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More on DVD-Audio and SACD
Spock the Baptist writes "This article at CNN covers the drive of manufacturers to get the public to convert from the CD format to two relatively new formats, DVD-Audio, and Super Audio Compact Disk. The manufacturers cite the superior audio quality, and 3-dimensionality of the new formats' reproduction as the reasons for customers to embrace these formats. The article also goes on to say: "An added bonus for record companies and retailers, who are engaged in a battle against piracy, is that the relative complexity of DVD-Audios and SACDs makes them much harder to copy. At the same time, that might turn some consumers off the format.""
One: I will not buy your "improved" format. You will not sneak this by my nose. You will probably on the other hand sneak this under the nose of everyone that does not read slashdot because I have found that everyone else is dumb.
Two: Someone will break your "copy protection" two weeks before you release it and this will not effect me any more than playing DVDs on my linux box does now.
Cheers!!
If you have a DTD capable recieve, there are several DTS encoded audio CDs that play in your DVD player and sound great!
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
It just seems like another attempt to jack up prices by introducing a new medium. I know that it provides superior quality, blah blah blah, but really: is it worth $30 a pop? I'd rather download the movie (I'm not saying I'd pirate it, although I do sometimes) legitimatly, amd I'd pay $5, or maybe even $10 if they would just let me do it.
People aren't going to buy into another format change just yet. Especially since it'll involve buying a whole new system to get the "benefits". 16bit/44.1 audio CDs are here to stay, for at least another 10 years. I mean jeez, most people actually think mp3's and CDs burned from them sound good enough!!!
...
The only hope the labels have is to release exclusive content on SACD and artists arent gonna stand for that
the 'slide
"Corporate rock still sucks. What are you gonna do about it?"
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
It's like watching a VHS tape on your high-definition television.
Why buy new SACD's that were converted from the original stereo source?
Until the recording industry starts releasing SACD's that meant to be SACD's in the first place, it is pointless...
Casettes broke and were non-random access. CD were vastly more reliable, and you could skip the filler tracks on most contract-bands. Oh, and they sounded better.
.... Maby when I get a third ear, I'll need the third speaker.
My point being - what non-quality reasons are there for me to move to these new formats?
I've already moved my mucic to a network: I can access all of my music anywhere there's a net connection and there are no jewel cases to lose.
Be damed if I'm going back to physical media just to gain 'headroom' or for a third channel...
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
That's pretty funny. I know that the limiting factor in my "music listening experience" isn't the quality of of the CD. It's everything else. It runs on a 6 year old Aiawa shelf system. Hardly the best in the world. I bet an SACD or DVD-A would sound exactly the same on my set up.
Or a better way to phrase it: Why are they trying to sell "sound quality" to a group of people who seem perfectly content with 128kbps mp3s?
With the exception of Audio-philes, who spend countless dollars on just the right setup, who will be able to tell the difference? DVD-A in my car with the factory system? Seems like over kill.
Ignoring the copyright issues for a second...
It seems to me, the cost of CDs is a sore point with some (many?) consumers already. Why would anyone think think those same consumers would rush out to adopt a new technology that's likey going to be more expensive?
It is quite simple
Haiku should not be funny
Try a Senryu
Not only does this format require a new drive to play, but the average joe consumer won't be able to hear the difference anyway. Right now I have a stereo and speakers that can't even take full advantage of a regular CD, let alone new "improved" formats. I'm willing to bet that most people don't have that kind of system. Unless you have an audiophile quality setup already there is absolutly no reason to upgrade other than to throw your money away.
"I've figured out what's wrong with life: It's other people." -Dilbert
Quote: "Educating the public is a key issue here for these formats to become more successful," Iverson says, "and I don't really see people making a big effort in this regard."
I saw this in the dead-tree news yesterday -- so it's not so much news. But anyway, I have to wonder. Much as a there is a bowl shaped curve for $$/Gb in hard drives, there is a bowl shaped curve for audio performance. Playing really old recordings is expensive for preservation reasons, playing the newest SACD is expensive for technology reasons, CD's are cheap and provide "good enough" sound that people are willing to incur lossy compression to fit music in an IPOD. Seems to me that if they want to move people toward SACD, then they better follow the HD industries lead. For hard drives the average schmuck wanders out once a month and asks the question, "So what does $250+/-10 get me this month?" The analog is "How much quality of music can I get for $15 this month (including overhead on my audio equipment)"
There's always a niche market. People asking "Money's not a major issue for me so when can I get those 320Gb drives?" and
"Money's not a mjor issue for me, what's the best possible sound quality?"
The latter group are the same people still listening to vinyl on swanky turntables. So the real question may be, "Is SACD better than good vinyl?"
Basically, yeah - I'm with you on this one.
