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New Audio Disc Formats and Copyrights
JollyGoodChase writes "CNN has an article on Super Audio CD digital watermarking and the lack of digital outputs on any SACD or DVD-Audio players. Covers dealer responses, tech issues, and consumer options in a good summation of this technology."
that just like DVD-region encoding and similar BS that this will begin to disappear in a few years, if the standard is to survive.
also, did anyone else notice IBM as one of the companies ultimately behind DVD-audio? Do you think big blue will give linux hackers information on the copy-protection scheme used in DVD-audio as part of their commitement to opensource/free software?
my pet machine
there are always pro models of all gear that lack the sorts of 'anti-piracy' features of the commercial ones. once one person rips a source and it hits the Net, what's the difference?
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Consumers aren't going to run out and buy all new hardware just to support a new format that gives them really no added capabilities over their existing hardware.... CD-Audio is good enough quality sound; this new format doesn't offer enough of an improvement for it to catch on -- and that'd be the case even if the formats weren't fair-use crippled. Once you throw that into the equation, these formats have an even dimmer potential.
A format doesn't begin mass market acceptance until the fanatic audiophiles buy into it at the beginning, and those are exactly the types of people who will raise the biggest stink about the copy protection, and the lack of digital audio out.
NO CARRIER
If there is sound coming out of my speakers there will always be a way to make that sound into a mp3. Don't they understand consumers want mp3s or some other digital format.
If you can play it, you can record it. You can capture the audio from the source, not nessisarilty with an MP3 ripper, but with a 3rd paty stereo or dolby recorder. It's quite easy for anyone with half a brain.
Just capture the source as a WAV or orther format and you can burn it however you like.
With DVDs first came out, the general consumer opinion was "great - now I'll have the same flexibility with viewing that CDs offered over cassette tapes." Well guess again, buster. With most DVDs you're now forced to watch 2+ minutes of INTERPOL and FBI warnings before getting to a chapter index on a standard player (some of it is usability flashy annoyances, but you can't skip any of it).
These 2+ minute warnings do nothing to prevent piracy and only serve to annoy people - they're rather like the recently-dumped "are you carrying any bombs" questions at airport check-ins. Technological advances and misguided DRM measures just don't mix. It doesn't help that the entertainment industry is just paranoid of any new technology:
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
- Jack Valenti in 1982, trying to get congress to outlaw the VHR.
AFAIK, Digital watermarks are removed when the music is encoded with Ogg/MP3 , after all these compressions work by removing the sound elements that humans percive poorly.
Maybe, this is just a way of ensuring only 'approved' cd's are playable on this equipment, and therefore protecting their monopoly from the threat of joe blogs distibuting his own music without going through a record company....
Hey music industry, could you make your mind up about whether you don't want the analog loophole or want to avoid digital quality leaks? SACD players without digital ports? You have got to be kidding. Next thing we'll hear about is a player with neither analog nor digital ports...
Then clearly this format isn't targeted at you, so don't bother. Since SACD's play on regular cd players, I imagine it would be pretty easy to rip them from the stereo 44k 16bit layer and compress it until it sounds like it was recorded on a microcassette.
The target audience here, for now anyway, is clearly audiophiles and people who want to use their 5-speaker home theater setup for music as well. Unfortunately, they're going to alienate both of these audiences by refusing to add digital output.
Me, I'll stick with vinyl. It's cheap enough that I don't mind paying for the product, sounds better than cd, and has a tactility that can't be argued with.
Scott
In the second paragraph of the article it says "But many audiophiles are cool to the virtual padlocks, which could prove the undoing of one or both formats." WTF? Who exactly is "cool to the padlocks"? They don't give any names...
Further down in the article it even admits that "In a recent Gartner G2 survey, 88 percent of respondents said they believed it legal to make copies of CDs for personal backup use while 77 percent felt they should be able to copy a CD for personal use in another device. "
Regardless, if it can be played, it can be recorded. I'd like to see the look on David Migdal's face when the encryption is broken before the first disk is released...
Vinyl sounds like crap compared to CD. Its a scientifically proven fact, and any "audiophile" that tells you that vinyl sounds warmer than CD or any other BS is blowing smoke up your ass.
Well, doh, it's a sampler disc. You would fully expect it to sound just great! I'm sure they've had a Team of Super Sound Engineers to fill the high-end.
Don't get so hyped on a single record. I'm willing to believe SACD sounds better than a CD, but I'm also certain that having a good sound engineer makes much more difference.
Looking at my CD collection, the symphonic version of the Princess Mononoke soundtrack sounds like shit and forces me to boost the volume to dangerous levels to enjoy it somewhat, while the symphonic version of the Castle in the Sky is simply the best-sounding CD I have ever heard. Same author, same technology, abysmal difference in quality.
Sure, you can take an end-run around the whole digital protection scheme with an analog "rip", but consider these problems: 1) the DAC -> ADC process introducing resampling artifacts (probably minor), 2) PC/EMF/motherboard/HDcontroller noise while in the analog stage (quite possible), and 3) your PC will need to be VERY close to your fancy new SACD/DVD-Audio player whenever you want to "rip" (pain in the ass, but you do NOT want a long run of analog cables to your PC). High quality soundcards with an isolated analog input section can help with #2, for a price. Here's a good site with soundcard performance benchmarks.
