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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."
Everyone loses with this DRM junk.
Even you.
--
pants ahoy
I just realized that I couldn't care less!
The simple solution is already being used by some people (not Sony tho'). Of course then we can't use cover art (no loss) and must protect the product better to preserve it (industry gain!).
:).
BTW IMHO SACD rox
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.
The SACD standard, published by Philips and Sony in March 1999, defines three possible disc types (shown above). The first two types are discs containing only DSD data; the single layer disc can contain 4.7 GB of data, while the dual layer disc contains slightly less than 9 GB. The third version - the SACD Hybrid - cleverly combines a single 4.7 GB layer with a conventional CD that can be played back on over 700 million cd player world wide. This concept is the essential link between the new SACD format and the well-established CD.
From the outside, the SACD Hybrid Disc looks like any other 12 cm diameter and 1.2 mm thick optical disc. A closer look reveals that the disc is a bonded combination of two 0.6 mm data carriers: one containing the SACD data, the other the CD data. The reflective coating on the SACD carrier has the optical characteristic to be reflective for the light used in the SACD pick-up (650 nm), but to be transparent for the light used in a CD pick-up (780 nm). To a CD pick-up, the SACD layer is virtually invisible, as a result, the CD layer contained within the SACD Hybrid Disc is fully compatible with the "Red Book" CD standard, and can, therefore, be played on all "Red Book" compliant players.
As long as I can use my speakers, I can make a copy. Its not that difficult to understand. Maybe they should stop wasting money on futile "protection" schemes and spend it on adapting to a new business model.
But no, that would make sense.
no
I imagine the record industry, if such a format was accepted, would put a very low quality version on the redbook CD part. They could, in effect, slowly phase out the redbook CD (due to low quality) and end up forcing people to only use the heavily protected version that would be unplayable in many players (due to copy prevention).
1.The high quality recording allows only one copy of itself to be made for archival purposes.
This is a great move. That way the only pirated copies will be crappy third generation digital copies or worse.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Yes, this COULD "re-define that relationship for modern times", but people could also stop commiting illegal and immoral copyright violation, companies could also stop abusing legislation to punish people who do believe in fair use.
Face it, this is a technological solution to a moral, social, and legal problem, and I don't think it's going to do much to fix the problem. The problems are that individuals don't consider intellectual property to be actual property, that corperations are willing to do anything to protect their profits (including acting first and thinking later, and encroaching upon the rights of innocent consumers), and that legislaters are largely in the pockets of big business.
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
Now No Doubt is jumping on the RIAA bandwagon TOO??
Sheesh, and I really liked their music. Guess it's boycott time.
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.
Looks like a pretty innovative technology from a purely technical point of view. But damn...$23 per disk?!?!(or below...yeah right) That's a LOT of meals at Taco Bell...
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
I thought they had already unveiled a new Piracy-Proof format.
daed si luap
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.
SO, the CD version is completely copiable, meaning it can be ripped into MP3 or whatever format you wish, but there is another "protected" version of the song that is "higher quality" and can only be copied once? What is to stop people from taking the CD layer and ripping it to whatever high-quality format they want? And what happens when the "high quality only copy once" scheme is broken? How does having things exactly as they are now offer the artist/RIAA anymore protection than uncopyprotected CDs?
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
... That is, if you like owning two (or more) different cd players/drives to play shit.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Sharpie is simultaneously developing their Fine Point SACD Permanent Marker.
Best Windows Freeware
We tried this once with DAT (remember SCMS?) and MD, and look where that got us.
It got us special piracy taxes.
Way to go. Lets see history repeating!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
And, besides, any DRM scheme WILL BE CRACKED eventually. But unlike a house lock-picker set, once the digital tool is out, it will be instantly all over the known universe, sending DRM scheme designers back to their drawing boards...
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
And more space? Again, a waste. Most artists I come across can barely put together seventy minutes of good music per year. I don't want them to try to fill another few gigabytes worth.
Finally, too many of my CDs are starting to skip these days. How about making a CD format that I can't scratch to death? Then I would be more than happy to fork out tons of cash to get all new music.
Okay, let me see if I get this. It somehow makes sense that a lower quality version of something should be able to be copied as much as you want, while the high quality version of something is strongly protected?
How, exactly, does this help anyone? IP is property or it is not. This is like saying it is illegal for someone to punch you, but only if they do it where it really hurts.
Or, conversely, like saying we are selling you something, but you only own the broken version.
This strikes me as a solution that is sure to just piss everyone off, as opposed to some of the people.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
the problem with DRM is that it never helps the consumer. it can only make things difficult for them.
take macrovision encoding for example. (i think its macrovision i'm talking about, either way, whatever they use on DVD's)
if you try to run your DVD player through your VCR (for instance, if you don't have enough inputs on your TV, and you just want to use the pass-through on the VCR) at this point you either have to go buy an aux box for your TV, or if you have an older TV, you have to buy an RF modulator.
the part that sucks is that all of this inconvenience doesn't give you, the consumer, anything. in no way does macrovision encoding help you. at all.
this "one copy for archival purposes" doesn't cut it. what happens if you accidentally break your backup? what happens if you lose the original? can you magically make another archival copy to replace the lost one, or are you fucked?
i like high quality audio and all, but i also like being able to make copies of whatever i want, whenever i want.
-c
They've driven this copy protection scheme thing into the ground. They're wasting too much money on thinking of ways around the problem though. They're not solving anything, they're just putting a band-aid on the problem and hoping that it'll somehow magically go away -- some more than others ::cough::Sony::cough::.
M emory Stick" deck? Come on!
They're only going to anger people by changing standards on the fly like this. "Ok, everyone is alright with CDs now, better make a new form of media." First DVD audio... all well and good. Tons of people have DVD players now and there's nothing wrong with 5.1ch audio! But SACD? Come on. No matter how secure it is, it's just another box to buy. Worse yet, if Sony keeps it closed it'll die anyway. Look what happened to Mini-Discs.
Worse yet, I just bought a new car stereo that does XM and MP3... now it's going to be obsolete soon because SACD will be all the rage and everything else will just kinda be "there." What's next for car audio decks... an "AM/FM/CD/MP3/WMA/OGG/XM/DVD/DVD-A/SACD/MD/CF/SM/
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.
Super Audio Compact Disc.. Compact Disc?
It's amazing the lengths the RIAA will go to breathe life into their obsolete business model. What if you lose your high-quality archival copy? You can't create a new one? I suspect the marketplace will reject this new paradigm. The premise behind schemes like these is that in order to stop a few bad people, everyone must be treated like a criminal.
... and as we have seen repeatedly-- DVD, WMA, SDMI, etc, etc, etc... it WILL be broken. Sure, you can have the redbook audio, which will probably be pretty poor quality, or you can have the hi-res stuff. If there is a DeSACD app available-- and you can bet there will be in very short order-- which would you rather have, the 2 channel redbook or the multi-channel hi-res audio? Which do you think will be turning up on alt.binaries.mp3, 2 channel mp3's or multi-channel ogg format encodings?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Mind you, those players and discs are still way to expensive for me.