The public only switched from LP and cassette to CD because it was several magnitudes of order better. (No more rewinding and fast-forwarding tapes that tend to wear out, or accidently get erased when someone runs by them with the vacuum cleaner. No more flipping the record over to hear the other half of the album. No more background hiss or pops and clicks.)
In fact, I'd wager that the actual ability for CD to reproduce sound more faithfully than the other formats was the *last* thing on people's list of reasons to switch, truth be told. (Most of the consumers who raved about CDs sounding so much better were really referring to the afore-mentioned lack of pops, clicks, tape hiss, or warbling effects of a turntable not spinning at the perfect speed, or tape transport mechanism slipping. They weren't really referring to improved high-frequency response, etc.)
(Heck, most of the CD players people first purchased were built onto sub $200 boom-boxes, that certainly weren't paragons of quality audio reproduction!)
The public simply won't switch formats again, simply on claims of "better than CD quality" sound. Most people won't even be able to notice the improvements, when they go to check this new technology out.
There's a big difference between video (analogue VHS tapes which wear out and get chewed by vidoe players versus digital DVD) and one digital format versus another - especially if only a music fanatic with a top of the range system could tell the difference in the quality. My prediction is that unless they add value in some way (i.e. have more than just the music on them), they'll go the the way of all the previous attempts to replace the CD.
No, dumbasses at the RIAA et al, people want portability and freedom. Why don't they get this yet? How many songs are downloaded/ripped to a LOWER quality format (128kbit) for the sake of convenience?
This just proves that they either just don't get it, or they are fearing that they are losing that sweet sweet control that they have had for so long. Or both.
OK, here it is. You want to get the music fans back? Take the incredibly massive archives of music that you "own", digitize them, and offer the files at a reasonable price. How many Ratt CDs have you sold over the past 10 years? But you know what - if I could get all those songs at $0.15 per song I would do it. That was my high-school years. Offer ridiculous compilation albums in MP3 format. "Top 100 songs of the 80s" for $20. Customize, you pick 100 songs for $20. I am not talking the latest releases, how about anything older than 5 years old. Those songs are just sitting there. Generate some interest in music instead of bitching and moaning that nobody is interested in the drivel that you put out. Hell, offer a CD full of old MP3s with every new CD that you buy. Something! Anything! Just stop trying to control your customers with force.
How come I can think up several plausible solutions off the top of my head, but they are blind to the fact that digital file formats for music are here to stay?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
SACDs and DVD-Audios, when coupled with the right speakers, sound superior to regular CDs.
"if you're working around the house, then it (the enhanced sound) doesn't really matter."
In order to get the benefit, you have to be sitting right in the middle of the stereo (or surround) field of your new $600 Klipsch speakers, with a new $500 deck, $550 reciever, and maybe a nice preamp. Also, the difference in dynamic range between 16 bits (CD) and 24 (DVD-Audio), while nice, isn't even going to be noticed on any piece of music destined for the radio, because they compress it into oblivion before it gets anywhere near the station, let alone your reciever.
(Pop in any rock album from the last 10 years. Watch the levels -- they won't vary more than about 10dB. Do the same with a Beethoven Piano Sonata. The levels are all over the place.)
You've also got to care. The only people who are interested in this are classical music fans (so we can hear the difference between the 300-year-old Stradivarius and the 275-year-old Stradivarius), and the muscians, producers, and engineers who think that everyone's an audiophile too.
I'm not even sure that I'd want to hear Britney on SACD. It would probably rupture my eardrums.
True to form, like failing governments all over the planet, when it's hard being a monopoly (government hates competition and illegal practicies when they're not the ones behind such actions), nothing works better than re-issuing currency and changing exchange rates, disenfranchising people who have large amounts of the older currency. Sometimes making the private holding of such currency illegal in order to encourage the quick and equitable change. Retailers will be asking for lube and a laywer...
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
"The manufacturers cite the superior audio quality, and 3-dimensionality of the new formats' reproduction as the reasons for customers to embrace these formats."
They've got to be kidding right? Anybody who has ever used the Internet *know* that 99% of the "consumers" are happy with crappy 128 kbit MP3s encoded in Xing. Most of them can't even hear the difference between those MP3s and audio CDs.
Consumers don't care about quality. Manufacturers have to come up with something truly revolutionary, or most people will stick to CDs like how people stick to MP3 and refuse to use Vorbis.
...there is an entirely new form factor.
8track->cassette->CD
Super8->VHS->DVD
LP's are in there somewhere, along with all the lost formats (DAT, ElCassette, Minidisc, etc)
With each new toy, there was a real form factor change along with a fidelity change.
