Slashdot Mirror
DVD Hack Delays DVD Audio
An anonymous reader noted an article that is running over on CNN that is discussing the news that
DVD Audio will be delayed while manufacturers attempt to implement strong encryption to prevent the same thing from happening to DVD Audio that happened to DVD Video. They are still operating under a fundamentally flawed assumption: if we can decrypt it to watch it, someone will figure out a way to decrypt it to rip it. The delays hurt their profits as well as irritate their customers that want new products. Its quite frusterating.
Not 100% on topic, but:
What exactly -is- DVD Audio supposed to provide that a CD don't? 5.1 surround concert CDs? 10 hours of music? More expensive players?
just curious..
Rob,
I think using the phrase "rip it" was probably a poor choice. My take on the whole DVD deal was that I just want to watch them under linux and not have to run a proprietary OS to do it. I don't want to have to buy 2 dvd players (one for the living room and one for the bedroom). Using phrases like "rip it" make you think of copyright violation via copying.
just a thought. not a flame.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
If you can decrypt it to watch it in a DVD machine, you can always theoretically rip it. I see nothing "fundamental" about it. It may be logistically tough, and a pain in the ass, but it remains do-able none the less. Futhermore, I can almost gaurantee you that someone will discover a way to rip it and view it practically, some time in the future.
Disclaimer: I am not a crypto expert, but this is pretty common sense.
From the DVD FAQ:
[1.12] What about DVD-Audio or Music DVD?
When DVD was released in 1996 there was no DVD-Audio format, although the audio capabilities of DVD-Video far surpassed CD. The DVD Forum sought additional input from the music industry before defining the DVD-Audio format. A draft standard was released by the DVD Forum's Working Group 4 (WG4) in January 1998, and version 0.9 was released in July. The final DVD-Audio 1.0 specification was approved in February 1999 and released in March. DVD-Audio products will show up in late 1999 at the earliest (Panasonic has announced DVD-Audio/DVD-Video players for October 1999). The delay is being caused by the slow process of selecting copy protection features (encryption and watermarking). A watermarking technology was supposed to have been chosen from the top two contenders: Aris Technologies and Blue Spike. (Aris press releases in late June touted itself as the winner but there has been no official announcement.) Proposals from Cognicity, IBM, and Solana were eliminated during testing, although Solana later merged with Aris.) The evaluation process is being done by major music companies in conjunction with the 4C Entity, comprising IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba. It's possible that the RIAA's Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) could push the introduction of DVD-Audio into 2000.
DVD-Audio is a separate format from DVD-Video. DVD-Audio discs can be designed to work in DVD-Video players, but its possible to make a DVD-Audio disc that won't play at all in a DVD-Video player, since the DVD-Audio specification includes new formats and features, with content stored in a separate "DVD-Audio zone" on the disc (the AUDIO_TS directory) that DVD-Video players never look at. New DVD-Audio players are needed, or new "universal players" that can play both DVD-Video and DVD-Audio discs.
Plea to producers: Universal players won't be available for some time, but you can make "universal discs" today. With a small amount of effort, all DVD-Audio discs can be made to work on all DVD players by including a Dolby Digital version of the audio in the DVD-Video zone.
Plea to DVD-Audio authoring system developers: Make your software do this by default or strongly recommend this option during authoring.
DVD-Audio (and universal) players will work with existing receivers. They output PCM and Dolby Digital, and some will support the optional DTS and DSD formats. However, most current receivers can't decode the high-definition PCM audio (see 3.6.1 for details), and even if they could it can't be carried on standard digital audio connections. DVD-Audio players with high-end digital-to-analog converters (DACs) can be hooked up to receivers with two-channel or 6-channel analog inputs, but some quality will be lost if the receiver converts back to digital for processing. Future receivers with improved digital connections such as IEEE 1394 (FireWire) will be required to use the full digital resolution of DVD-Audio.
The music industry has requested an "embedding signalling" or "digital watermark" copy protection feature. This uses signal processing technology to apply a digital signature and optional encryption keys to the audio in the form of supposedly inaudible noise so that new equipment will recognize copied audio and refuse to play it. Audiophiles claim this degrades the audio.
In the meantime, the DVD-Video standard includes surround sound audio and better-than-CD audio (see 3.6.2).
Sony and Philips have developed a competing Super Audio CD format. (See 3.6.1 for details.) SACD provides "legacy" discs that have two layers, one that plays in existing CD players, plus a high-density layer for DVD-Audio players. Ironically, initial price for these dual-layer discs will be higher than for a standard CD plus a standard DVD. Sony released version 0.9 of the SACD spec in April 1998, the final version is expected in April 1999. SACD technology will be available to existing Sony/Philips CD licensees at no additional cost.
-- jar
"Great product, but it's too easy to use. Add some needless encryption or something."
Currently, I can play CDROMs on my computer. With the data encrypted, the playback unit will have to have the key and decoder. For stereo equipment, it'll work like DVD video does, I assume. But will computer audio now be windows-only? Until it's cracked again?
Will the "completely new encoding system" raise the hackles of ITAR?
CSS2 must not have been much more secure than CSS, much egg for the faces of Intel, IBM and Toshiba.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
On a more serious note, I hear that after this year, all DVD players MUST have region locking enabled in hardware...but it's only a matter of time before someone breaks from the pack, like Plextor did with Digital Audio Extraction in CD-ROM drives. Even to the uneducated, apathetic layman, stuff like this makes no sense, and annoys them to the point where it may galvanize them into either breaking the "security" (bad enough from the industry's standpoint) -- or worse, educating themselves on the issues and becoming a real threat.
Big Government and Big Business don't want you thinking (or creating) for yourself. Just sit back, shut up and eat your gruel, citizen-unit.
Fuck Slashdot
More of a question than a comment:
Is there a danger that companies will pull out of the video DVD market now they are frightened of ripping? Although the DVD market is strong here in America, I know that in Britain it is still taking off, and I could imagine big companies panicking and cutting out of the British Video DVD market until another 'secure' video scheme comes along.
Even though millions of dollars have been invested in DVD, I wouldn't be too surprised at seeing companies cutting their losses...
Any thoughts on this, or am I being too paranoid?
I've never thought that DVDAudio was going to go anywhere. IMO, it's going to be a niche market like Laserdiscs were to the home video market. A few loyal fans will be able to spend the money and tell the difference but most people won't want to give up their large CD collections for a more expensive technolgy that they won't be able to hear the difference of anyway. I still know people who can't tell the difference between a tape and a CD. Those people are not going to tell the difference between one digital audio format and another. All this delay is going to do is hurt the bottom line for the companies involved and give downloadable music a bigger chance to grow market share.
Hmmm, wasn't the reason they where able to crack it so easily was because one of the keys was not protected and therefore they used that key to break the others? I mean that had nothing to do with weak encryption, that was just incompetence.
Why, oh why, do so many companies seem to feel a need to create their very own *special* encryption mechanisms when there are proven algorithms out there?
==================================
neophase
==================================
neophase
All this accomplishes lost revenue on the new product and an tapped R+D budget. Even if they use a key four times larger than the last, it is still only a matter of months before someone manages to unlock them. Then we have the MPAA and the RIAA screaming again, and the cycle repeats.
There are millions of brains and PC's out here waiting to beat the system that only a dozen of them engineer. Who do you think wins? Not Matsushita and certainly not the RIAA!
.sig: Now legally binding!