This seems like a step backwards: Consumers will need to upgrade PC hardware to end up with a lower quality analog rip of more expensive music media.
To take the audio output of his player, hook it to the audio input of a good sound card, produce an MP3, and put it on the P2P. For almost everyone, the sound quality would be adequate, and most people would never even know that it went through an analog step along the way.
So much for copy protection.
The only good weather is bad weather.
"The watermarks must be present for the player to recognize the disc and play the content. A bootleg DVD-Audio without the watermark would fail to play". So if I record my own music and want to make a high quality disk out of it the players will act as if I don't own the copyright. This seems like the system is designed to lock out unauthorized musicians. I bet they are hoping this will superceed ordinary compact disks so that indie music will be crushed forever.
Audiophiles do not listen to music in home theater mode.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
I don't get this watermarking crap. Yes, watermark will not let you make unauthorized SACD (or insert other format here). So that just means that there will be no independent artists which can use this new format. They will be stuck with the old CDs.
Or, more accurately, they will be forced to go to a licensed authoring house, and pay them to manufacture their SACDs. The reason for the watermarking is to prevent musicians from mastering their own albums, and distributing them on consumer DVD-Rs.
I tend to be an early adopter of new technologies. Bought my first CD player in 1984 for $1600....
But I gotta ask, whats the point? Why would I want a new format to play the new noise that is passing for music? Except for compilations, I havent bought any "new" music since 1992.
I'll stick with the Carver CD player I bought in 1988 until it breaks.
Kevin
SACD, meet DivX. DivX, meet SACD.
err... wtf?
sacd is a music only format with the potential for very high quality. DivX is a video codec...
dave
Music composer John Cage had an album with a track of nothing, nada, complete silence. It was called "4'33", and was four minutes thirty three seconds long.
Musician Mike Batt created an album which had a track of complete silence, lasting one minute, called "A Minute's Silence". He credited John Cage as co-writer as a "tongue-in-cheek dig" at the whole concept. John Cage's publishers then sued him.
The court case included various hijinx, where defendant/prosecutor tried to prove the compositions as different/the same by having live performances of the work. Mike Batt performed his silent work himself, while John Cage's work was performed by a musician not playing the clarinet.
Although very very silly, Mike Batt lost his case because it was obvious he knew about the prior work. But, in principle, he could have been sued even if he appeared ignorant of John Cage's work. If someone can claim copyright ownership of a stream of zeros on a CD, then there is no hope for the concept of Intellectual Property.
begin ramble
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I got to thinking yesterday that we've nearly come full circle with audio technology. Thanks in part to the public's desire to "steal" that which is not theirs, and thanks in part to the greedy record labels who's only focus is to "steal" all they can from the public. I'm not going to go into detail on this, I'm sure you can all figure it out. What I do find rather amusing is a lack of perspective (more often than not, though this doesn't apply to everyone) on both extremes of the debate.
What I really wanted to talk about though, is how the audio industry spent years making conumer and professional audio gear with increasing fidelity and sound quality. Mono went to stereo then surround. The recorded mediums went from records, to 8 tracks, to cassette tapes (1/8"), to CDs. Now we have SACDs and DVD-Audio. The later is simply a much higher resolution PCM format while the former is a totaly new and actually quite exciting DSD format (Direct Stream Digital.) The DSD format is supposedly (though I have never heard an SACD for myself) of such high quality that it does make a noticeable difference. What makes these formats interesting, is that if we can't provide the players with quality digital to analog converters (which can be very expensive) then the whole point of the formats is lost because the system itself can't reproduce the streams properly. A more ideal setup for our increasingly digital-only entertainment systems would be that the signal remained digital up until the speakers, at which point the self-powered speakers could handle the conversion and amplification of the signal. Analog signal degredation (noise, interference, etc. although these can be problems with digital signals too but that's another story) would only occur for a short period of time and would be negligible. It would, in fact, be less expensive to implement such a system than to start the conversion process at the player and attempt to have high-quality, RF shielded analog components, and high quality connections all the way through the system to keep the audio pristine.
In essence, and in the end, we have both side shooting themselves in the proverbial foot. One industry (the record labels, which have several hands and a few feet in the consumer audio industry) are so terrified of ever increasing bandwidth at home, and millions of P2P users, they will stop at nothing to find a way to prevent end users from using their music with the fair rights that owning your own copy of Britney Spears' "So what if they're fake?" entitles you to.
Of course, the really funny thing is. The majority of consumers couldn't give, as Eminem puts it, "two squirts of piss" about SACD and DVD-Audio. Much of the world is happy downloading or compiling their music in MP3 format (yes there are OGG fans out there, and sheep who are hearded into WMA) and the fact remains that MP3 is not and will never be Red Book CD-Audio quality. So if we're happy listening to music in a format that degrades stereo imaging and has increased sibilance and harmonic distortion rather than a format made popular in the late 80s, it's the record companies and consumer audio companies who will loose in the long term because their focus remains on maintaining their empires, and that is one of the wonderful things world history has taught us, those who fail to adapt to the changes of the masses are ultimately overthrown by their own lust for control. That is not to say that the companies can't phase out CDs and DVDs, in order to replace them with formats that are so restrictive one can't even use them. In the end, and like any really good story, the people will prevail. We always do. Although I can't believe I just wasted 30 minutes typing this crap on
end ramble