A 5" round thing that looks like a CD, plays in what looks like a CD player, plays only music, plays music at no real discernable quality gain, yet costs significantly more, and carries the potential of no copying...
That's dead before it leaves the gate.
At least come up with some new player and format. Maybe a solid state chip or something. Not just another "CD".
It's very likely that you wern't listening to the DVD-A track, so much as the AC-3 track that's on there for people who don't have a DVD-A player, and just pop it into their DVD-V player.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
CDs are 44.1 KHz. That means frequencies up to 22050 Hz can be represented.
No human can hear above 20000 Hz.
So a higher sample rate is superfluous.
And a 16 bit quantization is essentially perfect for all music except that with an extreme dynamic range, and even then, only if you are anal.
The 96 KHz sample rate on DVD audio is insane. And as for 5:1 surround sound, please note humans only have 2 ears...
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
..to simply make DVD discs with regular-CD (or 24bit) quality, WITH the music videos aswell. The subtitle tracks could be the lyrics, and any "special material" (which is bullshit IMHO) could be embedded like on movie-DVDs.
This would demand near-to-none upgrades for normal consumers; "most people" have a DVD player these days..
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
Anything above CD's 16 bits/44.1 kHz is imperceptible unless you're a dog, a bat, or a child with unusual ears. Hearing loss increases with age, and with the advent of rock concerts, the problem is worse than in previous generations.
- AlanH
Not universally available. Can't play on portable player. Can't play on CD-Rom drive. Some SACDs are double layer media (have both SACD and Red Book format), but on double layer Red Book format (that is, 'classical CD format' has a higher than usual error rate. This is not just a hearsay. This has been repeatedly observed and measured.
Built-in encryption. You cannot duplicate SACD, period. Encryption is the integrated part of SACD format. At least it doesn't affect its sound quality. With DVD-A situation is even worse. Encryption comes as an afterthought, in a form of watermarks, which does interfere with quality and defeats the original purpose of having the higher quality audio in a first place.
Improvement in quality due to format is mostly marginal. A Red Book format is 16-bit format. it has been shown that a human hearing can distinguish dynamic levels which can be encoded with at most 18-bit format. With a properly applied dithering, you can make 16-bit encoding sufficiently close. So we really don't need 20 or 24 bit based encoding. It is true that many new releases on SACD or DVD-A sound better that the old Red Book releases, but this is primarily because of better remastering of the original analog tapes. Using the same remastered tape for Red Book format would produce roughly the same level of improvement.
Many alternative and independent artists release their own CDs and do not contemplate moving to neither SACD or DVD-A media.
Probably can think of few more, but that's already enough.You know, you've got a great point.
The Big-5 keep telling us that CD's are reasonably priced at $17. That we're stealing bread out of Britney Spear's babies, or something. We come back and say, "Hey, Cd's cost pennies to make, where the hell is my money going".
They respond by saying it's all in the marketing, the advertising, distribution (that they own 100%) to cover the 90% of the bands that lose money for them, etc, etc, etc.
Well if that's the case, they should make these SACD's the EXACT same price of CD's. They should discontinue the normal CD, and only sell the Hibred CD. No one should complain, as long as they can play them in normal CD players.
Since the marketing and distribution costs stay the same (it's not like they have some a multi million dollar ad campaign out there promoting SACD's) then the only cost difference should come from producing the product. I doubt it would cost them much more to only press SACD)
The result? Instant converts with every sale. Have a normal cd player? No big deal, it still plays. Itching to hear the magic of SACD? Then buy a player in the future.
I don't see why they're pussyfooting around this one.
Haven't they realized how annoying CDs are?
Everyone is right, the quality is FINE! People went from LPs to cassets for ease of use. We then went to CDs because of their ease of use. Why the hell would we switch to a different CD that poses the same problems like scratching, skipping, and storage room? People are not only switching to DVDs because of the video quality, they are doing it also for its compact size, dependability and EASE OF USE. They have seen the memory stick, compact flash, smart media card and the freakin INTERNET. Lets stop this mechanical crap and release a quality, full function, hi-fi solid state media system. Yea I could break a memory stick, but if it falls on the floor, it probably would survive a hell of a lot better than a CD.
Lets get away with CDs, tapes, and anything else that requires motion to work. Skipping, clutterd desks, and dependability would increase significantly. Sounds more practical to me.
Plus, who can tell the difference with this high quality music when your roomates, parents, or spouse keeps telling you to lower the damn stereo....
It really doesn't matter for most of us. My stereos won't play it any differently, how ever they mix it. My cheap stuff just doesn't have the sort of dynamic range that a CD is capable of storing, and my ears can barely hear the range my cheap equipment CAN play. When I listen in the car, it might as well be mono, since the road noise drowns out all the detail that I can hear when we're stopped.