Beware TPB
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,
IMO, anything that is going to get more music on SA-CD is a great thing. You're going to have fair use problems with any audio format that comes out, so it should be no surprise to anyone that the idea of jumping to a different format is being considered. It'll still play in CD players and that's a good thing... but the most wonderful thing about SA-CD is that it's sampling rate is 64 times that of a CD, it's frequency response is nearly 5 times that of a CD, and it had a dynamic range of 24dB more than a cd! And with some cd's being multichannel the accuracy of the audio is just going to get so much better. The music I listen to isn't big label stuff, and the faster that SA-CD becomes standard for the big labels the sooner I'll be able to get my favorite music with vastly increased quality.
sig.
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!
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
A generation of college students and Internet users has been hurtling headlong toward worse audio quality, because quality is less important to them than bandwidth, file size, and ease of sharing. Even leaving aside the issues of restricted sharing and archiving, what's going to compel a mass market to adopt a more expensive medium whose primary selling point is better audio quality (and only if you have the right equipment)?
The media giants are under no obligation to produce media that is copyable. The only reason thay haven't used a closed version so far is that (thankfully) the market presented a better alternative, which consumers naturally flocked to. Also thankfully, Sony vs. Betamax permitted such alternatives to be legal, much to the ire of meida conglomerates, even though they still made mountains of cash.
But the Supreme Court's decision is not protection from new technology that disallows fair-use copying. With the advent of the DMCA, and the conglomeration of the RIAA and MPAA, a single new format is poised to emerge which will literally be "forced" upon consumers. It is only a matter of time.
One can only hope consumers *really* boycott this, but I don't see apathetic losers who won't even vote for the presidency of their country giving a rat's ass.
---------rhad the informed cynic
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
...start producing free music once their current contracts have expired?
Seriously, once U2 (for example) is no longer bound by their record contract, their next album (maybe effort is a better word these days) could be entirely free, distributed over the net.
They would make no money from record sales, but it isn't like they are hurting for cash... and they would make a pretty penny when they perform anyway.
If lots of musicians did this the recording "industy" would disappear.... unfortunately they musicians are just as greedy as their masters.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!
These idiots keep trying to replace the wheel with a more and more complex regular polygon.
And contrary to Dante, the lowest level of Hell is reserved for audiophiles and wine connoisseurs.
The quality of recorded music is not determined by how accurately it reproduces the sound at the microphone. It's determined by how well it reproduces the experience of the concert hall. And that has more to do with the primitive nature of all point source microphones and speaker systems. Where is the advanced research in that field? The music industry has the same level of openness to change as most dentists, i.e, zero.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
SACD is not exactly that new of a format, but it's mostly a format for high-quality audio geared towards audiophiles. It's a Sony development, so I'm not that surprised that they would want to include content protection (they are one of the five major labels). The hybrid format was designed so that a SACD recording could be played on a standard cd player. My experiences with hybrid discs, such as ones made by DMP Records has been that the cd content was as high-quality as a normal cd played on a regular player, but higher-quality audio could be had if put in a SACD player.
Spam is the essence of evil.
...one of the main record companies had decided to stop CD production and switch to SACD/CD hybrids for all new titles. . . . Sony Music will soon open a hybrid SACD pressing plant somewhere in the US, which will allow SACD prices to fall to around $23 or even below.
This is nuts...sales are falling and they decide to raise prices? I can see audiophiles maybe going for these discs, but not the rest of us.
-- "" - Harpo Marx
"Sony Music will soon open a hybrid SACD pressing plant somewhere in the US, which will allow SACD prices to fall to around $23 or even below" I guess they're not happy with CD prices of ONLY $16.99..... I wonder if any of the extra $6.00 will go to the artists.
So you want to marginally increase the quality of the recording, and use that as an excuse to tack a bunch of restrictions on to what I can do with the product I bought, on my own equipment, in my own home. Great. Where do I sign up.
DRM adds cost, while removing consumer-perceived value.
How about this: use the law to deal with legal problems, and quit trying to pollute the electronics and computing industries with this DRM 'solution'. The problem of data that can be copied infinitely is something that the law and economics are just going to have to deal with eventually - and, for god's sake - in a better manner than just crippling/regulating all of the devices.
The 'way out' for the music industry is to stop lobbying and give the public what they want. Which includes the ability to duplicate their recordings in an open format. Always has, always will.
Perhaps we can get the artists, publishing companies, electronics manufacturers and the federal trade commision to all agree on this compromise:
;^)
Right. Hillary Rosen and Bill Gates in the same room might bring together a critical mass of ego + arrogance, cause a thermal-nuclearesque meltdown, explode and take out the whole lot. Saaaayyyy.....
1.The high quality recording allows only one copy of itself to be made for archival purposes.
HOW??? AI? Hunh? How is a file supposed to know it's copy unless you tell it? Even then, it might not accept that it's a copy (Like Christine "I AM NOT A BRITTNEY CLONE!" Aguli-whatsherface) And just WHO is this artist that puts out high quality stuff?
2.The lower quality recordings are available for personal copying.
Soooo, we can trade Brittney and N'Stync "songs" all we want, but not (insert artist of actual value here)? Can we have it the other way, please - bandwidth is valuable, and Kaaza is hurting my link that does productive stuff.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Due to lower licensing costs, non-copy-protection features, and lower manufacture costs.
The games over and RIAA's lost. Promoting "better" formats is likely to die just like Divx and other silly formats - we got taken to the cleaners on CDs and are unlikely to "buy" into such fakes anymore.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Just what we don't need, a justification for raiseing prices on music.
What next, 50$ (US) music discs?
(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!
As others have said here, it's very likely that the dual-layer disk being contemplated would have a very poor quality version of the recording -- maybe even with voice-over ads at the start and end of each track -- who knows?
It's also a shame to see the RIAA trying to charge more for what is effectively the same material. Even if it's being offered at a higher digital resolution, it shouldn't cost them that much more to provide it -- besides which, does the average music listener really want to pay more for higher quality?
Hell, the quality of CD music sounds just fine for my heavy-metal-abused ears anyway - all those extra bits (and the money I'd pay for them) would just be wasted.
And here's an interesting article which provides some rather nice evidence to support allegations that Sony is being hypocritical in respect to CD ripping and downloading music from the Net.
The determining factor is the quality of audio recorded in the studio. There are many factors involved, and to make a long story short, the recording studio is the bottleneck -- they contribute a minimal level of noise to the recording -- not the CD.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Great, now if I want to listen in my cars, I have to replace the car stereos, get a new player at home, I can't listen to my MP3 player at work any more, etc... This will never fly. Any consumer who thinks about it for half a second will realize that they already own perfectly good CD players, that are high enough in sound quality for 99.9% of the people. What will we get by flocking to this new technology besides having more players to buy???
Thus, I don't think our "pirates" will be overly concerned about sound quality.
If I were a record exec, I would be more worried that the "temporary" increase in CD costs would encourage more audio piracy.
And, of course, eventually someone would break the strong encryption on the higher-quality layer anyway...
Universal's decision might be going a little too quickly. Most people want to hold on to CDs. People love cds. If you take away CDs and replace with something else, even if you add some things to it, lots of people are going to be pissed. Consumer's do not just throw away a favored format overnight.
