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Music Media

Sony, Matsushita set to battle over Audio DVD 104

Posted by Hemos from the VHS-beta-part-deux dept.
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.
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Sony, Matsushita set to battle over Audio DVD More

Sony, Matsushita set to battle over Audio DVD

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  • The better man SHALL win this time. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The article was short on details, and I'd love to see a feature-for-feature comparison of the warring formats, but I'd like to make a blind prediction nonetheless based on my experiences watching the consumer electronics industry grow up:

    The superior format will finally win this time.

    Of course, the battle will be very ugly in this technopolistic society where marketing declares winners and losers, riches and destitution; however, it's about time the children of the digital revolution start realizing the larger issues behind "I-want-it-now" satisfaction.

    The winning format will be uncompressed, of course, without copy protection, and will have features that will please the pickiest of audiophiles: 24-bit samples, 96khz rate, and the ability to playback as many or as few tracks as the listener decides (or can afford the hardware for). Specs like this guarantee that the format will be poised for a new generation of digital freedom, and the super-high resolution will make it incredibly difficult to corrupt the fidelity. (Right now, the strongest argument against digital data distribution is the analog->digital and digital->analog conversion processes. Higher resolution demands superior conversion electronics, and that means the margin of error will fall well outside the audible range.)

    Unfortunately, the winner may not emerge from this current battle; as I've said, I would like to see the specifics of both audio formats, but keep this prediction in mind. We'll see it take place as the digital revolution finally figures out what it's revolting against.
  • With the exception of The Wall and Billy Joel's greatest hits, all 200+ of my CDs fit on one CD. Most only take up 45-50 minutes. What is 2.7GB of storage going to get me? It'll just make it easier for the RIAA to gouge me for even mor emoney.
  • Posted by kegking:

    DVD will have NO part in music today. People were stupid in the '80's (wow man its like silver!) and handed over the cash for CD's. I will not submit to the monster. This will end now! nNo more $17 doller cd. No more stupidity. DVD is a breath of fresh air from analog (VHS) to digital (DVD), but digital to digital will not be as easy. It will fail. Hackers will win. All is good. How long will it take them to find a way to start DVD ripping? 2-3 weeks people?

  • DVD-Audio (Score:1)

    by echo ( 735 )
    As far as I'm concerned 44Khz 16-bit Audio CD's sound great, and I'd dare any audiophile to prove otherwise in a blind listening test.

    As for DVD-Audio, I don't see what the point is... Why can't you simply make a DVD that includes sound without a picture? The sound is already in Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC-3) on most movies, and with the capacity of DVD's, you could put a DD 2.0 Stereo track on there as well.. Bands could start using DD 5.1 to their advantage to do some really creative things...

    Ooo, I forgot, DD is compressed, just like MP3 is. Well, guess what.. Same challenge to the audiophiles.. let's take a blind test.
  • well MP3 doesnt even keep up with CD quality, but it comes close.

    but when everyone in the world is used to this new kick ass higher quality sound MP3 just isnt gonna cut it anymore... it only scales so high

    hence there is now a reason to buy music (beter quality) MP3 may still be around (convinience) but when consumers can have higer quality they will want it

    actualy, its much like tapes and CD's tapes can be easily pirated, but CD's are better quality... people still use tapes for convinience (we dont all have car CD players) but will buy CD's

    thats how this could kill MP3..
  • But if the average person can't tell the difference between CD quality and the higher quality audio, or more importantly if their amp/speaker setup is the limiting factor, then they won't be used to higher quality audio and therefore MP3 won't die.
  • I wonder if those audiophile idiots will *still* claim they can hear the individual samples? :^)
  • Are we talking *audible* quality, or are we talking *measurable* quality? I have a good ear (and think MP3s sound absolutely horrible--kinda like a metal cassette just about to crinkle itself into a little ball in a cassette deck) and I can rarely tell the difference between CD players.

    OK, so you're right... *sighs* Many CD players seem to add their own "color." I have an oldish JVC 6-disc changer sitting next to me right now, and it sounds vastly different from most other CD players I've heard...but that's because it mucks around with the signal, upsampling to 18 bit (like I said, it's oldish) and then smoothing the wave. Ugh. Gimme the crappy high end over pseudo-vinyl anyday. :^)
  • Better sound quality just isn't enough--yeah, the pundits said that about CD vs. LP, too. :^P
  • You'd be a dumb-ass to go out and buy either of these players - unless you want to be one of those people who bought a Betamax VCR and are now using it as a door stop!