The Label's need to realize that the business model of charging for distribution is starting to collapse. MP3s are currently on the fringe, but as MP3 ripping technology and transferring becomes easier, and MP3 Hardware solutions (for cars, etc.) becomes more popular, there isn't going to be a major market for an encrypted DVD Audio. If you can buy a CD for a few dollars less than you can rip, what is the incentive to get a DVD Audio? I mean, for "best of" collections, it is a boon as 2-3 CD collections can be combined on one DVD-Audio, but are current albums limited by the CD's capacity? It would seem like most albums use less than 80% of the CD, why switch to DVD. Also, with the encryption nonsense, DVD players are going to be more expensive than CD-players. It really seems like DVD audio is a solution in search of a problem. I mean, DVD Video is MUCH higher quality than VHS or Laserdisks, while more convenient than Laserdisks. I don't see a clamoring for DVD technology for audio systems. CDs had an advantage over records/tapes (being able to skip around track-by-track with ease). My family, when we had tapes in the car, would always buy the CDs and make two tapes, one for each of my parent's cars. I mean, unless the DVD-Audio comes out with dual-deck CD-players for copying/dubbing, I don't see a clamoring for a new digital format. Minidisks had a technological advantage (somewhat mitigated by MP3 technology), DVD audio doesn't. CD quality is "good enough," and I don't see an improvement in quality really making a different. Alex
Since most people don't care to listen to mp3
and cannot see the difference with CD, what 24 bit
96 kHz will bring to the average customer? nothing. What IS interesting is real multichannel
support (not the fake encoded ones like dolby)
which could provide new creative possibilities
(as well as the possibily to listen to old
Stockhausen's classics the way they were intended
to be) but I am not shure if the market is going
to support that. Would YOU buy an octophonic
sound system? (I know I would)
Don't these guys realize that it's not copy protection that keeps the cash flowing into their hands? It is copyprotection that will eventually be broken. What will this copyprotection be used for? To keep DVD Audio unfair just like with DVDs.
What will keep pirated copies to a minimum and money in their hands will be media that is cheap, availible to anyone that wants it at the same low price, media that is in a format that is easy to write players for. (How many of us have seen a REALLY buggy DVD player?) I would much rather just go across the street and buy this media than find it on the internet and download an illegal copy. It's more conveniant. (And my Linux box would be able to play them.)
My 2 cents....
Jack Neely
Did this type of hoopla occur over cassette tapes or CDs when they were new technology? Being in my mid-twenties, I was wee little when these took place, but I would imagine similar concerns over copying audio have been voiced since the availability of easily recordable media. The way I see it is that people are going to find ways to 'rip' the audio, even at a loss in quality, no matter what they try. They did it with tapes and CDs, why would this be any different? But what do I know, encryption isn't one of my strong points.
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
The REAL problem here is that they are expecting
to be able to decrypt this on equipment that is
not under their control.
What is to stop a person from hacking a DVD drive
to allow reading (and eventually writting) to
the entire disk? (as I understand it they rely
on the DVD drive being able to read a special
track but there being no way to get the drive to
divulge that info)
Alternatly...the music HAS to exist in unencrypted
form for some span of time. So...if I hack their software I can make it do anything...including
hack it to output to a file.
Or better yet...create an Audio Driver that claims
to have the highest possible quality output
surround sound and whatever ooptions the software
might look for to determine what it needs to
output as....that just captures the output
The same could be done for DVD movies even.
Their entire idea is thus fundamentally flawed.
Encryption just stops John Q Moron who has lots
of money for buying readers and writters from
doing a direct copy.
Someone needs to hack a DVD, figure out the disk
format and all that shit...and publish enough
info that independant hardware manafacturers can
make DVD drives. Force the standard open!
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It seems to me that if the companies producing DVD Audio want to store the audio with encryption, that's their right. As long as they provide players for Linux, *BSD, etc. (very unlikely, unfortunately), what is the justification for breaking the encryption? It seems that if these things happened, the companies would have a strong case against the hacker(s), claiming that the only possible reason to do this would be to illegally share copies. Just a thought...
Nevertheless, the music industry will undoubtedly come up with some brain-dead scheme to attempt to prevent copying. In historical context, there is a high probability that this move will kill the format. Witness HDCD, whose encoding is a trace secret of the only company that makes the stream decoder. Almost nobody uses HDCD, and nobody really cares about that format anymore. DAT and MD were saddled with stupid copy-protection schemes that made their initial adoption slow. Luckily the enthusiast community was able to overcome these schemes and DAT and MD have found a niche in the hobbiest world.
In the perfect world, the digital encoding format of DVD-A would be an open, published specification like CD audio is. I expect that the outcome will be the opposite.
-jwb
Is this going to be another formats war?
Sony has the rival format Super Audio CD which claims to "produce nothing less than a quantum leap in music resolution." Yeah, right, but at least it is available now.
However, Sony's argument for this format does not excite me:
I read this a "copyright protection and maybe something else if we can think of it, perhaps". It does not seem like a compelling argument, and it certainly does not seem like we need two different formats for this.
Any chance that Audio DVD will silently die now?
Hi!
By being programmable, it was inherently able to do the sorts of nefarious things that one would do with a "Blue Box" or any of the other Phone Freaking equipment.
At the time, Apple concluded that deploying a more freakworthy variation on what had just gotten Draper imprisoned would be a very bad idea.
That, of course, was a goodly dozen years ago. Time has passed, and the average computer with sound card contains 50 times as much DSP hardware as "scared off" Apple.
In effect, the modern PC can be programmed to be a phreaking monster.
Back to DVDs... If they deploy software on PCs that allows reading DVDs, and do not use some form of tamper-resistant hardware-based strong crypto, then the general purpose hardware along with general purpose software represents a potent force to completely crack anything the music folk try to use to prevent unlicensed dissemination of music.
Furthermore, even with strong crypto, of the DVD happens to be readable by a DVD drive, then copies can be made, even if the music can't be played on one's PC.
It is evident that the industry moguls are entirely clueless in this...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Hmm, it is nice to see that someone is creating a spec for DVD Audio, CDs are nice, but they are plain stereo, whereas DVD Audio will include the excellent 5.1 channel sound. Also, I would hope that the sampling rate went up to at least 96kHz or more (just because it can), and maybe the bit depth will go up - maybe 20/24 or 32 bits per channel to make the sound perfect. But, are you one of those people who claim that they can tell the difference between CD Audio and high quality analogue?
Hopefully, because of the vast amount of space on the disc, some videos can be included as well. I always think, when buying a single, that it would be nice to have the video on the CD as well, mainly because it is possible, and the video has been made! Also mp3 versions could be included on the disk.
Anyway, back to the subject in hand:
The problem is that with audio you can always rerecord after it has been decrypted. If the equipment for playing Audio DVDs is of sufficient quality, then the outputs will be hi-Quality and make excellent sampling sources! So you won't stop copying of Audio DVDs that way... It is pretty pointless really - most people are happy with CDs, and CD quality sound, and if they can just rip the sound off of an AudioDVD by resampling after it has been digitised then they will!
Obviously there is a big quality hit from recording video from DVD to a standard video recording medium (the VCR). But there will be little quality hit from recording audio from an AudioDVD onto a CD-R or DVD-RAM or HD.
The music industry can blow me. I can always find higher quality music from garage bands who don't have a problem distributing their stuff on the net in MP3 format. I'll do my business with companies that support open protocols and don't try to violate my rights in their greedy scramble for more money. Don't let them ease us in to a pay-per-view world.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
DVD Audio is doomed. Sure, the quality rules. I'd like it. But people have a HUGE investment of money into the CD technology. People want their music to work on their car stero, their boom box and their computer. The high-end technoweenie consumer also dislikes DVD audio because it is not as portable as a handheld digital audio device (mp3man, rio, etc.). Can you imagine how much a DVDAudioMan would cost? And it would be very bulkly. You need decryption on the player.
This isn't meant to start a flame war, but I think, despite the technical merits of it, DVD Audio is not a comercially viable technology. Perhaps the future of commercial audio recordings is in some encrypted mp3 standard.
"Another frog in the well croaks indignantly against in protest against construction workers who are unearthing the century-old useless well. Joining a whole crowd of other frogs in the well, insisting that the construction workers respect their rights to the well, and the water therein. But some day, the bulldozer will smash through the old well walls, and concrete poured in as they finish the basement of a new high-rise to be."