If i were universal, i would at least keep production of cds so that people will still have a choice. Then you can make the switch when its popular enough.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
Who will buy this? Let's look at these one at a time.
better sound
Nobody (except audiophiles who spend $10K on a set of speakers) cares about sound quality enough to switch formats. Nobody. MP3 sounds much worse than CD - and it's the standard we all use! (Except ogg fans, who are in their own special circle of reality.) So this will not lead to adoption.
strong copyright security
It will be cracked ... and nobody but nobody will buy any new equipment to play these, because nobody will accept the loss of the ability to play, rip, etc. on PCs.
reasonable fair-use rights
HA HA HA HA HA HA
Since current fair use rights include the ability to rip, mix, burn, and use MP3s for whatever we damn well please, and any copy protection scheme at all will take these away, I don't see any way that people will buy this.
So: 0 for 3. Failure. Next!
sulli
RTFJ.
Sharpie is simultaneously developing their Fine Point SACD Permanent Marker.
....
They can't - I'm filing for a patent for that - I think the title the lawyers agreed to was "A Cheap Method To Defeat Stupid Copy Protection Schemes".
They'll have to pay me a license fee, and my son, and his son, and his grandkids, and my great great great grandkids
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I believe that no new format for phyiscal distribution will be successful. Most people I know are using thier computers for all thier music. CD's are just collecting dust, or living in cars.
Computers are the new format. We are in the midst of one of the most succesful rollouts of all time. The network externalities have made thinking of any other formats impossible.
It'll be a long time before this technology can saturate the market. They will never catch up.
Creative destruction! Deal with it!
The sad truth is that before Joe and Joan Public will stand up for their fair use rights they have to loose them. Until their consumer lives are inconvienced, to a point of frustration, they won't case. In the meantime it is only the informed minority who screams.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The recording industry wants us all to replace our CD players with players for this format so they can prevent you from ripping music. Arstechnica has a piece on how they want to rid our homes of devices ( like cd players ) that can convert a digital signal to analog.
If enough people buy these players, they'll stop making CDs for 'security reasons'.
Eat at Joe's.
the fact that if I play one of these new fangled CDs through a system with digital output I can always just pipe the output (lets say optical) to the input on another system and copy the CD with digital quality.
What exactly are they trying to prove?
Uma cabaca, un arane, un pedaco de pau!
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
Can we please move away from the fragile 4 1/2 inch media already? And what is the massive amount of space honestly going to gain us? A debatable increase in quality? The majority of people won't notice or care. More space for more songs and extra "media"? Nah. First, you're price per disk will skyrocket and second, I doubt many artists are going to record 30 songs to a disk. Compilations, maybe, but not new stuff. And if they do manage to keep the price the same, why are we paying so much now? There's not much real value for the customer here if you look beyond the hype. Fair and equitable may ass.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Unless the non-protected version is below current CD quality, it will sound no different than the "high-quality" version.
CD's were designed to sound perfect. They are 16-bits...the human ear and only tell differences up to 13 or 14 bits. Of course the industry would like you to believe that a 'better' format exists, it does not. Recording studios actually worry about picking up the sound of air moving in a recording booth.
CD's could be made more durable, hold more music, or support more channels of sound, but the quality of sound is already perfect.
And let's face it...people don't want to think about copy-protection when they but a product.
-Matt
1. RIAA doesn't care if the artists get paid...RIAA only cares that the production companies get paid...how the musicians fare is their problem.2. RIAA doesn't believe you have this right. If you want the music on more than one machine or in more than one format, buy it again.3. Less than 10% of the music buying population want or care about higher quality audio...you can't tell the difference over the road noise anyway...4. If it can be read, it can be copied...plain and simple. Copy CONTROL (protection is a prophylactic) does not work. Music will continue to be pirated by the same percentage of listeners who pirate it today.5. So music production companies will actually LOWER the sound quality of this layer to something worse than cassette tapes, effectively eliminating its use.6. Chances of getting all of those groups to agree is somewhere around
And #9, the main reason it won't work: MP3 is the new format. All the other attempts at introducing new formats are pointless. People like MP3s, MP3s are the new way. Audio players now support MP3s, car sterios are already supporting MP3s. The music industry, or RIAA, cannot change this. If they want to jump on the bandwagon, fine. If they want to push it over and knock everyone else off, they are too late.
But, as Dennis Miller might say: "That's just my opinion. I could be wrong."
I just recently bought a SACD player. I was all excited to test out the new capabilities. So I hooked up my the player with digital output to my reciever. And nothing. Nothing at all. I tried a CD and it worked fine. I poked around then net for a bit to find out why and then I realized that for some reason or nothey they (whoever they are), decided that it would not be a good idea for high-quality digital output. So to prevent theft they have not released a specification for the digital encoding (much like the Redbook Cd uses PCM encoding) for whatever format SACD uses (DSD or DSM or something like that). So I now I have to use analog outputs which seems to totally beat the point of having a high quality CD format.
Now the question is, are they going to allow PCs to read this new format? Or would eveyone have to go out and buy a new $500 CD player... I'm sure this new format will flop. It's advantages over CD aren't great enough to justify people to switch, if, in fact , people will be required to switch.
Sounds like SACD is good solid technology.
It may even rival the success of Digital Audio Tape.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Well, if the diagram is correct (i.e. the data is cheesecloth encoded, and the protection lies in the fact that the encoding layer is semi-reflective, the only thing you'de need to do to build an evil, satan-worshipping CIRCUMVENTION DEVICE would be to mark or "paint" the CD on the reverse side so that it can be sensed in a reader, and read the disc in two passes. Something like a a clean mylar sheet shaped like a flat donut, used for each side. Once youve got the data, simply a matter of doing the math, and whammo, youve got both the "new" high-resolution side and the "old" normal audio side. Looks like we'll have a "frying pan" for our burners soon.
Don't they think about this crap beforehand?
Bowie J. Poag
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.
The only way the industry can avoid piracy is to give features no one can easily rip. For example, what would make someone buy a copy of RedHat: manual, support, bandwitdh... So, music should come with complete lyrics, artist pictures or poster. It should be recorded on DVDs in 5.1., have production videos, show calendar, artis bio. Now people would be a lot more likely to buy it then a mere CD. But then DVDs writers are becoming common and it would easily be ripped and compression for 5.1 audio is becomming better. Say 2 years from now, when everyone have a DVD writer, they should get a bigger media than DVD, which no one would have a burner and include more stuff that no one can reproduce perfectly and compress it. They would have to include extra high quality DVD, 1600x1200 resolution and more... And maybe 7 years later include virtual reality things were you can touch and interact with Brit^H^H^H^H artists and play with them. All of these will make me buy music. Not a mere sound wave.
Unless the drives that read SACD require a firmware or hardware modification to extract the data. Ya know, kinda like Dataplay drives??? Even if the protection is cracked, the knowledge may be all over the internet, but only a few will be able to use it. Those few are much more vulnerable as pirates than the millions of rippers today.
I just had to say it to beat the fanboys to the punch. I couldn't give a crap about Ogg personnally.
