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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."
Who can tell the audio difference between SACD and CD. It might be higher quality, but can people actually hear the difference.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
SACD output is 2.8Mbit/s. Toslink cannot support this as it's not just the bitrate but its a completely different way of sampling.
For what it's worth SACD is the one truly innovative format, DVD-Audio just pushes up the sample size/sample rate that AudioCD has, is a completely new way to do things. See here for background
Anyway....
There is no(*) receivers that support decoding this into the 120db dynamic range and 100khz frequency range that the format supports. So the solution is to decode to high bandwidth analog outputs and feed each channel in analog format directly to a discrete amplifier.
(*) actually I just saw one the other day, a pioneer, with IEEE-1384 input for SACD/DVDA type formats, now to find a player with this output.
So what are they supposed to do? Start using "pay for play" market strategies more? Blow hundreds of millions of dollars coming up with yet another encryption scheme that two guys at MIT will crack the next Sunday? Or, will they dump their millions into the pockets of unscrupulous politicians and companies like Microsoft, and eradicate the act of personal computing as we know it? My opinion: First, they must lower prices. There is no reason that 90% of the artists out there should be earning more then average Joe. And second, they must implement more intensive pay for play schemes and stop relying on the sale of mass amounts of over priced garbage.With lower prices on complete albums, and the ability for people to pay only for the songs that they like, I think that you could see the music industry sustain the success that they have had in the past (not like they are hurting now, mind you). One would hope at leastthat with the increase in sales, they might stop shelling out billions in their campaign against our freedom.
"Copyright owners are entitled to use whatever formats they want to use," von Lohmann said. "If they really want to protect their content they can go back to vinyl."
How is THAT going to stop people? It simply makes it harder to rip?
With the proper equipment (read - PROPER) you can produce vinyl rips that are BETTER than some CD sources. Naturally the equipment is expensive, and there's always the inevatible static click or pop, but, with good digital procecssing, you can clean it up. I've done several albums off vinyl and burned them to CD with excellent results.
Which remins the question, did the mention vinyl beecause of sound quality, or because some people look at it as lower sound quality than cassette?
There are a few major flaws with all these new systems.
- Until you can readily get SACD or watever in the music store, you won't find people jumping to sign up. Plus if there is no significant improvement over a regular CD, then people will stick with CDs. What will the price be? Will they cost more than CDs? That will certainly deter people.
- 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.
- Also, a watermark won't stop someone copying the disc, it will just stop them making a disc with the same content. Look at the Dreamcast. Why would I need the disc anyway when I can play it on my computer, on an iPod, or throw it on a regular CD.
And they can't try and convince me that putting only Analog outputs will stop copying. Analog to digital is no big deal. Some quality will be lost but whatever people will still do this to be able to listen to their disc elsewhere.
If it does fly, it will probably end up with way of the DVD. Great technology, but not fulfilling its purpose (ie the non-copying).
My Sony DAV-S500 does have digital out, as well as support for SACD.
AC comments get piped to
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.
These are exactly the people who won't care about copy protection, because they don't want a lossy copy on their computer. They want these formats for the superior quality, and if you want superior quality, you don't care as much about maiking a lower quality copy. Audiophiles are the ones who still claim the MP3 is a horrible format even though the average person can't tell the difference between cd audio and MP3. They won't care that they can't make a copy of it, because the copy will invariably be of worse quality, and that is exactly what the audiophile doesn't want.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
One thing that I find very intriguing about P2P is that works from the 1910s and 20s and early 30s are very popular. Although I'm only in my thirties, I'm a huge fan of this stuff and I never had convenient access to it before P2P. One of the reasons you never see it isn't because it's not entertaining, interesting and informative, but because there's no longer any profit in it.
The rediscovery of our archived electronic entertainment history is a bigger challenge to the current entertainment industry than how to protect the latest warmed over reinventions of those old acts. The more I look and listen to the old media, the more astounded I am at how cyclical and repetitive the whole notion of recorded entertainment is.
And to address the topic head on, watching and listeing to those old recordings makes you very aware that quality is extremely relative. When you're really excited about hearing something you'll get up and dance and sing along to something that sounds like hell. The question is how to make people enthusiastic and obviously the entertainment industry if failing to even attempt to address this.
