EVER been listening to a fascinating programme on the radio and wished you could rewind a bit, even though you weren鈥檛 recording it? Thanks to the falling price of high capacity memory chips, you now can.
A new breed of digital radios will let you rewind to the start of a programme, pause it, or get an instant replay of a short segment. And the same microchip-memory instant 鈥渞ewind鈥� facility is also coming to digital television receivers.
In all the new devices, microchip memory acts as a buffer. Sound (or vision) is continuously fed into the buffer memory and simultaneously read out, for normal listening (or viewing), so there is no noticeable delay. As the memory fills up, the beginning of the recording is automatically erased to make room for new material.
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When you press the rewind button, playback instantly jumps to the beginning of the memory. From then on the set continues to record and play simultaneously as before, but lags behind the live broadcast. Hitting another button makes the playback run faster or jump forward to the 鈥減resent鈥�.
It鈥檚 not only the falling price of RAM that鈥檚 bringing new capabilities to radio and TV sets. The explosive success of digital audio broadcasting in the UK, with up to 50 digital radio stations, and the Freeview terrestrial TV service, now in 4 million homes, is driving manufacturers to come up with new ideas. They expect the digital rewind technology to roll out soon in Europe, Australia and the US for digital radio and TV services.
Pure Digital of Kings Langley in Hertfordshire, UK, has launched a 拢150 digital radio with 8 megabytes of RAM, which stores the last 10 minutes of a broadcast. The listener can also pause during a programme for up to 10 minutes, and then listen from where they left off. A 32-megabyte memory card can be slotted in to make a permanent recording, which enables a listener to catch the previous 10 minutes and the next 2 hours of a broadcast.
Veteran UK transistor radio firm Roberts Radio of Mexborough, South Yorkshire, launched a similar digital radio last week that costs 拢200 and can pause or rewind a programme by 30 minutes. Television is moving in this direction too. Although 32-megabytes of memory represents only about 30 seconds of recording time, it could still allow you to see that missed goal. Fusion Digital Technology of Harrogate, North Yorkshire, has launched a set-top box of this type. And there鈥檚 an added bonus: after replaying the segment, you can jump the programme forward by enough to skip an ad break.
As memory prices fall and better data-compression technology emerges, all the manufacturers expect to increase the replay times possible with their new gadgets.
