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SACD-CD Hybrids -- A Way Out For Us Both?
"An interesting feature of the SACD layer is plenty of room for strong digital rights management code.
Here's my proposal: it should should allow artists to get paid, and the citizens to have archived and portable copies of the recording they have purchased. The record companies should produce a superior audio product and get to protect it from serial copying. The CD layer should be freely available for personal copying such as to a computer or portable digital player. These 2 basic concepts are a model that can be applied in the future, when better formats become available. It may also serve as a model for digital visual recordings. Perhaps we can get the artists, publishing companies, electronics manufacturers and the federal trade commision to all agree on this compromise: 1.The high quality recording allows only one copy of itself to be made for archival purposes. 2.The lower quality recordings are available for personal copying.
Personal digital technology has brought a tremendous change to the realtionship between media publishers & consumers. It's time for a new paridigm that will re-define that relationship for modern times."
How does this protect fair use? It is like, "okay, instead of kidnapping your baby, I will kidnap your baby but leave you with this picture of him." Thanks, RIAA, but no thanks.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
The industry shouldn't treat its customers like criminals in the first place... They should produce the BEST product available rather than downgrade what they COULD produce in favor of making sure that their will destroy their computers if they try to listen to the cd they bought. Rather than pushing users into a new format, merely so they can be charged AGAIN, they should offer a new format that has an advantage for the customer.
I always thought the best way for the damn labels to justify the high prices and fight mp3 pirating is by offering a better product to the people. SACD is it. After hearing 2 channel SACD, any audiophile will gladly pay $20 or more for such a recording. Let the kids on the internet trade their mp3s, but if you want the uncompressed joy that is high-res audio, you will buy the SACD. This is of course until technology and bandwidth progresses to the point where sharing gig size files as commonly as we share mp3s becomes common place.
Then how exactly is it copy-proof? I have several CD-ROM drives laying around that can be used as stand-alone audio CD players. So if the Red Book complient disc can be read by the Red Book complient CD-ROM drive and fed directly down the audio path I choose, such as into my stereo or (wait for it)right into my sound card, how is this copy proof?
I understand the industry's position in all this, but I would think they employed a few people with enough wits to know that copy restricting an audio product is never gonna work.
And as far as the added capabilities go, who's gonna buy new hardware? We STILL haven't standardize DVD burners yet. I don't need any new media formats, I already have enough obsolete junk in my house.
I don't understand why quality is tied to fair use. If I own a copy of a copyrighted book, and offer a poor-quality OCR scan of it on a website, I am infringing the copyright on the work, despite the OCR errors that make it a low-fidelity, inexact copy. However if I read my OCR version on my PDA, I haven't infringed a thing. What does fidelity to the original have to do with whether infringement has occurred? I am sure that the digital copies of AOTC that were shot with a haldheld camera are considered to be infringing copies, even though the fidelity is quite poor. Can anyone explain this, even if it is a lame explanation?
Edith Keeler Must Die
Repeat after me: there are no technical fixes for social problems, there are no technical fixes for social problems, there are no technical fixes for social problems.
I don't care what code you put on the SACD, or what rights management comes with the software: until we get a consistency of governance, with the same clear law implemented uniformly, protecting both fair use, individual rights, and copyright law (what's left of it after Eldred Vs. Ashcroft all of this is just screwing around: people will hack around it, of course, and it'll be DeCSS all over again.
That's not progress, or a solution.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I have an SACD player, and it wouldn't be that hard to copy it, given you have the right tools. Currently, you must use the analog outs on the player (sorry, no digital outs...yet), but all you would really have to do is run it either to a 6-channel input on an audio card (they make some good 8-channel ones for mixing) or switch the SACD to 2-channel mode (it allows you to do that), and record the file to a WAV on your PC. If you wanted the surround version, just run it through a DTS encoder (check out SurCode DTS) and play it on most any DVD player / Reciever that can decode DTS. The quailty won't be *as great* as SACD, but it will be damn good.
