[ash71]

Howdy,

A couple of comments/statements/questions here:

1) Bought the new Foo Fighters CD a couple of weeks back and think its great. Of course now its come out with a 5.1 and enhanced stereo DVD so thought ******** I'll give the CD to a mate and went and bought the new version (typical, you buy the week of release and by the end of the month they release it with some "value added content")

I'll quote the little sticker that is on the cover (nice packaging by they way)
"DVD includes: Entire Album in Enhanced Stereo Disc 2 in 5.1 Surround Sound"

Well its not the "entire Album" its only the acoustic CD and not the main/loud CD so feel a little conned by that. Which got me thinking about DVD Audio and SACD in general:

2) DVDA is "dumbing down" Its giving us less of its potential now than it was a year or 2 ago. All the latest releases seem to be 48kHz/24bit (and packaged with the CD version) were as the dedicated DVD-A discs were 96kHz/24bit. Example All the re-released REM albums (Automatic For The People DVDA was 96kHz/24bit on the original DVDA release) and the latest NIN album. (The Downward Spiral is pretty amazing on SACD) These version do sound very good but as they are re-released as part of a 2 disc set I don't see why the have to downgrade the DVDA disc.

3) SACD would appear to be fading fast and this is a shame as it was a great format hampered only by a lackluster catalogue of titles - I know there was a few jems in there. DVDA seems to be having a last spurt also. Ah well my dad bought into the Quadrophonic System back in the 70's so I guess I've got 2000 version!!
Maybe Dual Disc will reverse this or maybe this is another half hearted attempt to get us to buy, again, what we have on CD but with a little extra quality.

My DVD player is SACD/DVDA compatible, like the majority of the people here I would guess. It's one of the reasons I bought it. And it's driving a system set up for multi channel audio plus I buy all the SACD/DVDA versions of the albums I like. It seems like such a missed oppounity for the music industry and music fans, look what DVD with Dolby Digital/dts did for the film industry - more people started spending money on better equipement and buying DVD films by the bucket load. Hell I have a perfectly good LD player and I've repurchased most of the films I have on LD with the DVD version. Some of my mates had massive VHS collections which they have now replaced with DVD.

My fear is CD will disappear and we will be left with no viable/popular/standard high resolution format to replace it but only have the option to download compressed music.

Hope thats not progress...

[FeisalK]

My DVD player is SACD/DVDA compatible, like the majority of the people here I would guess

I think Universal (SACD/DVDA) players are less common than we ('d like to) think - partly because not all brands have them.

CD's are not going to disappear soon I think the recording industry won't let it happen at least at this point they are fighting against MP3, and forcing everyone to upgrade a CD player isn't viable.

What Sony could have done is do away with CD only releases (i.e all henceforth at least 2.0 hybrids)

[mjn]

Originally Posted by ash71

Howdy,

A couple of comments/statements/questions here:

1) Bought the new Foo Fighters CD a couple of weeks back and think its great. Of course now its come out with a 5.1 and enhanced stereo DVD so thought ******** I'll give the CD to a mate and went and bought the new version (typical, you buy the week of release and by the end of the month they release it with some "value added content")

I'll quote the little sticker that is on the cover (nice packaging by they way)
"DVD includes: Entire Album in Enhanced Stereo Disc 2 in 5.1 Surround Sound"

Well its not the "entire Album" its only the acoustic CD and not the main/loud CD so feel a little conned by that. Which got me thinking about DVD Audio and SACD in general:

mmm....the 2 versions of the album were both available for pre-order at the same time.

The sticker is correct, but badly written, even i worked out that only Disc 2 was in DVD-A 5.1.

[manny]

Originally Posted by mjn

The sticker is correct, but badly written, even i worked out that only Disc 2 was in DVD-A 5.1.

sticker not correct! the dvd contains all of the acoustic disc in both hi-res stereo and 5.1, but none of the music from the electric disc in any format. i, too, was somewhat peeved by this.

[gavan]

Originally Posted by ash71

2) DVDA is "dumbing down" Its giving us less of its potential now than it was a year or 2 ago. All the latest releases seem to be 48kHz/24bit (and packaged with the CD version) were as the dedicated DVD-A discs were 96kHz/24bit. Example All the re-released REM albums (Automatic For The People DVDA was 96kHz/24bit on the original DVDA release) and the latest NIN album. (The Downward Spiral is pretty amazing on SACD) These version do sound very good but as they are re-released as part of a 2 disc set I don't see why the have to downgrade the DVDA disc.

I just checked my original-release DVD-A of 'Automatic for the People' and the 'Advanced Resolution' Stereo and Multichannel mixes are 48/24.

In any case, it sounds extremely unlikely that releases would be modified from 96kHz sampling to 48kHz sampling in order to 'dumb them down' or whatever it is you are trying to get at - I suggest you check your facts before making cooking up conspiracy theories.


Gav

[pwood]

I'm taking my Foo Fighters double CD back as its a major dissapointment on both discs.

[shaithis]

I had a rather interesting discusion with a few people I know in the music industry recently......from writers to technitions. It seemed that they all thought the same of "multi channel audio" - it was an unnecessary and time-consuming overhead for their productions.
I tried explaining it from a consumers point-of-view but still got the responces of "why bother", "its a load of fluff" and "whats wrong with stereo?"...

I guess this could explain the rather lackluster catalogs we have to choose from and the fact that only certain styles of music generally get SACD/DVD-A releases.

Based on that, I don't think we are in fear of losing CD anytime soon

[gavan]

Originally Posted by shaithis

I had a rather interesting discusion with a few people I know in the music industry recently......from writers to technitions. It seemed that they all thought the same of "multi channel audio" - it was an unnecessary and time-consuming overhead for their productions.
I tried explaining it from a consumers point-of-view but still got the responces of "why bother", "its a load of fluff" and "whats wrong with stereo?"...

I guess this could explain the rather lackluster catalogs we have to choose from and the fact that only certain styles of music generally get SACD/DVD-A releases.

Based on that, I don't think we are in fear of losing CD anytime soon

The new multichannel-capable hi-res formats _could_ be a good selling point for music companies and their lucrative back catalogues if marketed and implemented correctly. Unfortunately, marketing has been abysmal and the record companies have really cocked things up. eg. non-hybrid SACDs, the need to use a TV display to playback on many DVD-A devices etc.

As things stand though, the biggest threat to CD comes from inferior quality lossy compression (and still stereo) formats, not 'hi res' multichannel.


Gav