The recorded entertainment industry is like a lover who just didn't get it right one night. The consumer and the industry have been fucking for decades and then something happened and the recording industry says to the consumer --you've changed.
The consumer is like, no way baby. I'm still the same ol' cowboy. You know, let's get it on. But the entertainment industry is pulling this, no it's not the same anymore. You used to care about quality and now you try to get it anywhere you can. It makes me feel so cheap! If you really love me you'd at least spend some money.
And the consumer is like --what? Love you? What are you talking about? Why don't we just fuck like we always did. Nothing changed. It's the same ol deal. You say I changed, but you're the one who changed.
So, they don't fuck no more. But this relationship is special because it's all been recorded. So, the consumer goes back and starts watching the vids from back when things started and the fucking was still good.
Meanwhile, the recording industry joins the church and gets active in conservative politics and slowly starts developing these weird twitches.
Fucked up scenario. I'd hate to be the cop to do a domestic call on a couple like that.
Take an analog player, and remove or bypass the final analog output filter. The output waveform should then show some artifacts from the sampling rate. Split the output, and feed one path through a notch filter for the sampling rate, then into a phase locked loop to recover the clock. Use that clock to control the sampling rate for an A/D with more bits than the D/A in the player. If you can keep the noise level low enough, and can calibrate a correction curve for the player's A/D, you can recover the original.
To calibrate, look for low-frequency waveforms, which will allow you to see all the stairsteps from the D/A.
This assumes classical D/A conversion, and fewer bits than the noise threshold. It's probably possible for 16-bit CD players, but not for 20-24 bits. Telephony only has 8 bits, so 56K modems have an easier job, although they have to compensate for a lousy transmission line.
Now isn't this the perfect way to go about copy-protecting music? You see, if I want to encode to MP3 (and I do, I'm an iPod owner) then, as I read your statement, I'd be able to do it. I wouldn't get the best available quality, but so what? I'm compressing it to a lossy format anyway which is only going to get played over a set of headphones.
Is this the compromise we've been looking for? Non-protected mid-range quality which allows us to rip and encode as we choose, followed by a layer of higher-quality music which can't be ripped? I'd be satisfied with that.
Cheers,
Ian
The same thing happens with my Realmagic Hollywood+ program on my windows partition, but happily when I'm in Linux, MPlayer and Xine will let me do whatever I want. Unfortunately, support for my DVD decoder card isn't quite where it needs to be (you can check out the state of affairs at the DXR3 and Hollywood+ driver project page), so the DVD quality is a little off in Linux.
Actually, the example of being unable to skip the FBI warning is a good one to show non-techwise people, who might zone out if you tried to explain the entire CSS encryption and region-coding scheme to them. I watched something with my mom recently, and she definitely noticed when I pointed out how we were being forced to watch the warning screen.
No, you're both wrong. Today's CDs are heavily processed =including= compression. Radio stations =also= stomp the hell out of the signal to make it louder (and virtually unlistenable IMO).
OTOH, CDs from 15-20 years ago are no better in this regard. Popular use of compression technology dates back to the sixties in the recording studios and the seventies in the broadcast studios.
Many of the older CDs sound much worse than todays CDs because mastering engineers spent a few years trying to tweak them like they had to do with vinyl to get the latter to sound tolerable. This is why early CDs suffered from so much unnecessary compression and high frequency boost. It's also part of the persistent myth that CDs sound worse than vinyl. Early ones were just badly mastered.
It has been said before, but it bears repeating.
I have over 1400 songs that I ripped myself from legally acquired CD's that reside in an MP3 player slightly larger than my hand. It has changed the way that I listen to music. This convenience has become the singal most important factor in my music listening. I have bought more CD's since I got my MP3 player than in the previous 7 years combined. I'm not going back. I won't go back to vinyl or tapes, and I won't move forward to a new format or copy protected product that won't let me play music the way I want to listen to it. If independant artists are the only ones who release unencumbered music, then I'll buy from them.
By the way, if all RIAA studios switch to copy-protected CDs, does that mean we can repeal the "tax" on blank tapes and blank CD-Rs that "compensates" the major labels for the losses they will no longer be suffering?
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.