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In Reply to: RE: Thanks for the article, a very good read. Here's to what might have been. (nt) posted by Teresa on December 29, 2007 at 17:24:50
Hi Teresa,
I agree completely that it is a shame that 96/24 on DVD-Video never took off. Here is the story of what happened, along with my commentary. Take it for what it's worth.
DVD was proposed in the early '90s. Several companies began working on various proposals. These were relatively quickly distilled down to two competing formats. One format was led by Sony (surprise!), who always seems to be interested in owning a monopoly. At the last minute the movie studios demanded that there *had* to be one format. So finally the two warring camps agreed and DVD was on its way.
It took quite a while to hammer out all of the details, both for the hardware and the software. Things were delayed many times and for many reasons. Finally the spec was finalized in December 1996. Players started shipping in Japan early in 1997 and later in the summer of 1997 in the US. One of the topics that had to be finalized were the audio options. The big fight was between Dolby and DTS, as both were vying for the big royalty stream that would come from being the official standard.
There was also talk about music discs. Fairly early on it was established that there would be a "music-only" DVD, so they didn't pay a lot of attention to this. However, at the very last minute the DVD committee agreed to include 96/24 stereo (as well as a variety of multi-channel PCM formats) on the video discs. Nobody here in the States really knew much about this. All of these discussions took place behind closed doors in Japan, with some input from Hollywood (especially Warner Bros.).
But when the spec was finalized, the Electronic Engineering Times ran an article that mentioned the 96/24 capability. When I saw that I was ecstatic. I called Michael Hobson of Classic Records and although he didn't believe me at first, when I proved it was true, he was also ecstatic.
Very quickly we realized that the only way this would work was to have as big a group as possible, with as many hardware and software choices as possible. So we formed an ad hoc group to make hardware that would play hi-res 96/24 software. Among the group were:
Classic Records - Software
Chesky Records - Software
Ayre - Hardware
Muse - Hardware
Resolution Audio - Hardware
That was the beginning. Then more people joined in, although not directly as collaborators:
Conrad-Johnson - Hardware
Madrigal - Hardware
Theta - Hardware
The peak of this consortium was when Stereophile donated a room at one of their shows and we did a collaborative effort to display hi-res music. The hardware was rotated through the system every couple of hours so that everyone's player had a chance to be featured. Chesky and Classic released close to 50 titles each.
But guess what? Nobody cared!
The whole thing was a gigantic flop. There were a lot of reasons, but it doesn't really matter now. We had our chance to have hi-res digital audio, and as a community (including manufacturers, magazines, dealers, and consumers), we blew it. Instead, everyone was suckered in by the fairy tales spun by greedy companies that wanted to take over the royalty stream from the expiring CD patents. C'est la vie...
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