Well how about we become customers again and not just a faceless consumer? That money you keep spending on products that are outdated over and over again is a game that is constantly played by the major corporations. If you stop playing the game, all of a sudden the pirates are the culprit. Well, I don’t know about you, but I am tired of being called a pirate where once I was a customer. I am tired of all these corporations expecting me to finance their experiments in the market place. Call me a drop out but less and less do I care to be the financial guinia pig I don’t want any sort of player that can be turned off at someone elses idea of it being ok to do so. Mistakes are made in such situtations all the time. Getting one corrected won’t be on their priority of things to do. Especially if they have to fork up the cost of a player for each and every mistake, multiplied by the ones who own such players around the world. Rather than go through that, I refuse to buy one. Simply it isn’t ok for them to damage my player and I won’t have it.

We saw the introduction of 2 competing high resolution audio formats, SACD from Sony/Philips and DVD-A (DVD-Audio) from Panasonic + others. These formats came at a time when the 20 year patent for the compact disc was running out.

SACD was offered up as a single sided dual layer hybrid disc containing the SuperAudio content in stereo and sometimes also in a Surround mix on one layer, and the CD content on the second layer. SACD discs can be played on regular CD players by accessing the CD content layer.

DVD-Audio was introduced as a single sided single layer high resolution audio disc that could only be played in special DVD-A players. These discs often contained a video content as well as a Dolby Digital mix of the music so that it can be played in a regular DVD player. BUT, these discs could not be played in a regular CD player.

Both formats struggled along mostly gaining acceptance in the audiophile market. There were marketing campaigns but many peope still are not aware of these new audio formats. The slow acceptance for these formats was not enough to support a full rollout, especially when compared to the quick and wide acceptance of the current DVD format, so these new formats mostly remained in the niche audiophile market.

It appeared as if Sony had the upper hand because their discs were compatible with the millions of CD players already out there. But most of the content they released were classic albums such as the Rolling Stones releases during their contract with ABKCO records. Many of these hybrid SACD/CD releases were stunning. In many cases even the CD layer was clearly superior to previous releases (excellent job done by Bob Ludwig who mastered these albums, one of the most prominent names in mastering today).

But where were all the new album releases in the hybrid SACD/CD format? How many people cand you expect to dish out more money to buy classic records that they already own not just on CD but on vinyl, cassette, etc…

The DVD-Audio camp was fairing much worse and they needed a CD layer added to their product, and thus was born yet another format – DualDisc. The DualDisc is a double sided disc that contains the CD version on one side and what is being called an Advanced Resolution version on the flipside.

It seems now that both the SACD and the DVD-A camps have almost completely dropped these formats to release select titles in the DualDisc format (there are still SACD releases coming out so maybe Sony has some hope left).

All these new formats claimed superior sound compared to CD and evidence of that has been shown, but not all the time.

There have been cases where the SACD or DVD-A release of a classic album did not clearly outperform the CD release. This can be attributed to many factors. In most cases, poor mastering is the culprit and in some other cases a generational COPY of the original master tape was used instead. In other cases, old master tapes have decayed over time and that is the best sonics that could be pulled from the tape.

But does the average consumer really care about better sound (I definitley do)? This is not a big selling point to someone outside the so called Audiophile circles.

So now the electronics companies are trying to pull a similar tactic with HDTV via high resolution blue laser video disc players. HD-DVD on one side and Blu-Ray on the other.

It seems that the consumers, especially early adopters of this new technology will be the losers. It’s too bad because there is great potential in higher resolution video and audio, which has already been witnessed by many. However, the greed of the corporations will probably lead a new high res DVD format along the same path of high res audio, with mass comsumer confusion along the way.

Ted V.

isnt that a bit too soon for Holograhpic Storage?

anyways in regards to the above article I think Blue-ray will be the winning format… but that is an uneducated guess =)