Not another pathetic attempt to put the genie back into the bottle. When will people get out of their well and realize that the Information Age cannot be shoe-horned into traditional industrial models? Copy-protection is an old, obsolete concept that just doesn't fit in the modern context of the Internet and the Information Age. This new era is about sharing information, not hiding it. It's about making things available to people, and opening up choices by allowing fair competition to your trade. It's a new set of rules that sells services instead of hogging commidities. Trying to fight this will only shoot themselves in the foot, real hard.
And here we have yet another obviously traditional, "orthodox" company talking about "increasing encryption key size", while not realizing that the weak link is the fact that information is actually being displayed through the DVD player -- hence it's copiable. They're clinging on to old principles that are quickly becoming obsolete. Pathetic.
People who intend to survive in the new millenium better break out of their old mentality, and learn to play by the new rules. And they better learn this before the concrete is poured into their well. Time for them to get out of the well and look for higher, better things.
"Stagnation breeds failure and miserable defeat."
(BTW please excuse my melodramatic intro :-) )
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
The solution to these piracy problems with ripping video or audio media is obvious-- encrypt the digital data on the media and prevent it from ever being played in analog form... there you go. If you cannot play a music on your stereo or watch the movie on your television, then noone will be able to make illegal copies of that media. The use of speakers and video displays in conjunction with digital media should be illegal, and then all the piracy fears will be allayed.
;)
-Dean
Ok, Mr.Salesman, explain this to me. I buy this player. It has slightly better audio quality, so I can now hear the limitations of the studio where it was recorded. Sounds great! Oh, and I won't be able to use my car stereo, discman, or computer to play it? Even better! And if I manage to get a drive that can read it into my computer, I won't be able to even LISTEN to the music I own unless I run Windows? Oh, sign me up!
First of all, I don't see independant labels (the ones who produce the most important music anyway) moving to multi-million dollar studios to record something, and I don't see any real value in the added quality. Not so much that I'd want to fsck myself for it. Count me out.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
Why NOT hack it?
Seriously...why does a person NEED a reason.
Yes, its their right to encrypt it. However...
if I have a copy of it...it is my RIGHT to
copy it, or do whatever _I_ want to the data,
as long as I do not distribute it
(Copyright law ONLY covers distribution remember)
The reason for doing it is the same reason that
when i was 10 and got a little Star Wars walking
robot toy (I think it was star wars..probably
wasn't) I grabbed a screw driver and opened it up
and took all the gears out....cuz I wanted to see
how it worked
(never did get that damned thing back together...)
Isn't that justification enough?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I guess the question is: will people bother to buy it? The transition to digital audio (via CD) was easy for most people to make, since the difference in quality was obvious. Also, the new optical medium allowed for unprecedented ease-of-use (track skipping, random play, etc). For the most part, people were willing to give up vinyl and cassettes and move to this new media.
However, for a high majority of the population, CD quality is more than good enough. I'd say that most people don't have the equipment to fully realize the entire range of sound that a CD can produce. If they did, why has MP3 become so popluar? Why are people willing to move to a format that's "near-CD" quality? Because to most people, it sounds just as good, it works on equipment that they already have, and it provides unprecedented ease-of use. You can create your own mixes, playlists, and store a huge amount of music in a small amount of space. The only advantages that that DVD-Audio has to offer are increased quality (which most people can't appreciate) and longer play times (at a time when most albums come in well under the 80 mins available on CD).
I think that this format may very well fall into the same category as laserdisk: great for a small minority of the population, but essentially ignored by most people. And it should be.
minna-san:
this is one of the biggest frustrations imaginable...
1) the physical media is already difficult to manufacture, but those with deep pockets will have the means to create bootleg copies--this does nothing to really slow down major pirates, and much to confound consumers.
2) burning dvd-ram copies for sale is long and tedious, and will not have a big impact (how many music and software companies going broke due to the popularity cd-rw drives?).
3) a good engineering student could hack together a compact disc player, but even with a suite of standard components, would have difficulty building a bare-bones dvd player... when dvd media becomes obsolete, some audio may be effectively lost due to the encryption.
4) what happens when audio legally purchased on dvd-audio becomes public domain? no one seems to be concerned about all these encryption schemes which potentially lock away information *forever*.
sincerely, kuma
Just buy your music straight from the band. They email you a 256kbps MP3, or maybe even something with a higher-than-44kHz sample rate. Then, if you want to take advantage of DVD technology, no problem: just copy the MP3 to a DVD-RAM or writable DVD-ROM. Or burn it on a CDROM. Or copy it to an Orb or Zip disk. Or a flash card. Whatever. It's just a file.
Movies cost millions of dollars to make, so the media companies still have control over that product. But in the case of music, we're about to throw away the whole industry anyway, so who cares what lame games they try to play?
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
-jwb
>there was, in the early days of the Apple ][,
>the idea of creating a super powerful modem that
>would be programmable
Sounds like the old AppleCat modem by Novation.
Amazing little device, had a tone generator on it (we weren't hip enough to call it a DSP yet), so you could use it for the various things you mentioned (generating assorted phreak-related tones) as well as playing music. There was also a DTMF decoder PROM available for it, but I never got/burned one..
The niftiest thing at the time about the AppleCat was the ability to do Bell 202, 1200-baud half-duplex (at the time, 1200 baud full-duplex modems were still prohibitively expensive).
Of course, the warez scene at the time picked up on this and pretty soon Cat Fur systems popped up all over the place. Cat Fur was a nifty terminal/transfer program that allowed chatting between the sender/receiver (definitely a novelty at the time).
Fun stuff.
Gosh, sometimes I miss being 15...
-LjM
Like I always said, you can decrypt other people's formats as much as you want but unless the hacker community grows beyond the college lecture hall, the engineers who actually create these formats will forever build stronger encryption. If they don't replace DVD with DVD-2 they'll delay DVD audio. If you decrypt DVD audio they'll just replace it with another format. The only way to win is to become the engineers who create the formats.
The recording industry would like us to believe (falsely) that any form of copying is illegal. Their entire encryption efforts are based around this false assumption. Rob is entirely right to say that ripping should be technologically allowed. Please don't perpetuate the myth that copying without permission is automatically illegal.
Now if they can find a way to sucker people into buying them...
In many ways, I think there is a shift of view here so new that while I see it among us geeks, it has yet to proliferate into the general public. With the PC, and with the coming of age of open, free operating systems, we have reached a point where we dare ask for control over our machines, or more specifically, that they serve us, and no one else.
If you think back ten years, technology was about companies. A new system or format would come out, and we would all praise the creators for giving us new technology (ok, not everyone, but people who like new technology). We didn't ask for input into the design, and didn't complain very vocally when they were designed for the good of the companies rather than the consumer. The people creating these formats are still stuck in that age where they, a small number of large companies, controlled the means by which we also used them.
But those days are over. I simply will not invite a machine into my house unless it serves my agenda, and my agenda alone. I don't want a black box that keeps secrets from me, spies on me, controls my freedom, or generally tells me what I can and can't do. I believe that this attitude is the only way we can keep the integrity over our machines in the techno future, and I believe it will spread.
Regarding the specifics of making these disks hard to crack, they really only have a few options. They could put more keys on each disk, so that they can quickly stop printing one key once it is known to be cracked (damage control, but it means people will have to keep updating their players). And they can use stronger crypto (if they can get by the regulations which seems very difficult), but that only means makes the known plaintext attack that the CSS crackers used to attain all the other keys when they had one implausible, they would still have get first one.
I'm interested in hearing for people with better insight then myself into this sort of programming, if it is plausible to write a program where the key cannot be retrieved from the memory when the encryption is going on? After all, GPG complains about insecure memory everytime I run it, but that is from other users: this is worse, since it will be me trying to scan the memory for the key. Can it really decrypt things right under my nose without showing what transformations are being applied when analyzed carefully?