I realize that for less than a thousand dollars I could get a stereo that would sound WAY better to you. I wouldn't hear the difference. By the way, I've had my hearing checked recently, and it's normal. My ``problem'' isn't bad hearing, or bad equipment, it's bad attitude: I don't care that much.
My point is that there are a LOT more of us who don't care than there are of the folks who care enough to spend the big bucks. You probably spend a lot more on music than ten people like me, but I bet you're still buying the stuff that was mixed by ``... the braindead sound engineers who optimize for radio play rather than home audio ...''. The big studios can get away with putting out stuff that is technically crap for the same reason that they can get away with putting out stuff that is artistically crap: enough folks just don't care about quality, and so they buy crap.
I'm at least not contributing to the problem: I buy used CDs, I go to concerts, I download music that is posted to the web by the musicians, but I don't buy (new) music that is commercially distributed. The last time I bought a new CD, I wrote out a check to the artist during the intermission, and he handed me the CD.
See what I've been reading.
Yes, but the red is _still_ pixellated because of the YUV transform - net result, the blood's all blocky no matter what bitrate the MPEG encode. Gah.
Wake me when we can buy (or pirate) Ogg Tarkin + Vorbis/FLAC discs - or better still, uncompressed video movies on discs you can buy in the store - it won't be BluRay, but maybe the terabyte-range disc format after that (or in the 19-inch rack right now, if you can find the media).
It's kinda ironic they want to have such a beautifully intact, treated with care, lovingly sampled stream, and want to slap a watermark on it. I'll take the CD, thanks, because I know after training, I'll be able to hear the bloody watermark - either that, or the watermark will be *completely* useless from day one, no crack necessary. (sigh)
Since I have a decent DD5.1 setup with some nice B&W speakers, I'm going to buy a DVD-A disc to test out.
I can't tell the difference between the a CD and a compressed MP3, nor can I distinquish an OGG from an MP3, but I bet I'll hear a big difference from 2 Channel Stereo to 5.1 Channel DD.
It all boils down to what you've got. If you've got the DVD player and a decent DD setup, what have you got to lose? $20?
I'm not gonna run out to the store and by a newfangled DVD player, DD receiver and speakers just because Sony and others have this new technology... I already have all that.
:wq!
That it is possible for a person to tell the difference between brands of instruments simply by hearing them is not in dispute, whether it is true or not. My problem is with the garden-variety audiophile working at the local A/V specialty shop, who looks positively assaulted when you suggest that you might want to listen to your heavy metal or new age CD's when auditioning equipment there. As in, "You can't possibly get anything more out of that music from our equipment that a pair of $50 KLH 2-ways wouldn't give you."
It's fine to know a lot about audio. I applaud people who are experts in a field (well, most fields, anyway). But one shop has already lost my business because the fools who ran the shop were elitist assholes who refused to admit the mere possibility that I can tell the difference between Megadeth played on a shitty $300 setup and Megadeth played on a $2,000 system.
After an awful experience purchasing a (great) HSU subwoofer from this store, I then proceeded to drop over $2,000 at a competitor, Ensemble Audio in Arlington, MA, because the salesfolks there were both audiophiles (in the literal sense) and great guys (in letting me listen to my music the way I wanted to). I highly recommend them, by the way.
Power to the free market!
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Indeed. And how long did it take 8-tracks to die out after cassettes were introduced? 10 years?
Actually, these new formats will most certainly flop. People had compelling reasons to migrate to cassette, and later, CDs. Cassettes were smaller and less likely to break. CDs, of course, offered noiseless sound and random track access. These new formats offer marginally superior sound and longer content times.
As everyone has said, most people don't notice the difference between an mp3 file and the original CD. It is the lack of noise in CDs that made us dismiss tape so quickly, not the superior sound quality. No one is going to care about better sound they can't hear. Nor will they care about more channels. People generally don't listen to music the way they watch movies.
And I doubt musicians will take much advantage of the larger space. Most artists have enough trouble filling a modern-sized album with decent songs. Are we going to start demanding 20+ songs with every release now? Besides, aggregating music is what mp3 players are for.
99% of the titles released now on regular CD could be of better quality too. I have found some very good quality CD's from Telarc and a few others. The rest are far below par. Lack of dynamic range being the most overlooked, background noise not much better. IMHO, simply adding more channels is not going to automatically improve the sound. Quality controls need to be used if better sound is the goal.
I have a mid range Yamaha reciever with Dolby Pro Logic 2 and some other 5 channel modes. It is possible to get decent multichannel sound out of a regular audio cd with the optical input and if the source material is good quality. A bad quality disc is still bad in multichannel. Not a good apples to apples comparison because it was not indented to be multichannel.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.