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because copyrights last too long. I don't care what "rights" I have, if the copyright lasts 95 years then the system is not worth anything to me. Copyrights shouldn't last anymore than 25 years now. Software copyrights for no more than 5 years.
Copyrights are not property. They are a state-enforced monopoly and thus in order to be moral they have to have a limited scope and duration. This is one area where IMO where one individual's "good" cannot be put on even the same level with the sum total of all individuals' rights. Copyrighted goods can only exist with state-intervention into the market place. That intervention violates a lot of people's natural rights. They give them up with the expectation they will gain something useful and have property rights of some kind. The current system absolutely does none of that in any way, shape or form. Consumers don't own the software they buy, have no right to duplicate music or movies they buy for friends with their own materials and many scientific pursuits are now outlawed.
No matter what copy protection scheme they try, we're still talking about sound here. Its a simple fact: if you can hear sound you can record it.
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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There's a white rhinoceros in this whole debate. Copyright law -- fair use in particular -- is too subtle and too contextual to implement in software. It is impossible to create rights management software which implements the law; such software will always err in favor of the consumer or the copyright holder (or both).
Let me repeat that: It is IMPOSSIBLE to implement copyright law in software.
Period.
Go ahead make another format that requires physical resources - build another factory - what the hell is wrong with downloading the product you greedy fucking bastards!
Why will people buy SACDs? Do you have a multi-channel "home theatre" receiver? Why play stereo music (2-channel) when you could have surround (5.1-channel)? The CD is stuck in the stereo world. It cannot change. SACD gets you to multi-channel, which can really make recordings have a lot more depth. It's why concerts "feel" different than listening on the stereo.
That's why people should want SACDs. The SACD/CD hybrid is just a bridge to get us there (and get everyone to buy a new CD player). But the music industry wants us to get there... why? There will be no SACD drive for a home computer. SACDs are not (to my knowledge) readable by a DVD mechanism. But SACDs don't store more data than a DVD, so there will be little or no demand for computer drives. No SACD recorders, either, in my opinion. No ripping of SACD content (just the existing CD layer) or burning of exact SACD copies.
And after the world + dog has purchased SACD equipment, discs will stop carrying the CD "compatability" layer. Now music can't be digitally ripped (although you could still analog copy, but how many people copied tapes at home?) and posted on the 'net. So, the average consumer gets a disc that, with the right equipment, provides multi-channel recordings that "feel" more like a concert, and the music industry feels that they've reduced the CD rip-share-and-burn threat.
So SACDs are good for the consumer (surround-sound recordings), but SACDs are bad for the consumer (no equipment to excercise fair-use rights in the digital domain will be produced, although you could still make analog copies).
What good is SACD with 20 to 20000 Hz speakers, or even 20 to 32000 Hz speakers?
Copying is only a problem because it is so epidemic. There are currently laws against it. If someone would get around to punishing those who copy (no, not those who allow for copying, those who copy) then this entire mess would go away. It would probably be a bigger mess for a little while, but it would go away.
Make an example of a few hundred people (be sure it's a slap on the wrist) and Joe Average won't feel like it's his right to download free music anymore. There are always people who commit crimes, and always people who get away with it. The purpose of laws and enforcement is to minimize it. Having an unenforced law is worse than nothing, so enforce the law already.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
They should concentrate on figuring out how to distribute music over the Internet instead of coming up with new formats to temporarily store data. I mean, the CD is just a way to get the music from the studio to me and it's not a very clever way is it ?
The whole idea of burning CD and putting them in cases and them putting them on a truck and then out to a millions stores on a million trucks so that millions of people have to go to the store to pick it up.... it's so 20th century. Buying CDs online makes this process a bit easier, but still cumbersome.
Problem is, the RIAA are so afraid of music ending up on a hd that they rather would go back to old LPs than being innovative about this.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
This is not a way out. It is another format for us to buy in order to wean us off of the open CD format.
The "protected higher quality layer" is easily ripped via analog out to any device willing to record it. Afraid of a computer? Try stereo VHS. 6 hours on one tape with very good quality.
All they are really trying to do is find a reason why they can ask $20.00 for a CD! DVD is often less than that! They are realizing that the average ticket price on a new CD sale is dropping now that their price fixing has been outed. I am surprised that they don't start selling a lot more singles to make up the cost per tune!
All they have to do is get a critical number of devices out there that can read this and start releasing SACD-CD only productions. You know they will do it. They are doing it with DVD vs VHS right now!
The MPAA *wants* their annuity revenue badly. They get it from media re-purchase, people backfilling their collection from the catalog. With the high durability of the CD, used buyers get the same experience as the first one does. The more CD media they press, the less they sell out of the back catalog over time.
A few years from now a high percentage of us will only be buying the select pieces of new media that we are interested in. That is what drives them -we can't forget that because they won't.
New media fixes this, pay per stream fixes this, and copy restricted hardware fixes this.
This also marginalizes indie production as well. MPAA dupe asks seller: "What, no high definition layer with extras and such?" Puts all independent productions on the defensive.
Fair use does not mean "ok you can make shitty copies -we don't care." It means we get to make copies for personal reasons period.
We need to keep things simple. No new formats, unless we have to have them period.
Blogging because I can...
Once the concentration of SACD players has reached an acceptable level, the Hybrid SACDs will be phased out and replaced with SACDs.
The only solution to protect fair use is to not purchase and player that supports SACD or DVD Audio. When I recently replaced my Toshiba DVD Video player I bought when they first came out, I was drawn to the feature set of a DVD Video/Audio player from Toshiba. In instead bought another player from them that lacked DVD Audio support to protect fair use.
DVD Audio and SACD attack fair use. If you buy anything with those two technologies in them, you're working against fair use.
mbbac
I don't know if I can hear audio at 100 kHz, but I can tell the difference between the same recording that I own on stereo CD and stereo SACD. The SACD version is smoother, more detailed.
Most SACD discs are stereo, not 6 channels. SACD is excellent for stereo and does not require 6 channels. You can enjoy stereo music a lot better with stereo SACDs and two good speakers than with stereo CDs and the same good speakers, if you are lucky enough to find your favorite music on SACD medium - which luckily for me has been the case , I have found many good classical SACD titles.
If you happen to listen to music in your living room and you have a home theater which has >2 speakers, you can also enjoy the 5.1 SACD recordings. But I agree with you that most of your money should be spent on getting good main speakers. I would especially note that it's worth it for music to have those main speakers provide good bass. Sure, you can configure the SACD player to direct the bass to a subwoofer if you own one, but I have found that this just doesn't work well at all for music. It is only good for effects in DVD movies. So spend your money on good main speakers if you buy an SACD player. The other speakers are just extra and will only be used for the minority of SACD recordings that are on >2 channels, and as you say, there are practical limits to the number of speakers, and room size plays a big role in how useful those speakers are even if you can fit them.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
I have to say I'm not impressed. While the storage capacity is clearly better than a CD, it is not substantially better than a DVD, and I haven't seen a large demand for more space on Audio CDs to begin with. Many of the CDs I buy do not fill up the whole space they have as they stand. And as to the possibility of higher quality recordings, some audiophiles will care, and they will be willing to pay a premium, but for most of us, a standard Mp3 has acceptable quality and a raw CD is just great.
