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Ray Derrick
President/Chief Engineer
Panalogic Corporation Sydney, Australia
Phone: 61 (0)2 9894 6655 Fax: 61 (0)2 9894 6935

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But as a result of all the work we had to do in building a case to defend our position, I came up with a much better way to achieve the same decoding algorithm as a Cat280 using a somewhat different technique. The result is the CM353 card which is used in Panastereo processors and is now also available in a separate adapter for upgrading older processors that do not have SR.

Now I have a policy of not plugging my own products on this Forum, as I don't believe it is an appropriate place to do commercials - and I just blew it! Sorry folks, it won't happen again. Gordy it's all your fault, you must learn to be more accurate!

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Ray Derrick
President/Chief Engineer
Panalogic Corporation Sydney, Australia
Phone: 61 (0)2 9894 6655 Fax: 61 (0)2 9894 6935

The SMART CopyCat 280 card has never been the subject of a court case and has never been challenged by Dolby. We have never claimed that it is a true SR card. Our claim is that it is a SR Emulation card. By that, we mean that it closely mimics the action of a true SR card for MOST situations, but not all.

We did an AB test one time at ShoWest where we took a soundtrack of a movie from a laserdisk, ran it through a Dolby SR encoder, Model 363 with Cat 300 SR cards, and then decoded the encoded signals with the real Dolby CAT 280 cards and the SMART CopyCat cards. The decoded outputs of each set of cards as well as the original unencoded source material directly from the laserdisk player could be selected with a switch and fed to headphones. Probably about 100 people listened and switched back and forth. Only about 5 out of the 100 could consistently tell which was which, and then only in certain parts of the movie where the decoding of the CopyCat cards did not track properly. I do not claim ANY scientific validity for the test, but its results were such that I believe our SR emulation circuit is definitely good enough for most people.

Our circuitry is extremely simple, and as such, it will not decode every soundtrack situation properly. However, the worst thing I hear is at times, there will be a slightly higher amount of high frequency material due to the bandsplitting arrangement we use where mid-band material will open up the signal path for the higher frequencies also. Sometimes this manifests itself as a slightly higher level of hiss. The other thing I sometimes hear is a low frequency level alteration due to the way the very low frequencies are handled. However this is manifest as a slight raising of very low frequencies at lower levels which is somewhat like a loudness effect on a home stereo, so it does not really sound bad.

Now for the purists out there, I am sure you want nothing but the true SR noise reduction, and I have no argument with you. And you can get that with the Cat 280 cards, the Cat 300 cards, etc. Or you can use the new patented Panastereo CM353 SR cards and also get the real thing. The CM353 is a real work of art. We at SMART and, I am certain, Ray Derrick, the designer, will put it up against any thing out there.

The Cat222SR/A with it's SR shorcuts was obviously developed by Dolby so they could fit SR into a CP65 chassis. There is no way in a month of Sundays they could have squeezed the circuitry on even one, let alone two Cat280s onto just one little piggy back pcb for the Cat222. I would say they had no choice.

We only received notification that our patent had been granted a few weeks ago so we are still waiting for the formal documentation to arrive from the US patent office. I will send you an e-mail when we get the number. We do have the App. number but that is of no use to you.

BTW sorry that I misunderstood your non-compliment remark.

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Ray Derrick
President/Chief Engineer
Panalogic Corporation Sydney, Australia
Phone: 61 (0)2 9894 6655 Fax: 61 (0)2 9894 6935

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Thanks for the information; actually I asked because I wanted to get some feedback from the knowledgeable folks here -- I have a pair for our CP50 and my experience has been that they sound just fine. My room is very large -- 2500 seats -- so it is very difficulty to hear minute differences in things like hiss or low-end emphasis. All I know is they sound silky smooth and very natural. Plus, I have no Dolby cards to do any kind of precise A/B tests. To my ears, and happily to my audience, our theatre sound is very impressive. Besides, even if we had the Cat 280 cards, audio band compression and expansion tracking are not easily tested with common test equipment.

Actually if you consider the minimal amount of anomalies that the CopyCat might produce, and the very limited conditions of audio content when it would even become audible (I've never heard any), the price differential is like manna from heaven -- enough to make many an art house or non-profit which ALWAYS must live right on the edge of the ledger line between the black and the red. The CopyCat is very attractive.

I don't know where I heard that rumor about a patent court case between Dolby and Smart -- probably just more of my brain cells dying.