    The same thing will happen to Sony's Mini-Disc format - unless they're going to market a product, how can they expect it to gain mass-market acceptance? I live in Australia and have neither neard of nor seen Mini-Disc players/recorders in magazines, on the shelf, or on TV.

    For some reason Sony likes to invest millions of dollars in developing new products without actually selling them! How can they re-coup the cost of their investment unless they're prepared to sell the crap?

    What about Sony's new "Plasmatron" TV? I don't see any TV adds in Australia for that one - but I *HAVE* seen adds for the new one from Philips. Just another example of Sony being selfish with their technology and not wanting anyone else to even *pay* good money for it!

    As far as I'm concerned, when my 17" Sony Trinitron monitor dies, I'll be buying one of them nice flat ones from Philips!
  • Hold on... wasn't JVC the creator of VHS?

    ^D
  • Yup. Matsushita, as in "Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics", or MKE, which happens to be the company that owns the trademarks "Panasonic" and Technics, doesn't have anything to do with Japan Victor Company (yes, that's JVC).

    Now, I can't explain why the mediadroids came up with the story that MKE created VHS. Specially after having seen some JVC marketing stuff (many years ago) claiming that they were the creators of VHS.

    ^D
  • 24bits 96Khz. Somehow I don't think this will spark much of a revolution. After all, many geeks seem to think that listening to MP3s through a soundcard is good enough for them.
  • I thought that at most patents expired after 14 years... Why then is Mit{mumble} still paying $250 mill/year for royaltys? CD's entered in 82, that would be 96 when the patent expired.

    Or is there something that I don't know? (highly probable)
  • Does anyone know whether DVD Audio titles will still have geographic zone restriction like DVD video titles?
  • There's the problem of quality; current MP3 encoders/decoders don't support rates above 48kHz; also, the MP3 process distorts the high-frequency information a bit.

    And higher sample rates are a Good Idea. While 44.1 is enough to represent frequencies up to 22.05kHz, the harmonics of the higher frequencies become distorted by the sampling process. 96kHz would allow pretty much all human-audible sound to be encoded non-marginally.
  • Have you tried making 256k mpeg2s? (mpeg1 layer2)
    They tend to have better quality, at a minor (given the higher quality of the file) size increase. Encode faster too.

  • What about more channels? I know it'll bug the audiophile purists, but what about a 5.1 encoding on audio discs? This alone almost makes the extra space all used up on a DVD if you add higher audio quality as well.
  • no that is not the real reason. they have been talking about audio DVD virtually since DVD was being made
  • I don't know about anyone else, but I read about this "format war" about three months ago in "Home Theater Magazine." Maybe I am the only person with a subscription?
  • Maybe JVC's "real" name IS Matsushita? I always thought that JVC created VHS too, but I think maybe JVC is a marketing name for Matsushita.... think about it, who would buy a Matsushita TV? heh
  • The DVD/A specification already handles this. You can have higher quality sound, such as two-channel 192khz/24, or have more channels, such as 24/96 5.1 or whatever, or have hours of 16/44.1 audio.

    They also allow different compressions formats, such as Dolby AC-3, and a lossless ocmpression format that gives 2-3x compression on the audio.

    - Sam
  • > There should be a way to allow the a-dvd
    > master to pick their own trade-off between
    > length and quality... 48 or 96 KHz sampling,
    > 16 or 24 bit

    If I remember correctly, that is exactly what DVD-audio is about. And a few more.

    And IIRC, they simplified things by not requiring audio players to be able to decode MP3 streams.

    Personally I'd have required an MP3 decoder in the player: For the cases where you do want 100 hours of stuff on one disk, you can do it.

    Designing a good format is all about expecting the unexpected. Sure, not every content-provider will have around 100 hours of audio to put on a disk, but it sure would be nice for say an archive copy of a trial.

    (5.2G gives 100 hours of 115kbps MP3. Double-track gives a little under 200 hours. Reducing the bitrate can dramatically increase the capacity for stuff like voice-only.)

    Roger.