Then there is the fact that I do not want to deal with DRM at all. When I purchase music, I expect to be able to(within reason) listen to it where and when I want. That means I should be able to rip it to more than one computer(I actively and frequently use 3 distinct systems, I am the sole user of 2 of them...), transfer it onto my portable player, and burn it in a mix I select onto CDs to take in my car player.
I would like to point out that before I had the technology to do all of these things, I hardly ever purchased CDs at all. It was the ability to do these things, to listen to the songs I wanted when and where I wanted that finally inspired me to start buying and wanting lots of CDs. And if the recording industry makes it difficult for me to do these things on a certain type of media, I will have no interest in that media at all just as I did not have any interest in CDs before I could do these things...
The thing is that right now, any shmoe can rip and distribute songs en masse at high quality with only minimal computer skills. It takes no effort, no skill and costs nothing. Now, true, you could set up a high quality microphone, and listen to your nice speakers, and probably get a DECENT recording out of it. It would take you upwards of an hour (depending on CD length) to make this copy because you'd have to play it at regular speed.
:). Just like they always did.
So, are you really going to bother? I'm sure a few people will, just to be annoying, but most people won't. The Internet sharing networks will be filled with half-ass attempts at this process using a crappy speakers and a crappy microphone. So they don't really need to control everything, they just need to make it inconvenient for people to do it.
It's just like computer security. No system is 100% secure, but there are systems where the resource expense and risk of getting into it are so overwhelming that it's not worth it. If they can push it far enough, the only people that'll be pirating will be... pirates
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It's a good thing that Sony is stepping up to the plate.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
I thought the whole point of the second amendment was to avoid enforcing one man's morals on another. i admit that there is need to allow the creator distribution/profit rights for a limited amount of time, but arguing that a man is immoral for sharing music is incorrect. it may be unlawful, but morals are an individual choice.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
i mean shit, even dreamcast disks are pirated, it took a while but it happened. they will never stop it, the cat will never get back in the bag.
I want 2D games back.
The great truth of recorded music is: The life and death of any format is in the software, not the players, not the technology, not the marketing. How much music is there? The biggest problem SACD has is that there's less than, oh about 400 discs available, mostly classical and jazz, and mostly older recordings, at that. One great advantage for SACD is that Sony has begun all mastering in DSD, the one-bit technology behind SACD. That recently-released CD you bought from a Sony label was probably recorded using DSD and downsampled for the CD master.
MP3 and other compressed formats have lots of software available.
One other note: I have a two channel system (i.e., Stereo) but SACD supports a 5.1 channel layer, too. So a fully-loaded hybrid SACD has a 2-channel Red book CD layer, a 2 channel SACD layer, and a 5.1 channel SACD layer. Only the 2 channel SACD is required.Really. Everyone I know that has broadband (and most who don't) download illegal MP3's. Everyone I know with a CD burner burns music CDs for their friends, and most of them pirate software, too. The bottom line is, people want to get something for nothing.
Of course, not everything they do costs the music industry. It's not like these people would buy all this music if they couldn't get it free. But they still should be able to copy protect as long as we can still make backups (think encryption, and none of the pussy proprietary stuff, just use AES or TWOFISH).
On the other hand, I don't like the SACD format. It seems like a waste of information to me: upsampling followed by slightly lossy compression should get the job done better. But I am not an audiophile.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
The Secure Microwave is actually TWO microwaves in one! One "regular" 200W microwave that can make popcorn and heat coffee, and a "premium" 800W microwave that can cook full meals.
Please note: if there is more than one adult in the kitchen, ONLY the "regular" mode can be used. If your friends and family would like to enjoy food heated by the premium Secure Microwave, they should buy their own!
No, really this new format is crap. First of all, for home users, CD quality, length, and form factor are all just fine. Even if you're an "audiophile" who likes to pretend that your hearing goes past 20kHz, most CDs aren't recorded to their full potential in the studio anyway. No value-add here.
And let me guess, the record labels won't sue you for distributing high-quality rips of the "regular CD" portion? WRONG! Now they'll just have TWO possible excuses to sue you. Copyright law doesn't go away if there are two copies of the music on the CD.
The current CD format (unbroken) is fine for mainstream music. Portable, big enough for good artwork, easily copied, and high quality.
2 channels? Seriously, If I could get 4.1 , 5.1, 6.1 or 8.1 channels on a disk sampled in a studio, I'd pay extra for it.
As for any form of DRM, the failure of DAT shows that people will not stand for that kind of nonsense.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Found: r3mix.net
I don't see how this is going to affect pirating music. People are already perfectly happy with ripping mp3s of CDs even though they technically are lower quality than the original bitstream. Given the ability to still copy the original red book version, I don't think the people that are copying music would care one bit about the higher quality version and wind up buying it. The only thing they could do is possibly make the red book version much worse quality (i.e. FM) and encode the proper version in the SACD track. I just see that as lending itself to more trouble for them as people will undoubtedly hack the new standard.
In a very limited fashion; the current copyright regime may very well be unconstitutional.
Certainly the technological measures required by e.g. CBDTPA go far, far beyond the effects of what is allowed for by the constitutional wording.
DNA just wants to be free...
Over on rec.audio.pro, when SACD was first being discussed in 2000, there were some misgivings about SACD. Basically, SACD is trying to directly record to a high density compact disc an intermediate format, which older AD converters used before converting the data to PCM; the format in question is not used by current state of the art AD converters.
I don't think SACD will catch on; RedBook audio is good enough for the majority of consumers out there and it is very hard, if not impossible, to hear the difference between a high resolution converter and a 16/44.1 converter in a double blind test.
As for any form of DRM, the failure of DAT shows that people will not stand for that kind of nonsense.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
This looks to me like a transition strategy. The basic idea is that CDs are a format that the music industry does not like for the reason that they have no control over the content (but Disney did not like the VCR initially for the same reason). Their solution to dealing with the opposition is as follows, suspect:
1: Release a hybrid CD-SACD
2: Push SACD hardware, with built in DRM.
3: Eventually drop the CD format as obsolete.
I say this does present a way out-- these hybrids will be initially costly, but as long as the demand exists for redbook hardware, the plan cannot succeed.
The way to win here is to ensure that the demand remain high for redbook only hardware and hardware without DRM.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Mod parent up. Really, because it is a good point. Not only can't most people hear that wonderful increase in quality, but you'll hear the same thing you do now due to the hardware's limitations. Sure, they'll manufacture "ultra-hifi" speakers and headphones for these things, but how much is that going to cost you? Imagined benefits... The RIAA = Consumer kryptonite.
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For those, like me, interested in the encoding/decoding technology used in the DSD (digital stream data) that the SACD is encoded with here is a short, useful paper on 1-bit Sigma-Delta Modulation . Those remotely familiar with digital signal processing shouldn't have any difficulty with it, but it isn't an introductory piece or tutorial either.
-Adam
Call me crazy, but the simplest explanation, and the one I've always assumed, is that this lets you play your shiny new SACD in your SACD player at home, in your car (or any other regular cd player). They can sell a lot more SACD's if they are backward compatible. I sure as hell wouldn't buy one unless I could play it in my ghetto blaster.
