Who Invented Digital Vinyl?

[darasan]

Interesting article about the birth of digital vinyl systems:

http://who-invented-digital-vinyl.co.uk/

A gripping tale of patent wars and even industrial espionage!

The article is written by Steven Carroll, who was the head of UK company Intimidation in the 90s. Some older DJs might remember Intimidation for producing some seriously innovative mixers for the time, such as the classic Blue:




These guys invented kill switches!

To put this in perspective, this was at a time when companies like Gemini still thought it was "cool" to put sound FX buttons on their (ugly) premium mixers, so DJs could drop "UFO" and "machine gun" FX into their mix. No joke :




Whereas Intimidation produced futuristic and forward thinking mixers, with the company being headed by a young, creative guy (in his mid-20s when running Intimidation). Big respect to Steven!

[astromech]

I think I still have a Blue in my mum's garage.

[sarasin]

AAHh Shiit.....that old Gemini.....KEKEKKEKEKEKE

My first mixer was a Gemini BPM250.......

SHYTE.....Pots went in the 3rd month.

[Patch]

Wu-Tang clan ain't nuttin' to....

[nem0nic]

It's an interesting tale, and no doubt some elements of it are true. But there are a bunch of just plain wrong information in there as well. I'm assuming that comes from only knowing one side of the story (and it happens to be the side most removed from the development of the first DVS).

Also, let's clear up this whole Andre Rickli / RZA thing. That patent was for an OPTICAL system, and if you dig back further you can find similar systems dating back much further (like the optical mouse patent from 1984, or the optical digitizer patent from 1982 it was derived from, and on, and on). It's completely unoriginal, and was never fully realized or monetized because this kind of system has several insurmountable limitations when applied to DJing.

N2IT's first press release for FS1.0 was published in November 1998, and was announcing it's retail availability in March 1999. It had been shown working at several shows before that, so it had been in the public eye as far back as 1997 (when I first heard of it), and in development at least a year before that. According to the UK patent office, Steve applied for a patent for a "digital control device" in early 1998, and that application was terminated in early 1999. I find it highly unlikely that Steve drafted an NDA, spoke to several companies about "his" invention in the fall of 1998, and then in early 1999 decided to abandon his patent application. And even if this were true, it would still be suspect, because he (by his own admission) only had some IP, and and at the same time N2IT had several prototypes and was ready to go retail in March 1999.

Also, Stanton was no "new kid on the block" in 1998, having been around since 1946 producing consumer phonograph products and DJ equipment for YEARS before digital vinyl was ever an idea.

[Maxted]

Excellent read, read it all. Quite odd that i never really thought about who invented it.

[astromech]

Regardless of what happened with his DVS, it really sounds like he was treated like shit. No wonder he is so jaded. Someone even ripped off his entire company! They were whoring TouchDVS at BPM last year with some haggard booth girls. Tried to sell me one while I was wondering around with a TSP box! Had I known, I would have given them some shit.

[michaeldunne109]

Interesting read thanks for posting.

[Chilly]

Wu-Tang clan ain't nuttin' to....

fuck with.

[Patch]

Uh thank you.