This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz
by Brad Wilson.
Original Post: Format War, We Hardly Knew Ye
Feed Title: The .NET Guy
Feed URL: /error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/dotnetguy/Rss.aspx
Feed Description: A personal blog about technology in general, .NET in specific, and when all else fails, the real world.
Audio dorks like me can wax on for hours about the relative benefits of SACD vs. DVD-Audio. Most people don't care about which has the best sound, or the most interesting technology. You, on the other hand, probably don't care. How do you convince the music buying public about the value of DVD-A or SACD over traditional CDs (or online music stores)?
During a trip to Best Buy today, I discovered something very interesting in the New Releases music section: a small but sizeable portion of the new CDs out now are actually Dual-Discs.
The discs are dual sided, with a CD layer on one side and a DVD layer on the other side. The DVD layer contains the expected bonus video footage and such, but it also contains a full version of the album in high resolution uncompressed 5.1 channel audio in DVD-Audio format. As with all DVD-Audio discs, you can get 5.1 even with a non-DVD-Audio enabled player, albeit those older players will play an audio track that's lossy compressed with Dolby Digital.
Did you hear that? That was the end of the next gen audio format war.
Until now, SACD and DVD-Audio meant you had to commit to listening to your music on your DVD player. These new dual sided discs mean that you can play them in your car and easily rip them down into MP3. Despite SACD's superior sound format, they were already significantly behind because of a lack of video capabilities and the requirement of an SACD player. The only thing DVD-Audio lacked was a compelling reason to buy the discs.
Sony just got their asses kicked with marketing, and hardly anybody noticed. What people are going to notice is this new brand of CDs which contain cool bonus video stuff on the other side, which was something SACD could never have given them. Us audio dorks will be very happy with our killer audio quality in 5.1.
Not all is rosy, of course. The Dual-Discs bear a warning that some CD players will not be able to play the discs. In this case, "some" means that I can't rip them into MP3 on my Mac mini, which I use for iTunes and my iPod. My Wintel laptop w/ iTunes had no problems with it.
Previous Topic
