SACD and DVD-Audio, Doomed Formats?

[deacongreg]

I hear you. But, that is where we are, for now.

[pws442]

So much to say....

henry33--> Sit in a vehicle with a sound system such as the Acuras. It is tough to go back. And, lack of CD ability is the major reason I returned the LG. Unbelievable! Read on about the LG's strength...

kennyt--> when the LG combo player was playing the DVD-A disk, my display said Dolby Digital, and the demo disk made be believe it was not the Denon 3808CI fooling me. My Panasonic would play them, but the manual said it was 2-channel PCM only. (I wish I could be more definitive about it. Perhaps looking at the manuals for each would resolve it.)

deacongreg--> Amen! I do hold out hope for a unified player.

CharlyD--> Yes, the US is behind in broadband connection speed. Possibly because we have a couple of hundred (thousand) times the area to cover, possibly because our copper has been around for a heluva lot longer, and is not as pure as the new stuff going in in Japan and the Republic of Samsung.

[stevea]

Is there any reason why music should not just move on from SACD/DVD-A to TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio? Almost all the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD players support at least TrueHD, and being lossless and able to support multiple channels and sample-depths and sample-rates similar to SACD/DVD-A. Oh, and almost all the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD players support at least TrueHD. It would seem like a no brainer to do, so it seems as though there must be a reason for not switching?

[CharlyD]

Originally Posted by stevea

Is there any reason why music should not just move on from SACD/DVD-A to TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio?

I would guess the cost of entry is currently too high for most music labels. Also, most music content does not have associated video. A DVD-A disk might have ~5GB of data, far less than the capacity of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Some concerts (Dave Mathews) and an opera (The Magic Flute) have been released in hi-def format, and it will be interesting to see how these do in the marketplace.

I'm still strongly in favor of the downloaded content model where I can pick and choose which tracks I want, store them on a server and select and play these tracks through a modern, graphical interface.

[henry33]

My Pioneer Blu-ray player doesn't offer TrueHD or DTS-HD, so there must be others that don't. What's the need for any codec - even lossless - when there's plenty of room for 5.1 PCM which sounds the best of all? Why "move on" to those lossless codecs when we have loads of universal and dedicated players as well as processors which now handle SACD and it works great? Rather than fuss with yet another two formats, I think attention should be focused on what Telarc, DMP and Chesky experimented with on early SACDs and dropped, and the Swiss 2+2+2 process now offers on the MDG & DiVox labels: a much better use of the center and sub channels which are not needed for music!

[deacongreg]

Hmmmmmmmm, quite interesting henry33.