Hi-Rez Media: When Will They Learn?

No!"
I was somewhat surprised by my lack of equivocation. The time was January 2005, the scene was the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and I had just been asked by a high-end audio company if they should devote their engineering resources to developing a Super Audio CD player.

My response was perhaps even more puzzling because, the day before I flew out to Las Vegas, I had turned in the report on the dCS Verona Master Clock that appears in this issue (p.115). That review turned out significantly longer than I'd expected because I ended up including a "Follow-Up" on the complete dCS SACD playback system. As you can read, I felt that SACDs played back on this $45,000, four-box rig produced the finest sound I have experienced in my system. So why did I not hesitate to answer "No!"?

A writer was once asked what he thought about something. "I don't know," he reportedly replied. "I haven't written about it yet." His point was that the act of writing forces opinions to crystallize from an undigested soup of ideas and experiences. Similarly, while I had been absorbing data on the state of SACD and DVD-Audio over the past months, it was the manufacturer's direct question that "collapsed the wave function" and forced me to integrate those data into a single-word answer.

Five years after the launch of SACD and four after that of DVD-A (originally scheduled for 1999, the DVD-A launch was delayed by a Norwegian teenager's hacking of the CSS copy-protection code used by DVD), the hi-rez media are showing many signs of health. Almost 250 record labels have offered a total of almost 3000 titles on SACD, and more than 110 labels offer DVD-As. (The number of DVD-A titles is hard to determine, but appears to be around half the number of SACD releases.) The advent of low-cost DVD-A burning programs, such as Minnetonka Software's Discwelder Bronze program for PCs and Macs (see "Letters," p.11), and the introduction of new SACD mastering systems at last November's AES Convention are also welcome portents.

Recent major releases from modern mainstream artists are appearing on the hi-rez media—Jamie Cullum, Diana Krall, Tierney Sutton, Alicia Keyes—but so are significant numbers of back-catalog titles. Obscure rock artists such as Nick Drake are now available on SACD, the Grateful Dead can be found on DVD-A, and even the Carpenters' Singles 1969–1981 has been released on SACD. Classical music lovers are enjoying the release of the RCA Living Stereo, Mercury Living Presence, and Philips (Pentatone) catalogs on SACD, and the Nimbus catalog on DVD-A. Jazz lovers can browse the Concord, Vanguard, Fantasy, and Groove Note catalogs on SACD. And Classic Records continues to promote DVD-Video as a carrier for hi-rez music with its post-CES release of that audiophile favorite, the Casino Royale soundtrack, in both 24-bit/96kHz and 24/192 formats.

Things also look healthy on the hardware front. The 2005 CES witnessed new high-end SACD, DVD-A, and universal players from Ayre Acoustics, Conrad-Johnson, Cary, Denon, Esoteric, Meridian, and Sony Qualia. Musical Fidelity and dCS say they will introduce new SACD players later this year. And you'd think that the existence of something like the Pioneer DV-578A-S universal player, which I recently purchased from www.audioadvisor.com for just $129, could catalyze the acceptance of the new media by the mass market.

The underlying reality, however, is that neither SACD nor DVD-A has yet developed significant market traction. Despite the appeal to some listeners of the media's multichannel content, the public is voting with their wallets (when the record industry can persuade them to part with cold cash) for downloadable, data-compressed, two-channel music files.

The news last November that, in the first six months of 2004, deliveries to US record retailers of SACDs and DVD-As combined were lower than those of the supposedly obsolete LP gave me pause. Yes, there may be almost 3000 SACD titles available, but if the overall US shipments were 300,000 in January–June 2004, as claimed by the RIAA, that means that only 100 units, on average, of each title were offered to retail customers in that period. Even if you consider that the RIAA figures appear to omit hybrid SACDs, which are racked in record stores as regular CDs, and which account for half of all SACD titles, these statistics do not describe a market that has much to offer, other than engineering prestige, to an audio company thinking of offering a new SACD player.

The mystery, to me at least, is why Sony's own labels have not been more aggressive in promoting SACD. And as Jon Iverson wrote in this space in January, the DVD-Audio folks appear to be abandoning DVD-A in favor of DualDisc.With DVD-A or -V data on one side and CD on the other, the hope is that the DualDisc, like the hybrid SACD, will spread by stealth (footnote 1) (see "Letters," p.15 and "Update," p.17).

But, of course, that strategy does not take into account the forthcoming battle between two mutually incompatible disc media that use a blue-laser pickup, the 25GB Blu-ray format and the 15GB HD-DVD format (both figures refer to a single-sided, single-layer disc). As well as high-definition video, Blu-ray offers standard Dolby Digital and DTS-HD for audio, and is supported by Sony, Pioneer, and Panasonic, all of whom demonstrated Blu-ray players at CES. (There was no indication at CES whether the DSD encoding used on SACD will be used on Blu-ray.) HD-DVD, supported by Toshiba, Microsoft, and the DVD Forum, offers hi-def video and audio specifications similar to DVD-Audio, with MLP, DTS-HD, and Dolby Digital Plus, and is said to be coming to market later this year.

First we lived through VHS vs Beta, where there was a clear winner. Then we almost had a war of Toshiba-Warner-Matsushita's SD vs Sony-Philips' MCD, averted only when the two sides came to their senses in 1995 to collaborate on DVD. Then we lived through DVD-A vs SACD, with neither format winning. And now we have Blu-ray vs HD-DVD, which, as well as further confusing consumers, could well draw their progenitors' attention away from the current hi-rez audio battle.

When will they learn?

http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/305awsi/

Sony halts production of CDs with copy-protection scheme

WASHINGTON — Stung by continuing criticism, the world's second-largest music label, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, promised Friday to temporarily suspend making music CDs with anti-piracy technology that can leave computers vulnerable to hackers.

Sony defended its right to prevent customers from illegally copying music but said it will halt manufacturing CDs with the "XCP" technology as a precautionary measure. "We also intend to re-examine all aspects of our content protection initiative to be sure that it continues to meet our goals of security and ease of consumer use," the company said in a statement.

The anti-piracy technology, which works only on Windows computers, prevents customers from making more than a few copies of the CD and prevents them from loading the CD's songs onto Apple Computer's popular iPod portable music players. Some other music players, which recognize Microsoft's proprietary music format, would work.

Sony's announcement came one day after leading security companies disclosed that hackers were distributing malicious programs over the Internet that exploited the anti-piracy technology's ability to avoid detection. Hackers discovered they can effectively render their programs invisible by using names for computer files similar to ones cloaked by the Sony technology.

Sony's program is included on about 20 popular music titles, including releases by Van Zant and The Bad Plus.

"This is a step they should have taken immediately," said Mark Russinovich, chief software architect at Internals Software who discovered the hidden copy-protection technology Oct. 31 and posted his findings on his Web log. He said Sony did not admit any wrongdoing, nor did it promise not to use similar techniques in the future.

Security researchers have described Sony's technology as "spyware," saying it is difficult to remove, transmits without warning details about what music is playing, and that Sony's notice to consumers about the technology was inadequate. Sony executives have rejected the description of their technology as spyware.

Some leading anti-virus companies updated their protective software this week to detect Sony's anti-piracy program, disable it and prevent it from reinstalling.

After Russinovich criticized Sony, it made available a software patch that removed the technology's ability to avoid detection. It also made more broadly available its instructions on how to remove the software permanently. Customers who remove the software are unable to listen to the music CD on their computer.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2005-11-11-sony-cds_x.htm