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The whole point of DVD-audio and its competitors is to provide a higher-quality music format than CD. Some of the formats also want to provide more channels for surround-sound, or a new mastering format for recording studios.
There are basically three hi-res music systems around. The one you can listen to now is DAD, which is basically a DVD-video disc with no video, that contains two-channel 24bit/96kHz audio. These discs have been available from Chesky and Classic for about two years now. They play on standard DVD players, although not necessarily at 24 bits or 96kHz, and on dedicated hi-end playing systems such as that available from Muse Electronics. Discs are around $30.
Then there's the Sony SACD, in the process of being released. The first Sony player has come out, at $5000, and there are a few discs available. This sytem does not use pulse code modulation encoding, but rather is one bit wide by several million bits a second. Each bit indicates whether to increase or decrease the signal voltage for that 2/millioneth of a second. It is essentially analog implemented digitally. Sony has basically oriented their format towards two-channel, and although they promised to support dual-layering with CD-compatible data they have not done so on their first discs. They appear to be aiming for the audiophile and recording studio market.
Finally, there is DVD-audio. They've taken a long time to get off the ground, but finally they've written a 'standard' that allows a zillion formats. Two channel, five channel, six channel, 16, 20 and 24 bits, 44.1, 48, 96, 192 kHz, Meridian lossless packing...you get the idea. They're aiming at the mass market insofar as they're firing in any direction.
The reason for all this stems from two contradictory goals: to re-excite the masses and get them to buy new stereo equipment, and to provide a higher-quality audio format. Sony is tired of being sneered at by tubes'n'vinyl audiophiles, and is going to the best. Also, their patent on the CD is expiring and pretty soon they won't get 12 cents for each CD you buy. The DVD group wants this 12 cents, and they want to sell everybody new equipment--they don't seem to care much about sound quality, although they make it available as an option.
So we'll see what happens. I'm sticking to my 2500 LPs, my kilobuck phono cartridge, and those glowing glass bottles.
Sure, but "rip" is an unfortunate choice of words. There may be some RIAA propaganda involved, but still - "rip" is awfully close to "rip off" while "extract" sounds like a much more reasonable thing to do. As in "extract for personal archiving purposes."
It just doesn't get the conversation off on the right foot when you say "I want to be able to rip copyrighted material under Linux."
----
does anyone know what audio compression algorithm is going to support 96khz and 24 bit?(i assume there's gonna be a loss in quality, but it still should be a better than cd quality)
are the d/a converters in current DVD players 24 bit?
are there any soundcards out that currently support 24 bit 96khz?
obviously theres no consumer level ones. the highest best combo i've seen is 18 bits @48khz with some of those turtle beach cards.
ok When DVD audio comes out there will initally be a standard 96khz 24 bits. but if they start stuffing more channels or music on the dvds, then the quality's not going to be the same. Not that that's necessarily a problem -- it gives you more options. but i can guarantee that record companies are going to be re-releasing 48khz 16bit DAT recordings of old stuff in DVDs and people will buy them because they think it's better quality.
You are allowed by law to make copies of your personal music and software for personal use and backup purposes.
:)
You might want to listen to the music on a Rio or some other device, or you might want to make a backup copy in case your physical media becomes damaged. You might also want to keep a few copies in different places so you don't have to lug your music collection around with you. It's also fun to manipulate your music on a PC to see what it sounds like backwards and stuff like that.
There's nothing inherently wrong with "ripping" a CD, and the music industry shouldn't be so caught up in trying to control distribution to the point where their efforts are at odds with technological progress.
Copying music and then distributing it without permission is against the law, except in very limited circumstances where you can claim fair use (a la Negativland). But there is no reason that simply copying it, without distributing it, is wrong.
Don't let coporations control more of your life than they already do.
-OT (who is not a lawyer and knows these statements are not 100% accurate
As for theaters, the SDDS format is 16 bits at 44.1 or 48 kHz. I don't know about DTS. Many theaters still use analog sound tracks. Most theaters would be very bad for music reproduction.
-jwb
Other points: Secondly, even a violin has tones ranging from high bass to what is considered mid-range (G below Middle C up to about three octaves higher.) [I haven't played since early H.S., and I am not sure how high the top violinists can go]. So, not counting the overtones (which are important!!), the sound from one instrument still needs to be able to come from more than one driver, so in order to recreate the recording we'd need at least three or more speakers for every instrument and voice.
Even then, it doesn't make sense, because humans only have two ears, and our entire sense of direction about where a sound is coming from is synthesized in the brain by the variation between the sounds coming in the left ear and the right. What many people don't realize is that if, for example, you go to a symphony at with good acoustics, what you are actually mostly hearing is the mix of sounds as reflected by a "sound shell", which integrates the voices (sounds made by the instruments, etc.) acoustically and which a recording engineer simulates electronically. Which is why most of us will do just fine with two high quality, multiple driver speakers, and for movies, etc. the lucky folks who have spent the extra money will have a surround system (IIRC, five speakers).
By the way, if you've never heard a surround system used with a movie that has a high quality, directionally orientd sound track (i.e., where you would hear footsteps behind you if you were actually in the place portrayed by the movie), you're missing a real treat. Of course, one you hear it you'll want a surround system for yourself, so I may have just ruined your budget at some time in the future...
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I know, we all love to stamp our feet and jump up and down and say things like we are all saying here. I am as guilty of this as the next guy. But let's think about some things here...
Way back when CD Audio came out. It was cool. However, you could no more make a CD than you could to press your own album. If you wanted to copy it you used crappy analog audio tape and did it that way.
Then along come the CD-ROM drives and the CD-writeables. And minidisc and DAT. And the recording industry comes up with SCMS which is so easy to crack it is not even funny. Actually there is not even anything to crack - you change two bits on the bit stream and everything is cool.
Next we had MP3 show up. The recording industry again comes up with all these protection methods. None of them lasted. That Microsoft thing lasted what, a day?
DVD is really no different here. It fell and fell fast once MoRE figured it out. Someone else will figure out DVD-Audio. And someone else is gonna figure out whatever other formats show up. They do it for the Playstation by putting in modchips, and I remember a long long time ago in my Atari 800 days there being an addon for the floppy drive to let it write bad tracks so backup copies could be made of the commercial software.
Some little namby-pamby encryption scheme will not stand the test of time. No way, no how. Copy protection is a total joke. So quit worrying.
According to their FAQ
All VCRs, including the Dual-Deck[tm] VCR, are affected by Federal legislation that was passed in October 1998, commonly referred to as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. One of the effects of this new law requires that all VCRs sold after April 2000 recognize a type of anticopying signal that prevents consumers from making a usable copy
of videotapes encoded with that type of anticopying signal. We have modified our current models of Dual-Deck[tm] VCRs so that if they are
purchased prior to April 2000, they will continue to operate as originally designed for the lifetime of the VCR. If they are purchased after April 2000, they will recognize and respond to the anticopying signal as required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
www.codefreedvd.com is a British firm that'll happily sell you that DVD player you've been drooling over, but with the ability to play imported DVDs and to get rid of the signal degradation that MacroVision causes.
It's all a game. hack, counterhack.
For example, if we are sampling at 48khz, then the highest frequency wave that we can represent is 44khz. However, this assumes that the peaks of the waves are aligned with the sample points. If they are not then the phase is either going to get shifted up to 90 degrees in either direction to be able to represent the waves, or they will be anti-aliased into the wrong amplitude (if they even come out as a wave at all). Even by the time we get down to 11 khz, we still only have a phase resolution of +- 45 degrees. As a lot of the sense of position and space is defined by the phase coherence of a sound (especially in room accoustics) then this 'smudging' of the sound at higher frequencies could be a real problem.
