure you of a fast, reliable, wired connection that you can use to download at great broadband speeds.  While citywide wireless probably won’t completely eliminate home internet connections, it may directly affect the amount of subscriptions that Cablevision and similar companies issue out every month.  Being a child of a booming technology era, I love being able to have WiFi wherever I go.  The inexpensiveness of WiFi is leading the world into a new age of being able to get information from the Internet, no matter where you are.

Bibliography

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/wireless-network1.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiFi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0105/p13s02-wmgn.html

links:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1049996/10_wifi_super_antenna/

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/wireless-network1.htm

http://cnettv.cnet.com/2001-1_53-21990.html

new article:

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/national-broadb.html

The year was 1844, and a man named Samuel F. B. Morse presented to the world a machine that was able to transmit an electrical signal over a wire that covered a large distance. This device was branded the telegraph, and was the basis for the creation of a new technology and industry.

Inventors sought to improve on this design, eventually creating devices that were able to save the sounds they heard and replay them at a later time. With time comes even greater advancements in technology, and over the past 100 or more years there have been a number of inventions that continue to fuel the creation and development of the world of audio production. Through this time technology has grown exponentially, and who knows where the world will be even 20 short years from now? When it comes to electronics and digital advancements, the sky’s the limit.

This paper will discuss the history of audio and sound recording with a strong focus on the science of magnetic tape recording and data storage. It will also recap the digital audio world of today, and give some insight on the future and what is to come in the world of sound recording and production.

World’s First Recorded Audio

After the success of the telegraph, inventors were always looking for a way to improve on this design. Around the 1870’s resources for this kind of work are not very prevalent, so the growth of technology took quite a bit longer than it does today. At the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia, Alexander Graham Bell introduced a device that turned mechanical sound waves into electrical current and back again. This was the telephone, and it was such a hit that won a prize at the fair and launched what would become the world’s largest communication company. It was shortly after this time that Thomas Edison, largely influenced by Bell’s design, created the cylinder phonograph in 1877. Edison’s early design used tinfoil around a grooved cylinder, and a needle would carve a groove into the foil and “record” a sound. The foil method was hard to keep permanent, and wax cylinders were used so that the audio recording could be embossed and engraved. Early patents show that he also considered the idea of recording by grooving spirals onto a flat disk, but chose to use a cylinder instead because the groove on the outside of a cylinder would provide a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove. It was more “scientifically correct,” according to Edison. In early 1878, a man by the name of Oberlin Smith visited Edison’s lab at Menlo Park, NJ. His visit inspired him to use a magnetizing coil to record sound onto wire instead of using a cylinder. Smith had published an article in the Electrical World magazine in 1888 describing the basic theory of all magnetic sound recording. In this article he describes how a string that is infused with iron filings is passed through a coil of wires, and a telephone circuit converts the sound into modulated electrical currents that magnetize and demagnetize the filings as they pass through the coil. When this string is passed through the coil again, the magnetic state that the filings were left in remodulates the current in the coil and produces an electrical signal that reproduces the sound. Unfortunately, he never built such a device . Enter Valdemar Poulsen, Denmark.

Recording Onto Tape Using Magnetism

The Telegraphone was built and patented by Poulsen in 1898. This was a magnetic recorder that used a vertical wire-covered cylinder (later improvements changed this to a horizontal cylinder) based off Edison’s wax cylinders. With these improvements came the first ever magnetic recording, which is currently held in the Danish Museum of Science and Technology. It was at the 1900 Paris Exhibition that Poulsen recorded the voice of Emperor Franz Joseph on his steel tape version of the Telegraphone. Poulsen, with the assistance of his partner Peder O. Pedersen, discovered something called DC Bias, which is the application of a direct current to the recording head. This had improved the sound quality, and the recording of the Emperor is preserved well today. Poulsen’s interests turned to radio in 1902, and only a small number of his machines were made in Denmark and Germany. In 1905, the American Telegraphone Company acquired the patent rights and made dictating machines. Without amplification, the signal was weak and the wire spools would often get twisted and became unreliable. People continued to use the Edison wax cylinder design, which had been cheaper to produce and were more reliable than wire coils. Production was completely ceased by 1924.

