The RIAA has recently released a sales report for recorded music for 2003, along with comparisons to years past, for all recorded media. CD sales still ruled supreme in 2003, with nearly 756 million total discs sold. However, that number was down 7.1 percent over 2002’s total number of CDs sold. DVD-Audio sales remained stagnant in 2003, with a 0.08 percent increase in sales to approximately 400,000, says the RIAA’s “2003 Yearend Statistics” report. Sales for DVD-Audio discs were first tracked in 2001 at about 300,000 units and increased to 400,000 units in 2002. Music industry executives point out that these numbers could be slightly on the low side, because Soundscan allegedly has yet to track DVD-Audio sales on the Internet, which is currently the best place for fans of the format to purchase discs. Nevertheless, total DVD-Audio total sales at ...

With the ink still drying on the Warner Music acquisition, the big question that audio enthusiasts who are following the high resolution audio format war are asking is – will Edgar Bronfman’s team continue to support the DVD-Audio format? AudioRevolution.com is told by a source very close to the development of the DVD-Audio format as well as an expert on SACD that there is one strong reason why WEA will remain DVD-Audio’s biggest supporter. That reason is TimeWarner’s continued ownership of some of the intellectual property for DVD-Audio. Even without owning a vast empire of record labels TimeWarner could possibly rake in tens of millions of dollars on royalty money in the case DVD-Audio or a DVD-Audio flip disc becomes the music industry’s standard for the sale of prerecorded music. Bronfman will likely face bigger, more immediate problems than what to do with high resolution audio and surround sound music regarding the short term success ...

AudioRevolution.com has learned from a reliable source that Warner Music (WEA) plans to forge ahead with a DVD-Audio/CD “flip disc” without approval from the DVD Forum. Without approval, the disc might not be able to be called a “DVD” but will play in every DVD-Audio, DVD-Video player, Xbox and Playstation 2, as well as in every CD player currently installed in consumers’ homes and cars. The new disc will compete with the “Hybrid” SACD which can be played on all CD players, as well as in high-resolution SACD players in both stereo and surround sound. Hybrid SACD is an approved and commercially successful format that is already being distributed by the SACD camp for artists like Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones. Hybrid SACD, unlike a DVD, cannot easily synch to video, which limits the added value possibilities on the format. Hybrid SACDs are also not backwards-compatible in surround sound to over ...

DTS will be releasing a 5.1 surround sound transmission of a live concert by David Bowie, from the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, to cinemas across Europe and North America. Broadcast live in 5.1-channel DTS 96/24 digital surround sound on September 8 in London, Paris, Munich and Zurich and re-broadcast on September 15 in the US and Canada, the event will demonstrate DTS' end-to-end solution for alternative E-cinema programming. DTS will be encoding the multi-channel audio feed at the concert venue, using its CAE-5 professional broadcast encoder. The DTS encoded signal will be fed to TANDBERG MPEG2 encoding equipment for global satellite delivery coordinated by live cinema events organizer Quantum Digital. The signal received at the designated cinema sites, using TANDBERG Integrated Receiver Decoder devices, will be fed to DTS' new XD10 Digital Cinema Media player, which will output the 96kHz 24 bit-quality surround sound audio.

Backwards compatibility of the new audio formats has been a highly sought-after feature in the ongoing new audio format war. DVD-Audio discs are backwards compatible via the default tracks, which can be Dolby Digital, DTS Surround, or something like DTS 24-96 stereo tracks. Pure DSD SACDs are not very compatible with anything other than dedicated SACD players, but the increasingly popular hybrid SACDs (for example, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the Rolling Stones SACDs) have an actual Red Book CD layer that makes the hybrid SACD actually play back on hundreds of millions of compact disc players located in music systems, home theaters, Walkmen, car audio systems and beyond. This has resulted in a good first week for Dark Side on SACD, which consultants for Sony say sold over 20,000 copies in its first week. Some reports have the numerous Rolling Stone SACD hybrid titles selling over 1,000,000 copies total. In ...