The second problem is what happens when your frequency isn't a nice divisor of your cutoff frequency. If we go back to our 48 khz sampling rate: we have a 22 khz ceiling (/2) and then the next 'clean' frequency is 16 khz (/3). What happens with the frequencies in between? most likely, you are going to get a beat frequency introduced as amplitude modulation of the signal as it moves on and off the sample clock rate. As you move down the frequencies (/4, /5, /6) then the problems become less pronounced and it is possible to represent more of the wave-forms as a cleanly phase coherent signal.
I therefore think that it is quite possible that although the theoretical maximum frequency is well up into the super-sonic range, the effect of doubling the sampling frequency will provide a much more natural coherent sound than you would initially assume.
I think this is what Rob was getting at -- he should have used a period instead of a colon.
-
<SIG>
"I am not trying to prove that I am right... I am only trying to find out whether." -Bertolt Brecht
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
There's actually a lot of stuff that supports 24/96. If you've heard 24/96, the best analogy I can give you is the difference between gaming with 16 bit colour and 30 fps versus 24 bit colour and 60 fps. You'd *think* that 16 bits with 30 fps is perfectly great until you start playing seriously with the better setup....
Sure 16 bits is okay, but 24 is nicer if only for the fact that your level ranges are large enough that you no longer have to care about the levels. Actually with 24 bit audio, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of players actually had built-in compressors to allow 'quiet' listening.
I have seen the fading-in-and-out first hand. I recently bought a DVD player, and since I have an older TV without any RCA inputs, I had to route it through my VCR. Well suffice it to say that didn't work. The VCR detected the Macrovision (I believe its called) protection and started fading my DVD movie in and out, and giving flickering blue screens like it was losing the video signal. I wasn't trying to record it or anything, just trying to output the DVD to my screen. Its annoying and I can see how it would keep someone from ripping a movie if it was corrupted in that way.
When I volunteered as a Conference Associate at Game Developers Conference 1999, something that I recommend for all of you, one of my assignments was to watch over a talk on encryption.
Several companies who sold encryption products/services were represented.
They KNOW that every lock has a key, and that there's no way you can make something that will be absolutely encrypting.
They don't claim to make something unbreakable.
But they DO claim that they can buy you some time.., provided that no one slips out a gold.
I imagine that this is also the case for the audio folks. They just need something that will work for at least a little while, while the major sales are going underway.
I believe games make their most money in the first 3 weeks; I recall some of the companies saying that they could cover a company for this period of time.
Lion Kimbro =^_^=
(someday I'll make yet another Slashdot account and write down my password...
Is there even a place for DVD-Audio? Most people wouldn't buy new players for one or two CD's, as DVD-Audio will be pretty expensive at first (as manufacturers ramp up production), and it will take more time to get the DVD electronics in a small package, like a CD Walkman.
.WAV files, which is the one of the best ways to store a master because it can easily be converted to an MP3, burnt to a track on a CD, spat out digitally using S/PDIF, or dumped to DAT.) Storing a master on DVD-Audio is not a concept professional sound people would consider -- so many other alternatives, DAT, burnable CD's, MD's, that another entry in this market really wouldn't fly.
This reminds me of the stuff when DAT came out. DAT was a failure because of all the arguing over copy-protection (as well as being non-random access, but that was less of an issue than having copy-protection schemes voted on by the US Congress).
DVD-Audio has no place in high-end audio either. People who spend thousands for professional gear tend to stick to standard formats (I've noticed a migration to
So, if the high-end audiophiles do not have a use for this technology, and Joe Average has to buy fairly expensive equipment, from people who assume he is a thief bent on stealing their music, to listen to discs that sound pretty much the same to an untrained ear, then there isn't much real mass market here.
The only place I see a place is selling to audio buffs who have to have the best of everything to listen to their CD's, and have to have 24/96 no matter what. However, these people are fairly rare, and probably would resent having to get yet another piece of gear to stick in their rack.
The RIAA does not like the concept of a customer making copies of legal material for their own personal use. The ability to buy a CD then make a tape (or now, burn a copy or burn your own CD mix) for your car irks them. This has gone to court and "fair use" was upheld. Since then, RIAA representatives have made comments that imply their dislike of "fair use" is strong today.
Enter technology.
Take a good look at SDMI. Embeded within the specifications is the groundwork to eliminate that pesky "fair use" copying. Technology will enable the industry to eliminate what the courts would not.
I would expect a simular thought process to rear its ugly head within the DVD arena.
So, you have forgotten what happened when consumer-marketed cassette recorders came out. Isn't it remarkable how a young mind can blot out traumatic events? Quite merciful, I think.
Basically, what happened was that Sony damn near went out of business, Columbia stockholders were jumping out of highrise windows, there was rioting and lawlessness in the streets, and America collapsed. Rock stars got depressed from lack of sales and took up drug habits, but then had to go sober because they couldn't afford the drugs. Animals escaped from the zoo. Usenet flamewars raged unchecked long after Hitler comparisons were made. Windows became the dominant desktop OS and preachers cried on TV. Civilization plunged into a new Dark Age, and the gas pumps all went dry. Whenever you could get away from the crumbling cities full of rioters and looters, you would see that the countryside was littered with roving gangs of scavenging road warriors.
But back in the cities, if you watched the seething crowd, you would see that on every street corner, there was a man standing calmly. If you walked up to him, he would smile at you and say, "You lookin'?" If you replied with "Huh?" he would open his trenchcoat and show you his collection of pirate cassette recordings of all the best-marketed media creations. For a mere dollar you could have anything that knew you were supposed to want.
They were dark time indeed. I'm sorry that I had to drudge up these unpleasant memories, but perhaps I have saved you a few hypnotherapy sessions.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Naturally, the recording industry chooses to interpret the situation as an act of piracy, even though that had nothing to do with the motivations of many of the people involved.
If they put stronger encryption on DVD-Audio, so that I can't play them under Linux, I will never buy a DVD-Audio disc.
These are the same fools that have complained about every new recordable audio and video medium since the introduction of the Philips Compact Cassette in 1964 and the Beta VCR in the 1975. But now the industry makes billions of dollars each year on sales of prerecorded cassettes and videotapes.
Instead of viewing new technologies as opportunities, they choose to view them as threats.
I'm trying to understand encryption in the audio world. They encrypt this disk, I can't play it except on autherised players. What is to prevent me, owner of two autherized players and the equipment to burn a DVD (This doesn't exits AFAIK, but it will soon) from making a copy of it? Oh sure, I can't play it in linux (if it is good encryption), but I can now make a couple digital copies of the encrypted disk.
...the translation from analog to digital has a special feature. Bit for Bit PERFECT copies. If you've ever seen a second or third VHS copy you would see how this scares big companies even more. From the point we're at (my mantra: The Internet makes control of digital media impossible) it will either take tons and tons of legislation and massive crackdowns or a total change of perspective from media companies, to reach resolution.
Personally I'd like to see newcomers establish new workable business models based on massive VLC (very low cost) distribution. At least that's what I'm gonna do.. (An internet connection and a Linux box ~= radio station + tv station + newspaper)
+&x
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
CD's didn't catch on instantly either, but after a year or so the systems became affordable, and people started buying them. DVD audio will start out as an audiophile's toy, but the price will drop, and high quality surround sound audio will be accessable to the masses. Cars will start to come with DVD audio players as standard. The costs of the development of the format/encryprion/hardware will be spread out over millions of units sold. DVD audio is a superior format, and eventually the cost won't be significantly higher than what we pay for CD audio. If you don't think there's any benefit to DVD audio, fine, don't buy a player. Or if you're like me, and it's not important enough to you to purchase until the price goes down, wait.
As for the copy protection, I think it's a waste of the industry's time and resources. Copy protection has been tried many times in the past, and people have always found ways around it. Some of the methods have been legal, others haven't. The software industry has come to the conclusion that the copy protection just isn't worth the effort. Hopefully the recording industry will eventually learn the same lesson, and quit trying to sell me three coppies on every album I buy (home, work, car), even though copyright law allows me to make coppies for my own personal use.
