I remember our cooperation with great pleasure. Your delightful super logical way of approaching things has inspired me a lot since then. Especially the way we worked when we did CCC on Beocord 9000. It was ping pong between the physical world, the electrical world and the possibilities with a microprocessor.
In fact, we made our own A/D and D/A system. With logarithmic intervals.
We also had the idea of using our very special record/playback tone head. It was built with a separate record head and playback head in the same housing. There was a very small distance between record and playback. Because of the amount of crosstalk, we could only use this for calibration by recording something, switching off the recording, and very shortly thereafter reading what came out of the playback head. In this way we managed to make a system that set a whole new standard for this kind of feature.
Our nearest competitor was the Nakamichi 1000. It took about a minute to calibrate. We did it in 10 seconds and then we even did a distortion measurement and set the VU meter to match whatever level you could record on that tape. I see this as a shining example of what can happen when skilled professionals work together in a creative environment.
Next chapter: Appendix 2: Contributed by Tom Jelsing
Microprocessors in B&O consumer products 