  • Sony (Score:1)

    by jtn ( 6204 )
    MiniDiscs are certainly made by other companies, and the ATRAC encoding method isn't hidden from review either. Or would you call VHS "proprietary" as well because you can't duplicate it in your garage?
  • what's the difference between the audio on dvd-video disks now and dvd-audio? i've heard dvd's with only music recorded in 24/96 that sound pretty great -- why do we need a new standard, what's the difference?

    later,
    ian
  • No Matsushita isn't owned by anyone... they instead own many of the Japanese companies you buy from. They are quite the juggernaught and if it wasn't for them sagging under their own weight would prolly dominate every field of eletronics sales.
    ---
    Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...
  • And the answer was of course it is. It is owned by Matsushita who will use their huge presence to make it suddenly appear in a whole lot of "different" companies products at once.
    ---
    Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...
  • How will this kill MP3? I think we had this discussion before, about the "secure" digital music format. Anything that produces and analog output (or a digital sound output, if you have nice hardware) can be fed into a soundcard and encoded. Granted, the difference between MP3 and DVD is wider than the difference with a plain CD, but people will still use their MP3 players, just for the sake of laziness.
  • You're right about LPs sounding better than CDs, but they are NOT longer-lived. I'm listening to LPs that were produced in the 50s, but CDs will not last longer than 15 to 20 years, due to improper sealing of the metal layer. Possibly gold CDs will, but you can hardly get anything on gold, and you wouldn't want to pay the extra 10 smackeroos for the privilege anyway. At least I wouldn't.
  • Does anyone remeber Minidiscs? I do. I own one.
    All this talk about 6 hours of music and quality the human ear can't desitingush is crap because most people don't care.

    As the first post pointed out, the real explosion comes from portability, conveniance, and ubiquity. I personally wish that Minidiscs were pushed harder. They sound almost as good as CDs, hold the same amount of music (more if you cut the stereo) and they are conveniant and cheap.

    THAT is the sorta thing people need, kinda like a CD-age version of the casette tape.
  • I did a little research and I guess I was wrong.
    It looks like Matsushita DOES own Japan Victor Co.

    Take a look at http://www.mei.co.jp/corp/customers/contents_e.htm l
    Down at the bottom of the page under related site is Victor Company of Japan (JVC)
  • Maybe JVC's "real" name IS Matsushita?

    Nah, Matsushita's marketing names are Panasonic and Technics.
  • Are you suggesting CD's have better sound quality than LP?!! Ridiculous!
  • I grew up thinking that, but now all the news stories covering this are saying it was Matsushita. Hmm...
  • My only question is, why not use, or start modifying the existing dvd video players to have the capability of playing dvd audio. I see absolutely no reason why dvd audio players should cost ~$1000, when a dvd video player is ~$399 and up. Surely the dvd audio can't be any more complex than dvd video. Give me a machine that can play both dvd audio and dvd video and i'll buy. (mainly because i'm buying a dvd video machine anyway).


    Jarod
  • Folks, it doesn't matter a bit if you can tell the difference between brand MP3 and 24/96.

    It really doesn't.

    Those idiotic, muddleheadded, psychotic brain-damaged folk, like myself, who are so deluded in thinking that they can tell the difference that we'll do two things:

    1: ignore all contrawise thinking people
    2: Buy/use the "better" sound encoding

    Those who think we're dumb will be ignored, until such time as they also become similiarly deluded.

    hanzie.

  • Both! (Score:1)

    by JanS ( 16659 )
    Why not have more than one standard format defined, so that the record companies can choose what's most appropriate for each release. In this day and age that shouldn't be too difficult? I mean, imagine if mpeg videos only came in one resolution and frame rate!

    (5.1 channel audio should be accomodated in the same way).

  • if you want sound quality, try vinyl

  • Sony (Score:1)

    by Gerund ( 17746 )
    Sony seem to have been trying to do that for years. As soon as everyone had a CD player, they started talking about minidiscs. (at least 5 years ago) They're still trying to supersede CDs so we will all have to go out and buy a new player. They probably couldn't care less about the format, as long as it's theirs. Not that Matsushita aren't trying the same scam.
  • There's a limit to how much quality is worth having. Most of that quality would be lost on the amp/speakers of most hi-fis. Not to mention the limits to the limited difference in clarity discernable by the human ear. Noticed how sound cards still only work with 16 bits for wave sounds? This is why.
    Still, I can't think of many uses for that much storage, unless it's recordable, which it won't be.
  • This will slow down the roll-out of DVD-Audio.