Unfortunately, the recording industry hasn't learned that I'm going to find a way to make a copy for my personal use wether they like it or not, and unless they convince congress to make it illegal, and convince an AG to prosecute me, they're really just wasting their time and money. Their copy protection methods won't significantly slow down large scale pirating operations where there's enough money involved for the criminals to find a efficent way to avoid the protections. They're much better off spending their money lobying the government to find and prosecute those criminals, or hire private investigatiors to find them. They're just wasting their money and continueing the PR nightmare which comes from accusing basically every one of their customers of being a thief. They also haven't seemed to learn that if you reasonably honest people thieves often enough, a lot of them will no longer feel any remorse in stealing from you.
> people only have two ears. Adding channels beyond that makes no sense.
You're forgetting that your brain uses triangulation to determine wheter the sound is in front L/R, center, or behind L/R.
Go snag a SB Live and check out some of the demo programs where you can move the "audio source" around in 3d. You should be able to tell some difference from where the audio sounds like it is coming from.
IANAAE (Im am not an audio engineer)
Cheers
It reads more like a looming threat to the recording industry... Try to make it so we can't copy your goods and we'll be sure to make it possible.
/.er's, it's a win for them. They can lose these sales no problem if it means that the other 99% of the public can't dupe their works...
From my vantage point, I think that the huge majority of CD-Rs which contain CD-Audio are pirated CD's, not mix CDs or archival CD's... Some of those probably would have been paid for had CD-R's not been so easily accessible.
DVD Audio has the potential to add value to audio, with better sound quality, possibly more music per disk, and other gimmicks. For that, the industry should be allowed to protect their investment. That being all the money they've shoveled out and fronted to artists, studio's, etc, without knowing how well a particular act is going to sell.
It's their risk, so it should be their profit. Since DVD exists already, they don't need to go and invent a new form of media in order to add value to the music. But that opens up them up to piracy. So... like any busines, they're trying to cover their butts. If they come out with a format that's "unbreakable" to consumers, but easily crackable by
----------
On a second subject, maybe you all could do something about this by not supporting the industry. Ever thought of that? Don't like it? Don't buy it!!! It's just that easy.
Go a step further and think for yourself and don't even buy music from the major labels, rather than listen to whatever they shovel your way this week...
Do SOMETHING more to show your disatisfaction than ramble about how some mean old industry doesn't want anyone to copy their products....
Say, for example, that I've got a 700 page user manual on paper. I wish to copy it. I can sit at the copy machine for several hours and make a copy that is really cumbersome, not as good as the original, and took up way more of my time than simply buying another copy. I remember being asked many times in the early 90's when CD software was becoming popular how people could copy it. Luckily at the time the only answer was, "If you've got the space, go ahead and copy everything onto your hard drive". And most people didn't have the space. :)
So how do you solve the DVD problem? Keep it unfeasible to "rip" them. Right now it is -- I don't think recordable DVDs are on the market yet, are they? But they're coming soon enough, and eventually they'll be as prevalent as CD burners. So get the cost of the DVD cheap enough that it costs the same if not more to buy a recordable DVD and rip a copy. The problem will still exist. But people will be more likely to say "Ya know what? I'll just buy the thing." If the potential bootlegger had to spend as much to rip the thing as the original cost, then he can't stay in business long because he won't be able to make a profit.
How do you get your costs down? Lots of ways.
d
(*) The argument I hear most is, "What about retinal scans? Those rule!" Yeah, until I hold a gun to your kid's head and make you open your account for me. Hey, I never said realistic, I just said *not impossible*. You never know what people are willing to do, it all depends on what it is that you're trying to hide.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Now you'd more likely hear,
With ethics, "there is no try", but with copy protection it's a simple matter of "do or do not". So the idea that I can't do it because it's wrong is replaced by I can't do it because it's hard, and when the inevitable crack shows up and makes it easy, the can't part disappears, and no one remembers to ask the question that kept most of us from stealing beforehand.
A naive analysis, perhaps. But I can't help but wonder.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Don't worry about foreign markets, they're doing just fine riding the wave of region 1 (ie. US) DVD. (I'm in the UK, which is in region 2).
Regionalization is pure evil, and R2 versions of R1 material are particularly bad: the result is sometimes sub-standard in quality, often has fewer extra features, and to cap it all, sometimes R2 versions come out as flippers when the R1 version is dual-layer.
Needless to say, lots of people in R2 are very annoyed at this situation and about regionalization in general, so it's common to hear about DVD fans boycotting region 2 altogether and buying R1 DVDs exclusively. That's what I do, and I make sure that dealers know that this is going on so that they invest more in R2 stock.
Furthermore, everyone I know buys only region-free or region-cracked players. People aren't stupid, and they're not the sheep that the studios would like them to be.
If this means that native DVD markets will not flourish, that's excellent news. Regionalization deserves to die.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
"R2 stock" as written didn't make any sense anyway.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
As a DJ, I can tell you exaclty why a DJ at your local club won't play a CDR that you hand to him out of the blue-
-he doesn't know what is on it. He doesn't know what song it is (even if it's labelled, he doesn't know you) or the quality of the sound. Any recording which isn't top-notch will reflect poorly on his performance.
Handing a DJ music, or constantly requesting the same piece of music is not only obnoxious, but annoying and distracting to someone who is trying to get a crowd excited- the DJ has his full attention on the crowd and the music, not you.
Trust me, the DJ knows his music, and his art. Don't bother him .
Is there a song you want to hear? Don't give him the CD. Instead, write your request on a slip of paper in bold capital letters (not big, just bold) and leave it on his desk. If it doesn't fit in with the set, or if he just doesn't have it, he won't play it, and that's all there is to it. If blacklights are set up above the desk, write it in hi-liter so he won't miss it.
Stop concentrating on your desires to have a specific song played... leave your cds at home. Go dance and have fun with the rhythm.
You'll eat it and you'll like it.
As to the above post referring to frequencies above the range of hearing that refer to location, these can occur way into the MHz! I've been told (not personally witnessed, though), that if you take a channel of audio sound and play it into the right ear, and play an identical audio channel, only delayed 1 us, into the left ear, you can notice a very certain direction to the music. Change the delay, and you've changed the direction al response of the sound.
This is why very good audio amplifiers should have bandwidths up into the MHz, and not just rolled off at 20 kHz or so. CD-quality sound is pretty good, and can still produce these MHz-type effects, though it's been sampled at 44 kHz. How, you wonder? Well, it has to do with the 96 dB (16 bit) SNR. Phasing of a sine-wave can be determined rather precisely with the 96 dB of range, due to the 65536 distinct levels each voltage point can be. There's enough vertical resolution (amplitude) that horizontal spacing (phase) can be determined rather precisely.
Of course, moving beyond the 16-bit level of SNR is pointless, unless you've got the equipment to handle it. Ie, inherent non-linearities of the decoupling caps between amplifier stages is a killer. If your system is using a cheesy electrolytic here (the horrors), rip that puppy out and use a polystyrene cap. Eventually you may want to bypass this and DC couple all the stages. Also, use monster-cable to the speakers, even any small resistance from amp output to speakers will form a divider with the speaker cone, and introduce isolation from the output driver, which will distort your frequency response. Also never use a passive crossover, use an active one before your final amplifier. This doubles the needs of amplification, but hey, you're an audiophile, right? You'd be surprised by the supposed high-quality audio systems that still throw in a cheapo 50-cent cap just to save a few bucks. Ack!
"In a world without walls, who needs Windows" - Someone from LinuxToday
make world, not war
From what I've seen, the best pro equipment today has about a 120 dB dynamic range. That corresponds to 20 bits of dynamic range. For comparison, perfect 24 bit data would have 144 dB of dynamic range and perfect 16 bit data has 96 dB.
