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Well, it is possible to have a disc that is CD-audio on one side and DVD on the other:

http://www.dualdisc.com/faq.html

The obvious thing for the record companies to have done, IMHO, is:

1. create a single standard for high-quality DVD-audio
2. start marketing all audio discs as dual-sided CD/DVD-audio discs
3. push the manufacturers to market only players that are capable of handling both formats (meaning audio players, not video decks)
4. lower the prices on CDs, and keep the prices reasonable on the new dual-format discs

If they had done this, I believe they could have kept their sales numbers. The key thing being, consumers will buy the physical media if they are getting better quality - or believe they are getting better quality, and if they don't have to think about whether their player will play the disc or not.

SACD lost -- dual disc (which is CD on one side and DVD-A on the other) won. Sony didn't show SACD at the last CES show; with many new albums being put out on dual disc, the subset of people still buying physical albums are getting DVD-A versions now.

To be fair, dual-disc is not DVD-A or CD. It's a compromise.

Since people who don't care about audio quality are happy to buy or copy online versions, audio quality becomes more important for physical media. Since most people have DVD players, DVD-A will win. (Sony/Philips did not make SACD easily available, and Sony was too intransigent to also include support DVD-A in its players.)

As for SACD and DVD-A, they are still rare and most mixes are horrid. Most 5.1 remixes sound like someone took a painting you loved, tore it into several pieces, and flung it across the room. They sound wrong.

There are a few multichannel DVDs (like the Blue Man Group) that are meant to be multichannel and sound great, but I avoid most surround remixes. But high resolution stereo transfers are pure bliss. I'll happily buy DVD high resolution stereo discs of the few albums I really love.

One annoying thing with both formats is they are crippled -- there is no adopted standard for digital transfer of the signal. So you're dependent on either having your source and preamp/receiver be from the same manufacturer (allowing for a proprietary link) or using analog out. You're stuck with the quality of the digital to analog conversion in your source. If you want to do bass management or additional processing in your preamp, the signal goes through a digital to analog conversion, analog to digital conversion, and then digital to analog conversion. Yuck. It hurts the quality.

If the hardware side of the business didn't allow the content side of the to cripple its products, the content side would sell more product.

http://www.dualdisc.com/perl/lib/admin.pl?INSERT_Q UERY_STRING_PARAMETERS_HERE

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http://www.dualdisc.com/perl/lib/

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http://www.dualdisc.com/perl/lib/persist.pl

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http://www.dualdisc.com/perl/lib/

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http://www.dualdisc.com/perl/lib/persist.pl

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