    Sony and Matsushita will settle with a patent-sharing, compromise solution that includes both standards.

    Business goes on. Everybody involved makes tons of moola selling consumer electronics to teenagers...





  • The question was not whether Matsushita is owned by anyone; it is whether the format they are pushing (AudioDVD) is owned by anyone (like Betamax) or an open standard (like VHS). Read harder.

    Mike
    --

  • Believe it or not, 24/96 I believe is worth it. 16/44 is just plain lame. While I don't claim to be able to hear the samples, anyone that "listens" to music feels the inherent supoeriority of vinyl. Now, the problem is that the qualities of vinyl that people like (analog, fullness, more natural stereo seperation) are mitigated by the imperfections of atoms. Bits are the answer, but CD's weren't it.

    24/96 is ~ digital vinyl, or digital analog... I would argue that anything beyond that is in fact superfluous, but CD's are very lacking when it comes to accurately reproducing the original.

    Why are we willing to put up with MP3's? Because they fit onto devices we can afford, and are transferrable at bandwidth's that we can afford... in the long run, neither of these are an issue.
  • Actually, by the time a music format like this catches on, we'll all have faster computers with more storage & more bandwidth - we'll just move to a variation of mp3 or something similar which uses more bandwidth & has most of the quality of the new music format.
  • Yes, the point of all this ridiculous bickering over format is so one company can establish a monopoly. Anti-trust issues aside, these companies simply want to have a successful proprietary format so everyone else has kiss up (i.e, pay $$$) to buy in. What happens is that this fighting usually causes the new technology to be delayed for years (or never happen, like stereo AM radio), and you can guarantee we poor end users will get the short end of the stick.

    How best to serve the customer is never an issue. The issue is to try and screw all the competition and create the perception of being the best. You think SmallSquishy got where they are today by providing the best software for users. Has anyone used Windows or Office lately?
  • Is it just me, or does Sony really seem to be into proprietary formats these days? Memory Sticks, MiniDiscs, Super Audio Format, etc. I guess they're hoping one will catch on so they can rake in the licensing fees.
  • Just an idea, maybe it really sucks, I dunno. But I think it might be nifty if musicians had, say, 4 or 6 channels of sound to play around with, instead of just the ordinary 2 for stereo. (And of course so-called "surround", which isn't quite the same as having 6 channels to play with.)

    I suppose most musicians wouldn't find any real use for that. But it could be pretty cool for dance music, say, in a club. Make for a more interesting experience than stereo.

    Is this a daft idea?

  • You've missed the point. If a company owns the format and others license from it, it makes a bundle of cash in royalties. Read the part about Sony and how much it gets from CDs again. Sony wants to stay on the gravy train. The people supplying gravy don't.

    --


  • Hah, like that would ever fly. Sony, combined with the RIAA and all its minions, would have put up such a stink over that you'd be able to smell it in Antarctica. Requiring an MP3 decoder would have been their worst nightmare (and a consumers dream).

    BTW, I think you're right on the multiple sampling rates.

    --

  • I think they should find a balance between increasing quality and capacity. If the disk can fit seven times more data, make the audio format 32-bit, 88.2 K sample rate. Four times the audio quality, and you can still fit over 2 hours of music onto one disk.
  • Still, I can't think of many uses for that much storage, unless it's recordable, which it won't be.

    The complete works of Led Zeppelin/Mozart/Rob Malda, all on one disk, perhaps?

  • ...is to kill MP3. Think about it. They get everyone hooked on a new, fancy, high quality sound format that doesn't encode well into MP3, so that people keep paying money for music instead of getting "low quality" versions for free off of the internet.

    Oh, well. I suppose record producers have to eat, too.

  • You know, I remembered something important long after posting:

    I've worked a little with studio equipment (Akai HD recorders, DAT decks, digital processors). I don't recall ANY of them having a sample rate higher than 48khz. I think a lot of audio processors now are using 20 to 24-bit sampling but are still sampling at 48khz (at best).

