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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
Hah!
The last time their "advanced technology" was foiled by a felt tip pen! I hope they have something better.
Wait... I hope they dont!
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.
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.
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....
It came with a sampler disc. Had some great blues and jazz tracks as well as some Roger Waters (Pink Floyd). It's so lifelike, realistic, almost gives me goosebumps. But if you are the type that can't tell the difference between 128k MP3 and the CD, then don't even bother.
My point is: (A) The difference is very clear. The high end is so full, cymbals sound like they are right in the room with you. (B) You don't need to have an audiophile level system to hear it (just halfway decent speakers). Of course every bit helps. For reference I have a set of KLH speakers, good but not very expensive.
I can hear the difference, but you aren't going to hear it on a boombox or a set of computer speakers. To me, everything that I didn't like about the sound of CD's is gone with the SACD and all that's left is the music. I find I can get into the music more because there is nothing even slightly annoying about the sound quality to distract my attention.
The watermarking on a SACD disc is done by varying the physical 'pit' sizes, rather than embed some digital code in the data stream. There is a pattern of varying pit sizes in which the watermark is embedded. A SACD player can discern these slightly different sizes and won't play a SACD unless it has the right watermark. The good thing about doing it this way is the audio content is entirely unaffected by the watermark - it doesn't distort the sound in any way. It does make it much more difficult to copy the SACD layer, though. But most SACD discs are hybrid, meaning there is also a regular CD layer which can be read and copied as usual. Only the higher quality SACD layer is copy protected. For me I am willing to accept the copy protection to get the better sound quality.
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).
The RIAA is currently, and has been for quite a while, working on a new foolproof copy protection mechanism. With this system, no one will want to even try to bypass the copy protection mechanism and rip the CD, it will be futile and useless to even try.
I was at their secret meeting on a undisclosed island in the pacific[shaped as the head of Hilary Rosen] and I was floored to hear of this new mechanism. They were working on it for many, many years, they were quite visionary. Slowly it is entering the unsuspected consumer's home even now. They call this new scheme JPCM: Just Produce Crap Music.
No one will ever want to rip any CD anymore... Enter the complete DRM system for music!
SACD, meet DivX. DivX, meet SACD.
My
Limekiller
Feels like a slashback - but like many of you I've been following this for a while, I kept my own little list of interesting articles. Until now I've nowhere to put them, so this is as good an opportunity as any:
Terrorism, Copyright, or hacking. Apply whatever label you want to what offends you
It would be funny if it wasn't true:
But there's hope:
Hope you find them interesting reading. I'll go back to lurking 8)
Audiophiles are excessive. If I had a job to support my audio lust, I'd probably be classed as one, too.
Audiophiles have gone for this sort of thing. These people don't play CDs with just a high end CD player, you'll find they use what is called a CD "transport" which is a CD player with a digital out. For a nice one, a few grand at least, ranging up to five figures for these things. Then you need to feed this wonderfully accurate string of 0's and 1's into a DAC. Not just the crappy DACs in your receiver of sound card, these DAC units are generally made to match the CD transport and will probably cost somewhere between half and double the cost of the transport itself. Then, with your thousand dollar interconnect cables (a pair of RCA plugs, for example, but you'll find preference towards 'balanced' connectors), they'll connect it to a preamplifier and then into a power amp, which may be a set of monoblocks (one power amp per speaker, sometimes they bi-amp them, too!). Then you've got the speaker cables and speakers and I'll be dammed when they stop paying thousands of dollars for a piece of copper wire. Yes, a well trained ear can hear the difference between speaker wire and it does stand to reason that each wire has its own characteristics and high quality speakers can help those characteristics materialise. Not all audiophiles are this obsessive/rich. You'll find some who spend a moderate amount of money and simply buy what's best in their price range. But deep down inside, we all know they want a pair of Krell reference monoblocks driving each channel (or a large house to entertain guests, whichever turns out to be cheaper).
They'll have a seperate unit for DVDs as well. Sometimes they'll have an entirely different *system*. (I've known audiphiles to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on a stereo system and spend only a few grand on their entire home theatre rig so it all comes down to priorities).
To them, you'll probably find that the analog outputs would suit them fine, assuming the quality of the DACs in the unit are up to scratch. For a new format such as SACD, the attraction is that digital sound encoded in DSD is a lot more freeform than PCM encoded material because you're not 'locked' in to a certain set of frequencies. The result is in a more natural, real sound with greater depth and image. A lot of the purists have avoided digital purely because vinyl 'sounds better'.
Oh, and the audiophiles won't care about copy protection too much. It'll degrade the quality of the recording anyway, no matter what you do.
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.
+4 Insightful?!
*Some* DVDs have somewhat lengthy FBI warnings, but the idea that you're forced to "watch 2+ minutes" of them is a gross overstatement. 30 seconds, at the most. If you can prove me wrong, I'll give you $20. Obviously, those who modded this post up felt that it was either clever sarcasm, or are simply blind and ignorant.
Yes, you are prevented from skipping the warning on most DVDs, but again, they aren't 120 seconds long. Some major studio DVDs don't even have FBI warnings at all! It depends on the distributor, motion picture, and movie studio.
