Slashdot Mirror
Sony, Matsushita set to battle over Audio DVD
Some of us might remember that wonderful battle fought before between Matsushita and Sony, over two formats called VHS and Beta. Well, the titans are at it again, this time over the new audio format for audio. Matsushita, along with people like Toshiba, BMG, Warner and Universal, are set to fight with Sony and Philips. Matsushita is a proponent of audio DVD, while Sony is pushing their own Super Audio Format.
A three minute song with 24 tracks would fill a single CD. You would need a 24x CLV CD to get that data off the disk and then manipulate 24 100 Kb/s streams in real time. And that is if there are only 24 tracks.
Not likely.
Besides, why would you want to have to include a mixing console on every device?
128kb/s MP3s are inferior to CD on my cheap PC speakers. Through my stereo, the difference is even greater. I have a hard time with most (but not all) 256k MP3s. Bandwidth will solve this problem eventually.
To me, the technically obvious solution is MP3 on a UDF DVD disk. Any additional data (track information, etc.) can also be put into the file system. But I guess that's just too simple...
Ah, but the big difference is that you can't get tapes off the internet! Otherwise, the analogy is the same, but that's a pretty important distinction.
The article, of course, had no useful information. The DVD-Audio spec is just that, DVD discs with 24/96 audio. This requires a new player, even if you already have a DVD player, it doesn't know about the audio-only format.
The Sony spec, however, is very cool. My understanding is that it's a ~3MHz 1-bit delta-sigma encoding, and that's on the second layer. The first layer is good old CDDA, so the "Super" discs will play in existing players, but the new expensive player will be able to read the high-quality layer. It's the better standard, and it has the backward compatibility hook to gain acceptance.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
I just finished reading a post where someone called a poster an "idiot" for wondering why DVD was even necessary.
I'm sorry, I find it very hard to believe, even with the best possible equipment, that anyone can tell the difference between 16 and 24-bit audio. I also don't see what 96khz sampling gets you, except a frequency response up to ~48khz. That's real useful when the human ear can't hear anything higher than 20khz.
I'm all for more accurate sampling and reproduction, but the human ear is far more subjective than the equipment being discussed here.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Looks like Sony is about to screw itself over. Even if the high-end audio wankers (word of the day: "wank.") really dig this format, they aren't the ones who will make it popular enough to really go somewhere. Acceptance by the few hundreds who will pay four thousand bucks for a new kind of CD player does not imply mass acceptance by the Great Unwashed who think things like cassette tapes are really keen.
The only reason the cassette really took over was the walkman, which was about as low-brow and consumery as you can get. It'll take something like that (the killer app for the format) to really make the format go over in any way.
Similarly, if these extended-length audio things don't offer something cool that normal CDs can't do, they won't go anywhere. Just better sound isn't enough, and we can't expect there to be anything worthwhile to say about 7-hour-long albums. 70-minute albums are already bad enough, for the most part. Do we really need the typical record label garbage of two good songs and _six and a half hours_ of B-sides? Sure, there are a few artists who could really do something with that (imagine having an artist's entire catalog on a single DVD or two), but most of them are the record-label-hyped one-hit-wonder-types. Seven or eight hours of the Spice Girls? Or, for that matter, _yet_another_ reissued classic rock set? Like we need _yet_another_ version of all that Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin you've all already bought, what, three or four times already? (Vinyl, cassette, CD, reissued gold CD, big boxed sets of CDs with two new "bonus tracks" to suck you in and make you buy the same music again and again and again...)
Anyway, record labels suck. Don't let them decide what format we should be using.
With DVD players at about $200 (compared to $100 for a standard CD player), it would seem like DVD Audio is inevitable.
I doubt there's going to be many 6.5 hour albumns. More like the standard 45 minutes plus a few music videos or something.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You are correct. These guys fought for years over what became the original DVD spec, and are also fighting over DVD-RW.
The interesting thing about the DVD fight is that the format was redesigned in the process from "VHS Quality" to something considerably better.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.