    This isn't even taking into account distortion and limitations imposed by microphones and speakers.

    I agree completely that higher sampling rates and bit counts will reduce distortion (esp. at higher freqs as you said), but I'm left wondering what good it does if the distortion is introduced by components in the studio -- I guess you reduce the (negligable?) cumulative effects.

    I also wonder if we'll start seeing HD recorders and tools that do 24-bit/96khz. Better buy bigger hard drives, musicians....

    Anyway, I'm sure this thread is pretty much dead now. Just wanted to get two more cents in. Thanks. :)
  • "a new audio format for audio"?



    whew! 'cos i thought for i second you said "a new audio format for video" and i was like "but hey dude! what about the pictures and subtitles and stuff".

    mincin' it up with the best...

  • I know there's a big markup. On the high-end equipment a markup of 50% isn't that unusual, often higher. Part of what you are paying for is for someone to really design something right without marketing constantly trying to figure out how much cost they can cut.

    I stand corrected on the price of DACs. The new Burr-Brown DACs have come down significantly in price and are now around $3 in 1000 quantity. The last time I looked over there they were on the order of $40.

    As for building high-end equipment, which I have been involved with, it isn't cheap. A lot more care needs to be taken in terms of selecting matched components and using quality parts (i.e. no tantalum caps or carbon resistors in the signal path). None of the consumer-grade equipment I've seen does a decent job of using quality parts. Open up most Sony or other cheap equipment and you'll find it's full of 10% carbon resistors, tantalum caps, cheap electrolytics, and jumpers all over the place on a phenolic PC board with marginal solder connections and a just barely adequate power supply using LM78xx class regulators for the analog section (which are terrible in terms of noise).

    Most consumers wouldn't notice much difference with a high-end DAC with their $200 pair of Bose or Sony speakers. Someone with a pair of NHT's, Magnapan, Martin Logan, or Wilson's will definitely hear a difference because the speakers will be able to much more accurately reproduce the sound without muddying it with their own color.

    The high end equipment does not make these compromises. The BOM is higher and the quantities sold are much lower (since the average consumer doesn't have a system that could notice it with their $200 pair of Bose speakers). Due to the quanty sold, the manufacturer must charge more to stay in business. If you're Sony or Panasonic then you plan on hundreds of thousands if not millions of units selling. If you're Theta, Pass Labs, Audio Research, etc. then you figure you'll sell less than 10,000 units. If you were to sell 10,000 units at $100 profit each and you have a number of employees you'd go out of business real fast.

    This isn't to say that Sony or Magnavox couldn't make a high-end player. They could, but they're constantly looking at how they can cut costs which defeats the purpose.
  • I can very well see why a good DVD audio player would cost $1000. Have you tried pricing what it takes to build a good high-quality DAC that can handle 20 bits, let alone 24 bits? More than that, you need more expensive op-amps, better quality resistors, capacitors, filters, and so on. A high-quality 24-bit DAC isn't cheap either. The noise floor becomes much more critical and hence a much more expensive design is in order.

    For good quality audio equipment you don't get away with using cheap electrolytic capacitors or carbon resistors any more or the really cheap op-amps and voltage regulators. Now you need to move to 1% or better metal film resistors (or better) and polypropolyne/polystyrene caps and either discrete or very high quality op-amps. The power supply needs to be beefier and have better noise immunity. More than likely, a separate power supply is needed for the digital vs analog portions of the circuit.

    Oh yeah, now that you're 24-bit you want to use balanced XLR connectors. For that nice clean balanced output you now need two DACs per channel running inverted for a total of 4 DACs.

    A starting 24-bit DAC probably starts at $20 each. You're at $80 already for only one piece. Now another $60-80 for op-amps, $30 for resistors and caps. Now throw in the power supply for $80 for a good toroid transformer and double regulated supplies, independent for each channel and for the analog and digital portions. You're up to $250 already and nothing has been covered for the transport or other circuitry. Add video support and AC3 5.1 channel audio and you could easily exceed $1000 for parts alone.

    Of course, most of those here couldn't tell the difference between a CD and a cassette, given how fond you are of MP3 format. MP3 has some serious shortcomings quality-wise, and some could be fixed without too much difficulty (i.e. using a logrithmic scale for dividing frequencies rather than a linear scale).