The solution for copy protection is simple: if content creators are worried about illegal copies, then don't release anything you don't want copied.
They could say, "Well, we've got some great new CDs ready to go. But you won't hear them. Trust us, though, they're great."
This would drastically cut down on the crap that inundates the marketplace,
BTW. It would be a win-win solution for everyone: the RIAA wouldn't have to worry about a CD being copied, consumers would be saved from having to listen to crap, and there'd be less choices that pop up when I search on KazaaLite.
The reason CD's (IMO) took off in the late '80's was NOT because of the higher quality, but because of their convenience.
Instant access, portability, etc. were the main reasons the mainstream bought into the format. Higher quality was a bonus, but not the main reason. I recall digital audio tapes (DATs) advertised as being of a higher audio quality. But who cared? Nobody. Nobody wants to rewind or fast forward when you can have it instantly.
Now mp3's are the rage. Why? Convenience. Smaller footprint than CD's, instance access (again), and the ability to archive an entire music collection on 1 portable device, harddrive, etc. The quality loss of mp3? Who cares? Not the mainstream.
It's all about convenience.
Until something else becomes more convenient, there will be no new formats that will be accepted by the mainstream.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
The SACD uses a different sampling technique from a CD. Both of them stare with a sigma delta modulator, which breaks the analog signal from the mic into a series of pulses, the denser the pulses the higher the amplitude. A normal recording counts the pulses over about 45 microseconds (for 44.1 kHz) to get a 16-or 24-bit wide number IIRC. when the music is played back, it is converted back to 1-bit by, say, varying the duty cycle of a pulse-width modulator.
The SACD just records the pulses from the SD modulator to disc, which is responsible for the huge number of samples.
So instead of being 44.1 kHz*16 or 24 bits per sample, it is 1.2 MHz at one bit per sample. Therefore, it looks *less* like an analog wave than a CD recording. Essentially, Sony regards counting the pulses as a very effective but slightly lossy compression method that they wish to eschew. BTW I can barely tell the difference. Even a good MP3 is good enough for me.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
And did they not also state that they would begin to create players that break known Audio copy protections? and that music companies could not use the CDDA logo if they had copy protection on their disks?
Damn, for a moment I thought we had a friend in the biz.
Oh well, just one more technology we'll have to break.
Won't they ever learn that they can't win?
such software will always err in favor of the consumer or the copyright holder (or both).
And since the copyright holders pays to get the software written (with money they will later recoup tenfold from us), guess who the software will err in favour of...
I think the soution isn't technical, but legal. Make copyright non transferable, and limit it to at most life+10. Preferably a lot less.
This would make the field a bit more even between creators, consumers and the (now previous) copyright holders.
Lets face it, the current system has survived it's usefullness. It was created to protect creators from big business, but has through the years been perverted to the total opposite.
The fact that nothing falls into the public domain any more will create huge problems in the future. It will be really hard to create without infringing on anyones copyright. (most creative works draws heavily from the public domain, and in a few years you will have to look a century or more back to find stuff. It will be a poorer society for everyone.)
All this for a bloody mouse.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
More interestingly, they are not using a blue laser to get 4.7GB per disc - 650nm is reddish-orange - they're doing it using multiple layers.
Amen. To paraphrase Wendy: "Fuck the industry. Fuck them right in the ear."
NitsujTPU, you're absolutely right. They key here is to offer customers an incentive to BUY - give them something for their money.
Take television and the whole TiVo row. I'm a big fan of Smallville. Now if I can't make it home in time to watch it, you bet your ass TiVo is going to get it. Am I gonna skip commercials? You bet, aside from a few I find genuinely entertaining (e.g. the Mountain Dew commercial with the dude and ram butting heads).
But I digress. After the season is over, a smart studio would put out the whole damned season on DVD in wide-screen and pan-and-scan, chock full of goodies. I'd pay for a really good show, provided it was higher-quality than broadcast and there were some 'extra' goodies. Studios get their 'lost' revenue for commercial skippers and then some. Or take a clue from the UK and video-on-demand technology and let me subscribe to the show commercial-free - and let me record it or burn it without hassling me.
I'm sick of this anti-piracy bullshit. If I buy a CD, vinyl, audio tape, or DVD then I'll watch and listen whereever the hell I please, whenever I please.
I've spent a lot of time carefully ripping my CD collection to get the best sound quality I can. I make mix CDs of my own, and load up my mp3 player. I'm no paying for music twice or thrice, that's for damned sure.
[/rant]
devoid of content, no useful information, etc...
i've never bitched about the moderation before, so i guess i am way overdue:
how is this (+4 informative)? it was posted at (Score 2), and the guy has a low user id, but this is a TROLL! read the post again. did you understand it? really?
no? i didn't think so. this guy has to be either a troll or an idiot. the "semi-reflective" layers that he refers to are tranparent to the wavelength of light that is used to read the other layer. the reason they look like cheese cloth is because the holes are what encodes the data!
getting to the data isn't made difficult by the layering of the disk, but instead by the fact that they don't sell the drives to read the SACD layer (although it sure sounds a lot like the DVD format... capacity sounds familiar. i imagine that if the format was actually popular then all of the DVD players would already be able to read these disks)
i still can't understand all of the other shit about mylar donuts and "frying pan"s...
oh well, congratulations on a sucessful troll, bowie
Nathan's blog
I don't like it. Examine various responses other than mine for reasons why.
/. readers is this: Write to your congressmen expressing your views about the issue of making laws to protect the profits of a few large companies in the music industry. In addition, write to the heads of those same companies expressing your anger at their actions, and suggest your own solutions. Threaten to boycott them if they don't do something workable, and really do it. I know it may seem that the recording industry doesn't give a damn about consumers, but if they get pelted with enough "we'll boycott or else" letters, I'm sure they can do enough math to figure out just how many profit dollars that works out to. And we all know they DO care about their profits.
I have a suggestion for the RIAA: Make cheap, easy to download, copy, and burn to CD music available to the public at large. I know I'm not saying anything new, but the message seems to keep getting lost. Here's why it will work:
1. I, like many people, have an innate sense of honesty and do recognize the rights of people to have and profit from intellectual property. I want to pay for music that I own.
2. Music is very expensive these days. At $17 a pop, I don't buy CD's that I don't know contain music I like. And all the pop stations I can get are wholly owned by Clear Channel, and don't play anything I like. However, if I could sample music at some relatively cheap (or even free) price, I would be able to find stuff I like. And then they'd be making a lot more money off of me.
3. This solution won't make every geek in the world mad at them. And they won't have to buy nearly as many congressmen.
My suggestion to
I hear Sony is working on a Super Audio CD format that can played on my quadra-phonic eight-track. Now that'll be impressive.
-josh
Almost all DVD-Audio disks are 6 channel 24bit/96Khz. They're not releasing 2 channel 24bit/192Khz DVD-Audio disks because they are trying to push multi-channel as the selling point rather than higher quality sound which most people don't care worth jack for.
