In the interest of complete disclosure and fairness, I should state right out front that my personal preference in the “format war between SACD and DVD-Audio” skews in favor of high-resolution PCM over DSD. Let me share a few of my reasons for this choice. First and foremost is the fidelity of the sound delivered to our customers. While both formats have the potential to deliver audio fidelity that surpasses CDs, comments that I regularly receive from customers and the reviews that I read put our tracks at or near the top of most lists (we recently took Number One and Two in the list of the Top 20 “best multi-channel discs” in the May/June issue of DVD Etc. Magazine). Secondly, AIX Records has been producing multi-channel, high-resolution digital audio for many years and has developed a rather extensive capability for dealing with multi-track PCM audio. All other things being equal, the number of equivalent tools in the world of DSD is not yet as great. In fact, a large percentage of so-called DSD tracks actually existed at some point in their life as PCM. When I started making our products, the best available DSD system, the Sonoma from Sony, could record only eight tracks and all post processing had to be done in the analog domain, so going with PCM was a no-brainer. Thirdly, as any current AIX Records customer will attest, I am a strong advocate of delivering feature-rich discs to consumers. This means having video, photos, lyrics and much more on the same disc that plays the new high-resolution, multi-channel audio. As most of you are already aware, DVD-Audio discs usually contain a “DVD-Video” zone. Producers of DVD-Audio titles can choose to place Dolby Digital or DTS mixes in that portion of the disc for playability in DVD-Video machines, as well as video footage. SACDs are audio-only products; there is no provision for multimedia. The final reason why I chose to release titles in the DVD-Audio format instead of SACD is the vast number of players that can access the audio and video that we put on each disc. Currently, there are over 75 million DVD-Video players and 3.5 million DVD-Audio players (including factory installed car systems), compared to more than a million SACD players reportedly installed in the U.S. Don’t get me wrong, SACD can sound very good, especially for stereo music, but as a professional recording engineer and the owner of a specialty record label, I prefer to make and sell DVD-Audio titles.

I founded AIX Records in the spring of 2001 because I wanted to explore the emerging DVD-Audio format with music content that I would produce and own. Back in the spring of 1997, AIX Media Group was the first company to produce and commercially release a DVD-Video title. Yes, we had 100 percent of the DVD business for five days back in March of that year. Since then, we’ve produced many hundreds of DVDs for movie studios large and small and have maintained a healthy production company in the intervening years. The arrival of the DVD-Audio format offered an opportunity to produce AND own content. Since the cost of making an audio title pales in comparison to producing a feature film, since we have tremendous expertise in audio/music and since I’m an audio engineer/musician, the world of DVD-Audio seemed the right place to start a new venture.