    For those of us who really like to try and reproduce music (rather than noise) we do notice the shortcomings of 44100/16. Hell, even consumer equipment typically tries to enhance it (i.e. 8x oversampling) since trying to make a 20khz brick wall filter is about impossible without screwing up the phase and other artifacts.

    The filtering involved in the recording side also effects the sound since all input sound must be filtered to reject any signal above or at 22050 to eliminate aliasing.

    DVD audio is a long-welcomed addition by hi-fi entheusist since CD's are so screwed up. The recording industry took the minimal acceptable standards and went with those much the same as they pushed cassettes, another bare-minimum standard, or VHS, which was not properly engineered from the beginning (unlike betamax, which used a much better head geometry).

    Of course, the DVD audio spec supports several sampling rates besides 96khz and several bit depths from 16-bits to 24 bits. This means those 10-CD collections on those late-night commercials could be replaced by a single DVD.

    Also, if they support AC3 and DTS audio DVDs all the better. Full-surround DTS audio would be a nice medium to play with.

    CDs are ancient technology, and anyone who wants to replace them with MP3 should go back to their 3" computer speakers and sound blasters.
  • Um, Change that would to a wouldn't.
  • Yeah. *Sigh* Money tends to cause major coporations to have huge "Whose is biggest?" contests. Usually, the loser ends up with theirs cut off. Oh well, if corporations didn't make money, they would be in business.

    RB
  • My God, when will these companies ever learn that they are just killing themseleves by fighting over a format. THE CUSTOMER DOESN'T CARE HOW IT WORKS! All a customer wants to know is that when the button is pressed, something happens! Preferably, the right thing happens. They could be making money sooner if they just agree on a format.

    RB
  • Yeah proper Surround Sound is neat-o, but the complaint still stands that this would be aiming towards a *very* small portion of the market.

    Even if you could sell four speakers to a respectable sector of the market, who is ever going to set them up properly? This just doesn't fit with consumer products...Surround without properly positioned speakers is quite worthless.

    I just don't understand how Sony, et al expects to move many of these on those merits....although I suppose all they have to do is convince the public its superior....I dunno, the whole thing sounds like a waste of resources to me.

    I'm amused that we're finally reaching storage capacities we have no use for....everyone is grasping at straws on how to soak up the extra GBs with data noone really wants...
  • Well, from what I've heard they are regrettably going the full higher-quality route, at least in terms of Audio-DVD. Frankly I don't believe the world needs 24-bit 96kHz sound in a general consumer format.

    The average listener doesn't even pick up what CDs have to offer. 24-bits 96 thousand times a second still sounds awful if its going through a four-inch speaker in a boom-box. A-DVD will cater to a miniscule fraction of the market....I just don't think they can pull people away from their CD collections.
  • I fully agree; one year ago, I read information concerning these formats in a french audiophile publication. I really like the backward compatibility feature of the Sony format with current CD players. One year ago, the Matsushita format did not seemed to be backward compatible; did it change since or is it just meaning that a Matsushita player will be able to play standard CD ?

  • Yeah, but a well-recorded LP in good condition on good equipment will sound better than a CD on similar equipment.

    There are problems inherent in digitally reproducing audio. Even at 32 bits and 88.4KHz (or whatever the other poster suggested), there's the possibility of artifacts and sampling problems. Analog avoids a lot of this.

    So, no, you're confused.
  • I still listen to the CDs I bought in 1983 and I haven't noticed any sound or material degredation. The better digital electronics of today's CD players combined with the overkill redundancy of the CD format will let me listen to them for years to come.
  • That's actually the point of SACD - It's apparently backward compatible with normal audio, unlike DVD-Audio (unless they have 1 layer 16-bit 44Khz and 1 layer 24-bit, 96Khz.)
    The other problem with this little debarcle is that Philips make all the transports for Matsushita's CD players (Technics etc..). Sony make them for Toshiba. I think you'll have all the small fry fighting against the two big boys - look what happened to MiniDisc vs DCC. DCC lost out big time. If they make SACD recordable, maybe that might help.
  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • real comment. (Score:3)

    by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @02:37PM (#1936716) Journal

    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.
    --

  • Predictions... (Score:3)

    by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @02:34PM (#1936717) Journal

    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.
    --

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