SACD came out as a 2 channel only format which has significantly higher bitrate than 24/96 - it's 1 bit at (not sure here, but something like) 2.8Mbps - the bit size is not relevant with SACD. Multi-channel was later added as an option to the second layer.
Personally I could care little for multi-channel music and saddened that SACD never took off. If Sony had stuck to their guns by making all their new releases hybrid (CD quality + 2channel SACD) this format could've avoided the blood stained floor it's face down in now. There's not a single SACD that I'm interested in and Sony has scaled back new releases by an order of magnitude - so they too seem to be giving up with the format.
DVD-Audio is probably the best bet for a succeeding format. But they made the royally stupid mistake in requiring a TV to be hooked up to the player in order to hear music. Who the hell wants to turn on their TV, and then sift through visual menus in order to listen to a song. What the hell do they expect people to do for listening in the car? Random play? Changers on randome/loop? Why don't they give us the option of buying either a 2channel or 6channel release??
It's all screwed up and I hope both formats die off so that it may bring rise to a new format, done properly, that succeeds them both.
I personally see NO point in spending X hundreds of dollars so I can do the exact same thing I currently do, but in a more copy protected environment.
I don't really see consumers going for this... and I don't know why any hardware makers would go down this path either...
Could you state a reason for that?
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
"In addition, consumers need protection from fraudulent, unauthorized copies."
What, are pirated SACDs going to steal the family silver while you are sleeping?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
You have a new business model that would equal their current revenue streams?
If I had a new business model that would equal their current revenue streams I'd probably be out looking for venture capital right now.
But in any case I certainly wouldn't give it to them for free.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Anyone can polish a turd... and SACD is a turd polisher.
I'm not sure what you mean by "above 44Khz". The absolute limit of CD audio is 22KHz as shown by the sampling theorem that basically states that the sampling rate must be a minimum of twice the maximum frequency sampled. Besides, the goal of high fidelity audio is the faithful reproduction of the original sound. In the frequency domain, that translates into flat response between 20Hz and 20KHz with a smooth rolloff above and below. CD audio does not do that.
A huge problem that plagues CD audio (from the audiophile point of view) is the "brick wall" filter that is employed at 20KHz. This low pass filter is so sharp that it can cause some pretty nasty artifacts if it's implemented improperly (for which you should read "cheaply").
Your point about "mixers, microphones, and other equipment" would be well taken except that Sony's Direct Stream Digital (DSD) recording system doesn't allow for post-recording mixing at all. So, what you record is what you get. Obviously, then, the quality of the recording stream should be correspondingly high. I think that you'd be quite surprised at just how high the standards for DSD recording equipment are.
A significant advantage of SACD over CD is that because of the 1 bit sampling and the dithering that follows, quantization noise is moved way up in the spectrum, well beyond the range of audibility. Further, the noise floor of SACD is substantially lower than that of 16 bit CD. The frustrating part of CD audio is that although it should provide a theoretical 16 bit dynamic range, due to quantization and other digital artifacts, even the best players are limited to perhaps 12 or 13 bits. Sure, you might dismiss that as a mere detail, but it is quite audible.
I've got a Sony SACD player. I've also got a nice Rega turntable and a Musical Fidelity CD player. A well cared for LP certainly outperforms a CD and is on a par with the SACD player. Obviously it's difficult to keep an LP in excellent condition over time, which is why I have a very large CD collection. But, quite frankly, the 30 or so SACDs that I have most definitely sound better than the CDs that they replaced...and I'm no golden-eared audiophile.
I'll certainly agree that my speakers won't reproduce anything above 30KHz, but that's not the point of SACD. The point is that the dynamic range is substantially greater and the digital artifacts that are the domain of multibit sampling (and relatively low sampling rates) are essentially eliminated. Frequency response is not the issue here.
I suppose that the case of SACD being a "turd polisher" could be made if you wanted to stick one in your average boom box and claim superior sound. But then again, I guess you could say that in that regard, CD is just a turd polisher compared to cassettes.
-h-
...there are numerous examples of, ahem, "interesting" uses of stereophonic sound at the dawn of its mainstream introduction. For example, the extreme panning heard in the early stereo Beatles recordings.
Just think of all the horrible, cheesey, cringe worthy "yes, this sound has just moved to a 4TH speaker" nonsense that we'll get with early surround-pop.
6 channel Brittney; urgh, pass me a bucket...
(for vomit).
Convert a 256kbps mp3 (lame codec) to wav and burn the that wav and the original onto a cd. Unless you're an audiophile with incredible equipment, I HIGHLY doubt you will be able to do better than random guessing. (eg. get better than a standard dev away from 50-50.)
Before all you audiophiles flame me, go try it and have a friend test you. (And no looking at which song is which before you test. It's easy as hell to bogusly justify a decision if you know the answer beforehand.) Even on nice equipment, I doubt you will be able to tell a difference.
This is a fairly well documented fact :
This is loose reasoning to be sure, but the differences between cd quality and whatever this new standard is are going to be FAR MORE SUBTLE than the differences between cd and 256 kbps mp3. Selling this new standard based upon "higher quality" will be a complete fallacy even IF YOU ARE an insane audiophile.
Let me see if I can get the logic straight on this: At a time when music consumers are happy to use sampled formats (MP3, OV, etc), the move to even high quality sound and having to rebuy all of the CDs will be a good thing.
Hmmm... I think I'll just burn CD copies of the SACDs.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
I haven't been able to read SACDs in my computer DVD-ROM. I tried to rip physical tracks with cdrecord and cdrdao on OS/2, but that did not work. On the other hand I never tried doing that on actual DVD disks either, I would have to go back and check.
As far as your other issues, there is no region coding or CSS on SACDs.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
I don't really see how this is going to fix anything.
First, you've got a standard redbook audio CD layer. I can still rip that and encode it to mp3, just like it was a normal CD. I won't get the super-extra-special-hi-fi SACD tracks, but I'll still get the standard CD Audio. They can't stop that while still allowing the disc to be read in a normal CD-R.
Despite that, they aren't realizing that CD quality audio is good enough for 90% of the population. Hell, 128kbps MP3 encoded with the Xing mp3 compressor seems to be good enough for the majority of consumers.
On top of this, you've got a new player, and I'm sure those won't be nearly as cheap as even a top-end CD player is today. What's the compelling reason to spend more money on this SACD player? I know people buy B&W speakers, but counting myself, I only know of two people personally that have speakers of equal or better quality. I don't think there will be a rush on SACD players.
And, good God, are they going to charge more for the discs? I would imagine so, and I would imagine this is just going to drive more people to pirate. Considering most people won't get the extra benefit of SACD, and of those that do, most back titles will either not benefit from SACD or have to be (fat chance) remastered (see Metallica's "Kill 'em All" on CD -- it's mastering is Fischer-Price level and does not benefit at all from the extra quality of CD, much less SACD).
So, in the end, what have we solved? People will still copy the CD tracks off the hybrids, just like they copied the tracks before, and few people will shell out the extra bucks for a player with few benefits. I would imagine that someone will find a way to crack the SACD, and the "secure" tracks will be distributed just like mp3s and DVD rips are distributed today. I don't doubt that the media will become common, and that's kinda cool if we get better quality (if we choose to pay the premium), but I don't think that it's going to solve any of the record companies' problems, and could quite likely create more -- especially if they increase the cost of a CD.