A man by the name of Fritz Pfleumer was relaxing in a café in Paris on a business trip when he discovered a different method of magnetic recording. His idea was to cover paper tape with iron oxide as a substitute to a steel wire. He had the idea right, but unfortunately the tape recorder he used tore up the paper tape. He was only able to demonstrate how you could use the paper with the tape recorder for easy editing, and also the reusability of the tape. This discovery eventually led to the development of a two layer magnetic tape that bonded a top layer of carbonyl iron powder to a base layer of cellulose acetate. Plastic tape was much sturdier than paper tape, and this type of recording material was the standard design for the recording industry over the next 30 years. Some devices that used this kind of technology for tape recording are the reel-to-reel machine, eight track tapes, standard audio cassette tapes, and it was later discovered that video could also be recorded in the same way on the same kind of tape. Over the years, changes were made in the materials that the tape was made out of, but the basic concept and idea remained the same. With these improvements in materials came improvements in the quality of the sound or video being recorded. These ideas continued to be built off of, and in the latter part of the 20^th century, this technology was also used as data storage for computers (specifically a tape backup system). The same kind of technology that is used to align the iron particles on the tape is used also with the computer floppy disk, where a magnet is used to arrange these particles in a certain way so that they are always read this exact same way.

Digital Audio

In the 1980’s, the audio recording market began to go digital. Sony/Philips introduced the DAT, or Digital Audio Tape, and by 1986 compact discs were in full force. A laser is used to record information onto a plastic disc with a reflective foil on one side. The information is burned onto the foil and can then be read by most CD readers. This is called optical storage. It is easy and cheap to manufacture, and more durable than magnetic tape. The creation of the compact disc led to the steady decline of the need for magnetic tape recorders, and most music was recorded onto computers and then pressed directly to CD. Today, CDs can be used to play and store digital audio, but also can be used to store all types of computer data, which then can only be read by another computer. Influenced by CDs, the Sony MiniDisc was created, but was, and still is, not very popular. Today, we have digital music files that are created from reading the audio information recorded onto CDs and compressing it into a form that is smaller in size than how it is first recorded. These files, called MP3s, are a large part of the world today, invading many teenagers’ iPods with hours upon hours of digital music.

With the advancements in digital audio come advancements in digital storage. Today, we have a technology called Flash Memory. Flash memory (also known as solid state memory) is very compact, and is just a small circuit board encased in plastic. Unlike older hard drives with a spinning platter, flash memory has no moving parts, and is a very reliable source of storage. Less moving parts means less things that can go wrong and break. Compared to the price of magnetic storage, flash memory is more expensive per byte, but as mew technologies emerge these prices will also drop, as did the price of standard platter hard drives.

What’s To Come?

The use of spinning platter hard drives is definitely not a thing of the past yet, because some of their capabilities still exceed that of flash memory. The size of a normal hard drive is currently much larger in comparison to flash memory (due to the cost per byte of flash memory), and they are still used to store large files, such as digital videos. Western Digital, a company specializing in manufacturing of data storage, is in the process of creating a hard drive that spins at 20,000 RPMs in order to combat the advance of solid state drives. These speeds are supposed to be equal to or greater than the speed of flash memory, and since flash memory technically has a limit to the amount of writes and rewrites, these Raptor drives are meant to be superior. A current problem is the power consumption used by these kinds of drives, and is an issue that is still being researched.

In the world of audio recording, the future has not been written yet, but every day there are better programs and faster computers that can handle the kinds of hi-fidelity digital processing that is available today. Many multitrack recording programs exist for digital audio recording and editing (which has become vastly easier due to the lack of tape needing to be spliced together) such as Cakewalk Sonar, ACID Xpress, and Propellerhead Reason. Many of these programs offer audio effects and processors that change the way a sound is perceived by adding things such as echo, chorus, and reverb. As the industry continues to grow, more programs will be developed with more options.

Conclusion

Over the next 5 years, the world will see drastic changes in technology, and this trend will continue for years to come. The past has shown us that the insight of many bright people has given us the chance to grow and develop as human beings, and the growth of technology has only been a positive aspect to life. It looks as if there’s no end in sight for the advancement of technology.

Works Cited

1) Schoenherr, Steven. The History of Magnetic Recording, Nov. 5, 2002

http://history.sandiego.edu/GEN/recording/magnetic4.html

2) Article, The History of Magnetic Recording, Dec. 20, 2004

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3224936

3) Article, Western Digital Researching 20,000RPM Hard Disk to Fight Solid State Drives, Jun 6, 2008

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/06/western_digital_researching_20000rpm_hard_disk_to_fight_solid_state_drives-2.html

Related Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE6_M6BkUM8

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/29414-assignment-discovery-magnetic-recording-basics-video.htm

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/hsw/8716-daily-planet-making-music-with-technology-video.htm

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