The broadcasts in digital on ground wave are expected to be in operation very soon. Some mass media are reporting as though they are the first digital broadcasts in Japan. But the broadcasts in digital (BS system) have been on air from several yeas ago, utilizing a broadcasting satellite in the space and small parabola anthenas for receiving them on the earth. NHK's BS1 and BS2 and WAHOO have been on air through 7th、11th and 5th channel of BS systems. An experimental broadcast in high-vision is using the 9th only for transferring sounds.

People have acknowledged that BS system's pictures were fine and clear. But they have not paid much attentions on quality of sounds and musics.

In order to receive BS broadcasts, you have to add BS tuners to your TVs. The manufacturers of tuners have been making efforts to get pictures as good as possible at the lowest cost, but they did not pay attention on the quality of sounds. Every tuner has a digital-analog converter to convert the sounds in digital to those in analog which human ears are able to listen. If you want to listen good sounds, you have to have convertors in good quality.

However to supply the tuners at the lowest cost has been a matter of the highest priority for manufactures in order to survive hard competitions among them. So the most of them have had to save costs on the convertors by not adopting those in good quality as of the high-end CD players.

Today, I made an experiment at my home for finding out what would be the results when you use a quality convertor. The convertor of mine (Sony DAS-R1) was separated from the player as shown at the left side of the above pictures. But it has no glass cable in-put. So I send the digital sounds to a digital tape recorder through a glass cable and then transferred to the convertor with a coaxial cable (yellow cable on the right picture). The cable is one of the best quality made by Furukawa Denko. I bought it at Akihabara street, costing me \8,200 for the length of 2 meters.

The results are excellent. Not only musics but voices of news casters have become very natural. I would like to listen concerts played by such symphony orchestras as NHK, Berlin and Vienna in B mode (stereo sounds) at the earliest occasion.

In the near future, many digital broadcast receivers would be manufactured. I hope some of them has quality convertors on them.

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