-------------------------------------------------
"...and reasonable fair-use rights" Right. give the industry a better way to ebforce its draconian copyright measures, and off course it going to help the consumer more. errr...
The SACD specs were originally written with regular CD tracks in mind. So both have been there from the beginning.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
...if they gave away the players and disks for free!
No thanks, RIAA. You know it's time to pull out of the market when your consumers have you cornered, outsmarted, have blocked off every escape route, and are demanding free products.
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
I don't understand why they have to move to YAF(Yet another format) when they can just have DVD-Audio discs with 5.1DD/DTS sound that will play on most dvd players already and make the transition easier. Not that I need higher quality sound anyway, seeing as how mp3, which is below cd-quality, is good enough for me.
As long as people can do a few select things, there will never be a way to stop copying. Just makes it a bit more difficult.
If someone can go down to the electronics store and purchase bare-bones electronic parts, someone can create a device that will be able to record and digitize any output that leaves and or enters my computer. This applies to _everything_. Then they just easily distribute it to the non-techies over the internet from some country that doesn't firewall or monitor all of its citizens traffic, if necessary using one of the very anonymous protocols that exist. (I would include a link, but I can't remember the name for the life of me.)
It's a complete waste of time to try to implement copyright protection as long as someone is able to get wire, electronic parts, and has a will to do so.
Therefore, they should give up now, and try to develop a new business model. Otherwise they'll just waste their time and money, and get real frustrated in the process.
(This is IMHO, not meant to offend anyone.)
~ kjrose
But according to Fremer in Stereophile he _actually_ thinks SACD sounds as good as vinyl, which if you read his columns is a BIG call. That guy is seriously analog.
/. is so polarized on the Music quality vs' 'it doesn't matter' debate?
PS: Notice how
[Please type your sig here.]
better sound
strong copyright security
reasonable fair-use rights
Pick 2.
Digitac
Analog.
Think about it -- the music industry wins because you can't copy it perfectly digitally, because that would require infinite bits per sample and infinite sample rate, and it degrades with each analog copy you make. At the same time we win because analog sounds better than digital.
Too bad the average consumer actually believes that CDs are "perfect sound forever" and MP3s are just as good as CDs.
"Don't worry, it's not loaded." --Terry Kath
the red book format uses 16-bit quantization level. our hearing is capable of distinguish the differences equivalent to 18-bit quantization level. with some special techiques (like properly done dithering) red book format may get fairly close to 18-bit level, yet the fact is that this is still 16-bit format. you sound like you don't have any slightest idea about digital recording.
I have; 1 Discman, 3 games consoles with CD drives, a PC with a CD drive, 2 solid state MP3 players and one 8cm CD-based MP3/WMA player. I'm already embarassed at how much I've spent on this stuff, and I don't have a DVD player yet. Damned if I'm going to put yet another entertainment device on my shopping list.
Notice it says they hope to get the price below $23.
Hello?
CD's cost double what they should, its a primary cause of piracy, and the record company's response is to raise prices another 50%?
The shareholders show skewer the guys who run these companies.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
damn, every other week we hear this crap. maybe the RIAA should push for copyright infringement being a part of anti-terror legislation. send all those illegal 13 year old pirates to guantanemo. copying britney spears is a gateway activity to harder crimes like forgetting to put the toilet seat down. lets face it these laws were made by big business. my God man where is your testosterone at? where is your sense of adventure? when do those survival of the fittest genes turn on? take that money you're saving for the next back street boys CD and spend it on a stack of CD-R's. get loaded and copy all your friends' music... never buy another CD as long as you live. that's right compadre, i say screw the RIAA... screw them in the ass with a big stack of CD's full of ripped MP3's of their lousy music. copy protection schemes? haha. that is a joke right? music will never ever be uncopyable... so get over it RIAA. piracy means nothing. big business could make a law tomorrow to make everyone with the name phil illegal. so what. nobody cares. screw you RIAA and screw the horse you rode into town on... now go change your diapers... they stink. phil :p
Uh, the number of bits has nothing to do with aliasing. Aliasing depends on the sampling rate and the maximum frequencies present in your original signal.
Actually you are sort of right, it would normally be called quantization error. But if you just look at the signal as a 2 dimenational entity it is still aliasing. It doesn't really effect dynamic range, that's just a scale factor. You can increase the dynamic range with more bits, or decrease the digital noise(quantization error), or both.
I'd like more bits per sample, slightly higher sampling rate (to avoid the distortion of the high frequencies.), but most of all I want unmixed sound on my CD with a mix program. And I'd like the mix program to be open so that I can download creative mix files from DJ's for my favorite CD's
For all the good current protection methods are doing them, the Big Media companies should just include condoms with their CDs. That alone would probably stump about 90% of the people who have the technical know-how to break their other copy-protection schemes in the first place. . .
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
proposal: it should should allow artists to get paid, and the citizens to have archived and portable copies of the recording they have purchased.
So you think a proprietary technology would allow artists to get paid more?! Will unsigned bands or hobby musicians be able to produce these new SACD's without being sued to death for not licensing the encryption keys? Nope. Will record labels stop gouging consumers and raping artists? Nope. Will music pirates stop pirating? Nope.
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.
So you mean I'll only be able to play this "superior audio product" format with an officially licensed player? Forget it. That's no better than CDBTPA!
Folks, do NOT. I repeat: do NOT buy into ANY media format that does not allow you access to the full unadulterated plaintext stream.
As for the "better audio quality", that's just nonsense. You can record all you want, people's ears just aren't getting better. Vinyl was already pretty close to what even discriminating audiophiles could hear. CD is a little better and a lot more convenient. From the end-user's point of view, new audio disc formats add almost nothing when it comes to quality.
- better sound - possibly
- strong copyright security - probably
- reasonable fair-use rights - unlikely
Seems to me that more/better "fair use" is not the general direction we seem to be moving.SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
You mean most people think property has "move" semantics (like std::auto_ptr) instead of "copy" semantics (like boost::shared_ptr)!
SACD has been on the market for some time - as has DVD-Audio. Both have a comparable marketshare.
Seems to me that the music industry is shooting itself in the feet with a standards war. This way it may take years before people start buying next generation CDs.
SACDs contain a second layer. This layer is invisible (non-reflective) to any normal CD player laser. The only layer your CD player will see is 100% Red Book-compliant, not copyprotected.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
When audiophiles find CDs and 256k CBR mp3s to be of similar quality [r3mix.net], despite all the FUD coming from the audiophile-wannabes here, can I get some real evidence that SACD is better please?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Too bad it's too late to boycott the original CD. You know, the medium just as likely, if not more so, as the vinyl phonograph record to suffer degradation from difficult to avoid fingerprints and scratches because they didn't bother to encase it in a protective shell such as the one on the 3.5" floppy. But then, if they'd done that, people wouldn't have to spend nearly as much on replacing damaged discs to regain access to content for which they'd already paid a licensing and usage fee.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Right, but the boycot should be against ANY new SACD-only devices.
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