Just as an FYI, a CD's sampling rate is 44.1Khz (44,100 samples per second), SACD by comparison is 1.2Mhz (1,200,000 samples per second) talk about some serious data, this thing looks almost exactly like an analog wave!
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
(I use UHT == "User Hostile Technology" instead of "DRM" because I refuse to buy into the doublespeak.)
I get troubled when I read stuff like this from well meaning people who talk about the possibility of reasonable UHT because it implies an acceptance of something that, if wish to remain free, we can never ever accept: that our hardware and software should be telling us what we can and cannot do.
UHT is evil even when you agree with what it does, and even when it serves a clear utilitarian service. Good UHT is as much contradiction in terms as good dictatorship and just like with dictatorship the intention does not matter.
As we move further into the information age, we will grow more and more dependent on our computers as part of our lives, and as part of ourselves. We use them to communicate, to speak, and to be heard, and in many ways they must be seen as extentions of ourselves into cyberspace. In that context, we must recognize the immense power that the programs we run exercise over ourselves, and the incredible danger that is posed if those programs ultimately serve not to enable us but to control us.
Just like your lawyer cannot turn you in for the good of society, and your doctor cannot kill you to save two others, programmers and programs must act primarily in the interest of you, the user, and not society. Nobody should ever be compelled to run a program that acts against them, be it "reasonable" or not!
sacd's sound fantastic. dont get me wrong, they are incredible.. Listening to them a year ago in best buy was fun... but baing someone that was 18 when CD's hit the market, regular CD's sounded incredible.. and they still do, the ones mastered back in 1986-1987 are phenomonial, I have a supertramp CD that people swear is a SACD today. the problem is that almost ALL music you buy on cd is mastered crappily, they are speed produced and pushed out the door as fast as they physically can. Equipment is not calibrated before every session, and testing is few and far between anymore. THEY DONT CARE about making an album with the lowest noise floor and best use of the dynamic range. SACD's if they become mainstream and replace CD, will become crap, SACD's will start to sound as crappy as today's CD's.
the superior sound will go away, as it costs a ton of money to record and master a cd correctly.. that's why they dont do it now.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Does the average consumer notice the difference between the current fidelity of a CD versus say a 192Kbps MP3? No. Most don't notice the difference between the CD and 128Kbps MP3's. So does it really make sense to develop a higher fidelity audio format? I mean, sure, audophiles will enjoy it, I'm sure, but as a mass market item for consumers, what's the point?
The point, of course, is to make up some excuse for a new format that the recording companies can lock down and make "secure". The one problem they face is that nobody's going to invest in these new players except for the high-end audiophiles. So, unless they are going to try to push players by releasing big name performers exclusively on this new format, this is not going to last long. I don't know about you, but if I was Britney Spears or N'Sync or some other big name performer, there's no way I'd risk my sales to some corporate power play (assuming I still had the rights to my own musical performances).
The only way a new audio format is going to come to be is if the recording industry can figure out a way to make a substantial difference in the listening experience for the new media. It has to provide noticeable differences to the average consumer or it's not going to get past being a niche product for audio geeks.
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I can attest that the format sounds absolutely stunning. I have a pretty good system, but certainly not anywhere near the "$10,000 pair of speakers" a poster above mentioned as a requirement to hear the difference.
You are right about the studio, and I would add that the skill and technology used in mastering make even more difference. CD promised that the format would be "transparent" - that the limiting factor would be the recording and the mastering. I think SACD delivers on that promise.
Why? CDr makers, computer makers, and ultimately people want music. If the music industry stops providing music, either people will pay for the music, or get it from people who will offer the music.
People still want to go to concerts. Artists will likely make nowhere near what they currently are, but so what? It's just simple supply and demand. Currently the demand is over-inflated because of market manipulation, and technical limitations.
Now the technical limitations are gone, and people are realising the market manipulation. Basically their current revenue streams will likely diminish like the Tech stock market. And just like the Tech market, the good stuff will still be around, closer to what it really is worth. And in the end, the artists themselves will probably end up making more out of the deal.