DVD-Audiobahn

Follow the money...

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DVD-Audio and SACD were simply attempts to make free money. The patent rights for CD were expiring, and the royalties created a $1,000,000,000 per year revenue stream for Sony and Philips. Everyone under the sun wanted to create a new system that would replace CD so that they could collect the royalties.

The logical successor was DVD, but even though Sony had a piece of that pie, they wanted more. So they "invented" SACD (not much of an invention really, but just a re-application of existing technology). So then there was a format war to see who could harness the gold mine. It devolved into a feature war, with DVD-Audio offering more and more and more features that no consumers really wanted or cared about. (That's not surprising, as it was developed by a committee!)

There were so many mis-steps and mistakes made along the way by both sides that it is pathetically laughable. Because you are absolutely correct. 99.9% of the consumers would have been ecstatic with the audio features offered by the DVD-Video format:

a) Audiophiles could have 96/24 hi-res digital recordings.
b) Surround-sound fans had their choice of Dolby Digital, DTS, or PCM up to 48/20.
c) The "X" and "Y" generations could have pictures along with their music.

So everyone would have been happy. Plus the format was such an insane success that within five years 90+% of all households had a DVD player. This was the real key, because then the software companies have a target market to sell to.

But instead, we got a fragmented bunch of splinters with virtually nothing to show for it. And in the middle of it all, MP3 took the world by storm and now the fastest growing format is lo-fi downloads from the internet.

Oh well....

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