Dynamic range is the ratio of the largest signal to the smallest discernable signal in the output for a DAC, or in the input for an ADC. There are many things that can limit the smallest signal a DAC or ADC can resolve and bit depth is just one of them. Of course, the dynamic range of digitized data can NEVER be greater than the maximum for the bit depth being used, but it could easily be less.
For those of you unfamiliar with signal processing, the important measure is the Effective Number Of Bits (ENOB). This is a measure of the number of bits of information that a DAC or ADC can present in one sample. You could have a million-ka-jillion bit DAC, but the dynamic range will be limited by the analog performance of the DAC so you may have something like 12.6 ENOB. You see this a lot with "CD quality" audio; most low-end CD players and sound cards offer around 14 bit performance with 16 bit samples, but most people can't tell.
Now, it is VERY difficult to get 144 dB of dynamic range, and even harder to achieve that level of linearity (measured by total harmonic distortion, THD). 144 dB is a ratio of 20,000,000:1. It is EXTREMELY difficult to build circuits that have this level of performance. I'm not even sure if and sampled data systems have achieved 24 bit performance. I do know that the low-noise amplifiers used in the experiments to detect the background radiation of space cost tens of millions of dollars and IIRC involved extreme cooling to reduce the thermal noise.
My point is that the current limit for production level devices is 120 dB, or 20 ENOB. This is A LOT. Think about this, when describing sound levels (dBspl = dB sound pressure level) 0 dBspl is defined as the smallest sound detectable by human ears. The threshold for permanently damaging your hearing is around 90 dBspl, the threshold for pain is around 110 - 120 dBspl, and the sound level a few mwters behind a jet engine (747 IIRC) is around 140 dBspl.
We can use these numbers to get an intuitive feel for the dynamic range of various bit depths.
ENOB Weakest sound Loudest Sound
16 minimum hearable onset of hearing loss
20 minimum hearable onset of pain
24 minimum hearable jet engine
So, actual 24 bit audio would be able to range from the minimum hearable sound for human ears to the volume of a jet engine. 20 bits is still more than enough, and if CDs are recorded properly, they can come very close to 16 effective bits and this is good enough that most people couldn't tell the difference between 16 bit or any better data. However, if you have the storage space, why not guarantee that the quantization noise from the bit depth of the data is not the limiting factor?
This all depends on the listening environment as well. There aren't any speakers that can accurately reproduce 16 bit data. In addition, most people listen to muisic either in their cars, with fans from computers running, ar any number of background noises going on. The fact that MP3s are so popular despite the fact that the have worse quality than CDs shows that a lot of people don't know or don't care about the difference in quality. That said, I consider myself an audiophile and welcome any improvement in the recording quality so long as it is not used as a means for greedy studios to empty my pockets.
Well, that was quite a rant, but I wanted to clear up a few things that I have seen a lot of people on Slashdot showing some confusion about in this and previous articles. Normally, I don't have enough expertise on the topic to post thoughtfully, so I'll take the chances I get.
Matt
These days, most mainstream (read: crap) artists don't fill up normal cds.
Why exactly do you want to have a lot of wasted space on a DVD disk?
Maybe I'm totaly off base here, but what is audio on DVD going to do for you that CD audio doesn't? I (speaking personaly) don't need any higher quality than CD--I'd get more improvement from changing speakers.
Can someone fill me in on why DVD audio is a good thing?
This sig is false.
I think you're right about the awakening desire for technology to serve us without strings attached, but alas only very few people seem to take such a philosophical view of the technology, even among techies. (Increasingly, it's just "cool" :-) Despite that, what you describe does seem to be happening. It's not yet a recognized meme though; possibly all that is lacking is a name by which the media can get a handle on it.
A related view is that of empowerment of the individual, the PC seen as an extension of one's arm. It's not often used in the context of any gadgets other than computers, but X10-style home automation falls easily into the same pigeon hole, and a/v or hifi equipment is often linked up quite comprehensively in modern homes. They are indeed an extension of one's arm, quite literally in the case of remote controls.
However, I don't see any sign whatsoever that either philosophy or practice are heading in this direction outside of the techie sphere. Non-tech people are as oblivious as ever to how things work, or possibly even more so than ever since the replacement of analogue by digital has made things even more obscure for them. And since they form by far the larger part of the population, I doubt that the emergence of a new awareness among techies is going to make manufacturers deviate in the slightest from their self-centred plans.
At the end of the day, the only way in which we're going to obtain technology that serves our own needs exclusively is by creating it ourselves. Free software, Linux, the MP3 scene and Internet radio, www/ftp and the largest repository of information on the planet, none of these were created by commercial entities. It's down to us alone to make the world as we want it.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Then the xerox machine came along and everything changed - suddenly you could copy anything on paper for pennies, you're no longer looking for someone who copied your work and did a big press run - the usefullness of copyright went way down.
Then came digital media and the cost of copying went to an effective 0 - worse yet thanks to the 'net the cost of DISTRIBUTION has gone down to pennies - there are whole industries based on copying things and getting them from one place to another - these guys are in trouble - whether they realise it or not.
I think that what we're seeing for audio and video is the equivalent of the the arrival of the xerox machine - pressing vinyl or CDs used to be beyond the reach of us mere mortals - now we can all do it on our computers.
And MP3's are the next step - no media, no cost of distribution - things like publishers, record labels and moveie distribution houses are dinosaurs - they just don't know it yet
However now we've got a problem .... we still need a way for the original content producers (authors, musicians, movie studios) to make money .... this is what we should be trying to solve - not how do we get the distribution people to get their cut - they are history.
Finally there's a fundamental problem with encrypting digital media - at some point - in the machine where it's being played - out of the control of the media's author(s) - the encrypted data has to be rendered into some form that is usefull - bits in a frame-buffer, bits into an audio DAC. So long as that's true people will find ways to get their hands on the digital bits. Sadly the only way that's likely to work is to integrate these functionalitys (sound out dacs, whole frame buffers) out of the reach of mere mortals like the writers of Linux drivers - this can only be bad for a platform like linux that has small market share - will people write drivers for complex media chips for us? will they give us enough information to do it ourselves? (without giving away how to get at the precious media bits) - we still can't play our DVD disks under Linux - pissing off a whole bunch of geeks by not supporting your hardware is just going to get them pissed enough to reverse engineer your technology so they can use what they paid for ..... remember there are alot more of us geeks than the people trying to hide the bits
What's the point of sampling sound at 96kHz when human ear and speakers can do only (in the best case) 20kHz?
The consequences of the 44.1K sampling rate are quite severe. They can be understood in depth from the following article: Consequences of Nyquist Theorem for Acoustic Signals Stored in Digital Format
Essentially this article points out that since the sound reproduced at f/2 (the sampling frequency divided by 2) is derived from only two samples per second, the error in sound reproduced is actually larger than the sound itself . This means at 20 kHz you actually have more than 50% distortion in the CD audio format.
Other factors include introduction of phase inaccuracies from the introduction of a 18-db/octave anti-aliasing filter at the 22 KHz cutoff frequency. Loss of phase accuracy of course leads to odd cancellations in the room sound field.
In addition it has long been known that the stereo sound field quite poorly reproduced by only two speakers. For decades experimenters have known that at least a center channel improves the sound image dramatically. Home theatre enthusiasts have also become very aware of the practical benefits of a seperate subwoofer channel and amplifier. At the very least they no longer have the problem of tweeter burnout from distortion harmonics induced by amplifier overload.
Take a look at http://fagersta.com/electronics/audio.html for more information.
Take a good look at SDMI. Embeded within the specifications is the groundwork to eliminate that pesky "fair use" copying. Technology will enable the industry to eliminate what the courts would not.
Well, then. I used to be able to make backup copies of all of my music CDs, because they tend to get scratched over time. Now, with SDMI, I cannot do that.
How about a class action law suit against RIAA or whoever? They are deliberately ignoring the decisions of the United States court system to increase their own profits at the expense of consumers.
