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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.
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....
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...
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.
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.
begin ramble
/.
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