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
I can't sit here and hope to convince you anything about SACD, since most of you are too busy speculating and screaming your heads off because you can't go and copy an SACD of a disc that has most likely been out in CD for quite some time. What I can do is tell you the following things and hope maybe at least one of you will actually go out and hear a high-res format sometime before posting without once even givng an honest listen to the format.
.wav. It sounded like a poor AM radio version of the song playing, but that goes to show just how much info between the two were actually changed.
First off, there definately are SACD/DVD-A combo players. There's quite a few of them covering the entire spectrum of how much you want to spend on gear. Personally, I think a good purchase would be the Pioneer Elite 47Ai, which also has digital outputs, another thing that article is completely wrong about. The 47Ai has, by quite a few people's accounts including my own, some of the best video output of any DVD-Video player out there, especially at its price point.
Second off, most DVD-Audio discs *can* reach 192Khz for a sampling rate, however, most of them are released at 96Khz. Another thing is that Verance has actually changed their statement of their watermarking from being unperceptable to 'unnoticable'. That's because, well, you can actually hear it! This isn't a faint different, it actually colors the sound a bit from the original. There was a small test conducted by a person who obtained the Verance software and after doing a compare between the source and the watermarked version decided to isolate the difference between the two into a single
Third, SACD can be produced by independant artists if they wish to, there's actually several mastering kits out there ranging from $5k and up that you can save up, snag, take home and master stuff to. Products like SADiE, Pyramix, Sony's own Sonoma, are all available to be purchased by anyone who wishes to produce their own SACDs. Just searching on the web for 'SACD Mastering' brings up a lot of smaller production houses willing to do it for you as well. Slowly, places capable of pressing SACDs are catching up in pace as more plants are opened and the tech gets out there.
Also, claims about SACD not being higher than '24kHz' (when it's really around 100kHz) and the like are also rather bunk. There's a lot of people trying to test DSD by methods meant for PCM, which simply does NOT work because they are two completely alien methods of handling sound from each other with just enough in common that they both can be handled by some of the same processors. A good article found here will explain a bit more actually what's going on with DSD. There's been some people claiming that from a 'mathmatical standpoint' SACD is on par with a cassette tape (!), but even your layman doing an A->B between the two could tell you that's not the case. As a friend put it "If it measures bad, but your output is good, then you're measuring wrong".
Lastly, the bit about the CD layers of hybrid discs not sounding as good is also a lot of bunk thrown out by groups like Warner (DVD-Audio's big pusher) whom want to scare a lot of people away. However, one thing to keep in mind, is that SACD hybrid discs are being snuck in without any such labeling as to their hybrid status on the packaging. For example, that brand new set of Rolling Stones remastered stuff in digipak packaging are all SACD hybrids. Vivendi Universal has just begun releasing hybrid discs with the possible intention of switching over to exclusively releasing hybrids in the next year or so.
They don't cost anything more than the actual CD, and since SACD players can be snagged as low as $120 now, it's a bit easier to get into playing the the high-res layer. However, at $120, players I'd consider 'amazing' aren't many, in fact, it'd be just one that was recently discontinued. The Sony SCD-CE775 5-Disc SACD changer is one of the best players I've heard under $200, easily doing Redbook playback comparable to some $1k decks I've heard. Internally the SCD-CD775 is almost exactly the same as Sony's $450 SCD-C222ES SACD player, save its cheaper casing, slightly different power supply and a bit cheaper capacitors. If you really wish to get serious, you can have people like this guy spend some quality time with your SCD-CD775 or a few other models of players and have him upgrade and change a lot of the parts for better sounding playback. However, I doubt that'll appeal to everyone who doesn't own at least a good set of headphones (Sennheiser HD-600s, Sony MDR-CD3000s, Grado RS-1s, Audio Technica ATH-W100s, Etymotic ER-4S, etc.)
Also, most audiophile have been raving about some SACD players and their Redbook playback ability. I don't know about this Arizona group of '53 people' or one particular shop whom wasn't even aware of decks capable of DVD-A and SACD while also providing digital out, but you look for reviews of Sony's 'SCD-XA777ES' player and you'll find many saying it does some of the best CD playback you can possibly buy. Phillips, Denon and others are getting in on players of the same quality at comparable prices.
In short, I've found that article to be rather a lot of FUD, and the reactions of quite a few here to be playing into that quite nicely. Personally I own both a DVD-A and SACD player and titles for both, but I rather prefer SACD after spending a bit of time on each using decent gear (Carver CM-1090 amp, custom amps, Sennheiser HD-600 headphones, etc.) I also own about 350 legitimate CDs and continue to purchase CDs on top of higher-res formats. Am I at all alarmed that my ability for backups of these newer formats are limited? No, not really. I take care of my discs and my need to back them up or play them on my PC (although the new SB Audigy 2 can play back DVD-Audio on PCs) or portable unit is pretty unnessicary. One thing I will say, is that if interest picks up enough, I'm sure a DeCSS-alike will surface and so will another hailstorm of controversy and merry fun that Slashdot readers thrive on.