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In Reply to: RE: An insider's perspective on "what might have been". posted by Charles Hansen on December 29, 2007 at 21:40:32
Charles Hansen wrote (re Classic and Chesky 24/96 HDADs on DVD-Video):
> 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.
It's remarkable in retrospect that 24/96 2-channel PCM was ever
included in the DVD-Video standard.
I bought a bunch of HDADs back in '98 and enjoyed the heck out
of them via Pioneer DVD players that would output 24/96
digitally and cheapish 24/96 MSB Link DACs. There was a great
deal of confusion, even among audiophiles, surrounding 24/96
equipment, with many people **insisting** that **no** DVD players
would output 24/96 digitally (and of course everybody pooh-poohed
the notion of listening to a DVD player, fer gor's sake, through
its **analog** outputs!). The disks, in the beginning, were
hard to find and hard to get.
The mainstream record companies, for their part, wanted even
more robust copy-protection than DVD-V provided -- and they wanted
it to extend to the **analog** domain (Verance) to, hopefully,
even prevent taping or A/D conversion of copy-protected material.
Further, they weren't particularly interested in "audiophile"
quality two-channel, they were interested in multi-channel with
bells and whistles (lyrics and pictures going by on your TV screen
while you listen) to appeal to what they saw as the mass market.
And, of course, there was a format war -- Sony and Philips
trying to regain the royalty advantage, via SACD, vs. everybody
else in the hardware business. 24/192, AFAIK, was a last-minute
inclusion by the DVD-Audio folks to match the theoretical
bandwidth specs of SACD.
Another factor in the failure of high-rez digital audio as a
mainstream product can still be discerned both here from time
to time and on the Usenet audio newsgroups. In a way, the
"CD is as good as you can hear" marketing campaigns of the 80's
succeeded too well -- there are still some engineering-minded
types who will argue to the death that 16 bits and 44.1 kHz are
all that any sensible person needs, and that buying into higher-data-rate
formats is a sucker's game. Even people who can hear the
difference and might wish that digital audio had waited until
it was more comparable to the best of analog before it was
sprung on the public will still throw up their hands at the
notion of re-buying an entire CD collection in high-rez. That's
one reason upsampling is so attractive -- anything you can do
to "save" your existing CD collection is more appealing than
buying titles again in a new format.
However, in one way, DVD-Audio is a gift to the audiophile in spite
of its failure as a commercial medium. It isn't too hard these days
to get hold of software with which you can make DVD-As at home,
and there are transports and DACs that will play such homemade
discs at full resolution. Of course, that's less important these
days to folks who can't be bothered with optical discs at all,
and just play stuff off the hard drive. And, again, there are folks
who will argue to the death that if you're going to digitize
your LP collection, there's no need to bother with 24/96, let
alone 24/192!
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