They love suing anybody who walks in front of them. Let's try turning the tables on them.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
In effect, the modern PC can be programmed to be a phreaking monster.
Interestingly, now that most exchanges have traps so you can't MF them, many voice modems have a "#" command that allows them to produce 2 arbitrary frequencies together. Now to find an ancient exchange...
What's probably happenening is taht the listener is using phase information from the sound as part of the location process. The low-pass filter that cuts off the signals above the Nyquist limit to prevent aliasing also causes phase errors as the filter's cutoff is approached, and that distorts the phase information and impairs the listener's ability to localize.
So it's possible that the listener is not actually using sound he can't hear to localize, but instead that the tests distorted the sounds he could hear in the process of filtering out the higher frequencies, and the result was misinterpreted.
Raising the sampling rate and moving the filter up will also reduce the phase distortion at the high end. So regardless of whether the localization is from phase info near the high-end of hearing or something from higher frequencies than what is perceived as sound, the localization will be improved by the change. And regardless of whether the tests were misinterpreted they did what was intended: Showed the designers that improvement was possible and how to do it.
Back in the '60s, when I was taking undergrad classes on the subject, it was believed (by authors of perceptual psych texts) that phase information (at least above a few tens of cycles) was not processed into perceptual localization. (Steve Chaikin, who designed the DCM loudspeakers, knew better. B-) ) I was able to easily prove to myself that they were wrong:
We had two phones in my office in Ann Arbor, and a tie-line trunk to Detroit. The dial tones in the two exchanges were generated separately, and were a fraction of a cycle-per-second off. (A dial tone is the sum of two sine waves, and in those days was generated by rotary equipment, i.e. a motor-generator.) By putting one phone to each ear I could hear the Ann Arbor tone in one ear and the Detroit tone in the other. The frequency error gave the perceptual illusion of a sound source slowly orbiting my head.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
DVD Audio would be doomed to failure if everything else were to stay the same in the music scene, but it won't.
The reason it won't is that, after being stung by MP3, studios will "encourage" artists to publish on DVD Audio once it's available, because of the extra encryption. Of course we all know that that won't help them one iota against MP3, but they'll do it anyway as it'll give their single collective brain cell a good feeling of accomplishment.
As a result though, pressed music will progressively migrate to DVD, especially since there won't be many plain CD players left because the majority of hifi manufacturers will use DVD drives instead of CD drives as soon as the price difference drops sufficiently. They'll do that because product differentiation is the name of the game, and then where one leads the others have to follow in order to stay competitive in the market.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The industry is under the naive assumption that encrypting the digital data will stop anyone from ever being able to directly pull it out and manipulate it. Of course, because of the nature of a system that uses static keys, and since the data HAS to be decrypted at some point to be useful, this isn't that secure. Also, the real threat, as others have mentioned, is someone getting duplication equipment (by some unknown means) and just duplicating direct from disc - all that encryption can't stop this.
Also, strong encryption technology can't be exported (at least not without a fair amount of difficulty, AFAIK) from the US and (from what I understand) Japan as well. With the US and Japan being the primary distributing nations of said equipment and media, "munitions-grade" (hah) encryption is pretty hard to swing. Of course, since the data has to be encrypted at some time for playback, this is all immaterial - someone will figure out how to make it work, and they'll rip the digital audio stream directly from these discs. The DVD-video crack pretty much proves that. (No, Xing's error didn't CAUSE that - just sped it up.)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Urban legend? Have a look at Stanford's fair use site before you go making those claims.
Although you are right that erasing within 24 hours is no defense. Warez is Warez, and fair use is fair use.
If fair use is suddenly thrown out, on the grounds that the RIAA can't guarantee people won't be able to prevent 'pirating' of music, it sets a horrible precedent for the academic world. Remember the legal issues with hyperlinks almost being considered copyright violations a few months ago? Imagine every bibliography for any text ever written being illegal. It's absurd and morally WRONG.
Although I suppose I'm preaching to the choir. Most slashdotters would probably agree with me that fair use is necessary and justifiable for personal backups, quotes, links, bibliographic references, and similar purposes. It's definitely time to move our rants from the slashdot choir into letters to our technology and common-sense impaired representatives...
Just as soon as I finish finals.
-- You can actually change my mind with a good argument.
This is an outright lie.
You can copy it in any way you want.
It's what you do with it afterwords that can be a copyright violation.
'Rip off' can mean two things, to steal, or to remove forcefully. You 'rip off' a Band-Aid (tm) brand bandage.
I use 'rip' for the copying of something that doesn't "want" to be copied. CDs are a pain to digitally copy (it's not like you simply type 'copy track1.wav c:\wavs' or anything.
DVDs are a much better technology (without the CSS crap) because the disk, even a movie or music (if that ever gets off the ground) disk, has a filesystem, and files can be read without having to 'rip'...
People don't 'rip' files from a harddrive, because HDs and (decent) OSes are designed to aid in copying data.
No, and they won't ever buy a compressed format even if it sounds better. But, it's probably ignorant consumers who want bigger numbers who drive the market.
Sorry, this is a button of mine.
I know a bunch of people who refuse to listen to MP3s, saying they sound so different as to be unlistenable. They refuse to listen to compressed music in any form... And then they go and listen to a *tape*! A regular analog tape... Because it's not compressed, it must sound better. *Argh*
Anyone with a clue would realize that if 96Khz 48b music sounds good, you could take 192Khz, 64b music, use lossy compression, get it smaller than the uncompressed version, and still have it sound better.
MP3s sound worse than CD audio, but they're a tenth (or less) of the size! Duh! If you MP3d (at 1Mbit) DVD Audio, it'd sound way better than CD audio at aproximately the same size.
This sounds like what a 3D sound card would do, for headphone output, to mimic sounds from different places. Distort and slow certain parts of the signal, and at certain frequencies more than others, to mimic the distortion you'd hear in a sound if it were coming from a certain place.
Do you know if this is what they do?
That shithead would be matsushita corp. not somebody who happened to make a thing to play DVDs. I can legally make a cassette player, I can legally make a recordplayer. So I can definately make a DVD player. the silly buggers fromn the industry should get their head out of their ass and their hand out of their neighbour's. But don't try to monopolize the market. At least M$ tries to hide it...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Actually, they are kind of right. You only have two ears, so you only need two channels.
If you use headphones.
Otherwise the sound, not being directly on either side of you all along is going to be processed as coming from a certain direction, on top of the processing done by the card. So it won't work quite right.
And then there's the issue that breaking the low frequencies out onto their own track means you don't have to use a filter later to do it. Do it once with professional equipment so the consumer doesn't have to do it.
Speaking of which... With 5:1 sound, do all channels take the same ammount of space? If you've got a channel that you're only going to send to a woofer, does it need the same fidelity as the high frequency channel? If a woofer is for 20-1000Hz, couldn't you same it at 2khz, or 4khz to avoid aliasing problems, and at a probably lower bit depth too? (Woofers don't seem like they'd be as high fidelity as the mids and uppers.)
Having all the tracks seperate would be good for one thing. You could move your 'viewpoint' around the virtual orchestra and a 3d sound card could remix everything on the fly, not just for volume, but also to add directional cues, which would let you choose where to 'sit' to listen to your copy of some classical music.
this page tells of Dr Arthur G. Lintgen being tested by James Randi, and Lintgen passing Randi's tests.
Well, he said in a club...
...and I'm your regular Canadian student trying to work his way through school- so, with a good sound system, a couple of turntables, a cd player, a laptop, and a LOT of practice, you're versatile.
There's nothing more annoying than a greasy 16 year old handing you a CD and bothering you to play it when you're trying to get the beats matched between trance tracks- oh, yeah, there is something more annoying... when you're playing a trance set and that kid is handing you Limp Bizkit.
You'll eat it and you'll like it.