DVD: will HD-DVD and Blu Ray suffer the same destiny as Laser Disc ?

In My Humble Opinion
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[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
Same reason that even though jets were a revolution compared to props, the Concorde was a complete failure. To go twice as fast cost more than ten times as much and subsonic jets were fast enough…
[/QUOTE]
Actually, that’s a really good analogy. I’ll have to remember it. :slight_smile:

Another small thing working against the HD disc formats IMHO is the more complex and intrusive user interface. Java and active menus? Creating these will require new classes of skills and will make authoring more expensive in the short term, over and above the greater direct costs of HD storage and editing. I think tbhis extends to more complex DRM as well.

For something that was a sufficinet improvement to be a clear success, like DVD over VHS, though, it might not be a problem.

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Moved to IMHO.

-xash
General Questions Moderator

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I have a quick question in relation to this topic - today, I was at Best Buy and saw an HD-DVD copy of the movie “Full Metal Jacket”. What is the point of this? I mean, doesn’t the quality of the picture also greatly depend on the source material? And wouldn’t an average DVD with a quality transfer pretty much give you the best quality available based upon the original equipment that was used to make the film?

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[QUOTE=gazpacho]
I will buy the extra channels are something. But where is the clarity coming from? 20KHz to 24Khz? I don’t buy that an extra few bits beyond 16 bits can be heard. I am sure it can be measured but not heard.
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Hi def is record in 96/24, or even 192/24. That’s a LOT more resolution. And while it’s true that humans can’t hear above 20K, it’s a lot easier to design filters when they don’t have to cut off that low, and the loss of higher frequencies can cause phase distortion down in the lower audible frequencies.

Also, remember that we’re talking about stuff that is mixed especially for hi-res. A lot of CDs sound bad simply because they were pressed with a crappy mix that represented the limitations of the day. They can be highly compressed or filtered so that they didn’t cause problems - early equipment had a hard time keeping up with the added dynamic range of CDs over LPs. But now, the engineers have the freedom to mix the original masters at the native resolution and dynamic range, which just sounds better.

I’m the first guy to say that a lot of ‘golden ears’ are full of it. I don’t believe you can hear the differences between speaker cables, or between fancy interconnects and garden-variety ones. I think that most of exotic tricks audiophiles get into are completely worthless.

But in this case, the difference is clearly audible. Sure, a great CD mix can sound better than a crappy SACD mix. But a good hi-rez mix will simply blow away the sound quality of a CD. If you don’t believe me, go find a high-end stereo store and ask them to play some stuff for you. If you can find Beck’s “Sea Change” or Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, just sit back and listen to them. Then go listen to the CD mix.

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All modern CD players do over sampling or sigma delta d to A converters. This means while the information on the disc is sampled at 44.1 KHz the output dac is running at about 8 times that or higher. The last stage analog filters can be made very easily and still reproduce sound upto the niquist frequency of 22.05 KHz with very little phase distortion.

As for old crappy CDs sure they are old and crappy. But if you do all the stuff to make the high def formats and do that to the CD the cd will sound great. It has little to do with the audio format and almost all to do with getting a good first recording.

I really don’t buy that going from 16 bits per sample to some high number of bits is going to be audible. The 90db or so of signal to noise from 16 bits is just a lot better that people can hear.

interface2x I would hope that when they make an HD disc from full metal jacket they are making it from the actual film and not from the dvd. Film has 10 to 40 times the resolution of 1920x1808 HD TV.

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One way to possibly control the remastering issue might be to experiment with a hybrid SACD – I believe in at least some cases the remaster was also used for the redbook layer of the CD, in which case the only major issue remaining would seem to be the possibility that a multi-format player’s redbook capabilities were not on par with its SACD playback.

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[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
Same reason that even though jets were a revolution compared to props, the Concorde was a complete failure. …subsonic jets were fast enough…
[/QUOTE]

anybody remember “quad” stereo? Four channels, four speakers, …obviously better than two, right? Lots of hype, but it failed dismally.
Not everything new is better.

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[QUOTE=Sunspace]
Another small thing working against the HD disc formats IMHO is the more complex and intrusive user interface. Java and active menus? Creating these will require new classes of skills and will make authoring more expensive in the short term, over and above the greater direct costs of HD storage and editing.
[/QUOTE]
Nonsense. Most menus will be created with development kits (just as DVD menus are) anyway, so programming skills are a trivial issue. Even if you want to go all out and create a menu from the ground up and include tons of Java content in the special features, it’s Java. You can find monkeys to do it for $10.00/hr, if you want to go that way.

The important thing is that the interface is a spectacular improvement over the DVD spec’s “hyperlinked slideshow” approach, which is ridiculously limiting. No more having your menus spread out all over the damned place and waiting through delays as sound and video files are loaded for each sub-menu. Much more freedom and flexibility.

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[QUOTE=gazpacho]
All modern CD players do over sampling or sigma delta d to A converters. This means while the information on the disc is sampled at 44.1 KHz the output dac is running at about 8 times that or higher. The last stage analog filters can be made very easily and still reproduce sound upto the niquist frequency of 22.05 KHz with very little phase distortion.

As for old crappy CDs sure they are old and crappy. But if you do all the stuff to make the high def formats and do that to the CD the cd will sound great. It has little to do with the audio format and almost all to do with getting a good first recording.

I really don’t buy that going from 16 bits per sample to some high number of bits is going to be audible. The 90db or so of signal to noise from 16 bits is just a lot better that people can hear.

[/QUOTE]

Well, all I can tell you is that my SACD’s and DVD-A’s are so superior that I find it hard to critically listen to CDs any more. This isn’t a ‘golden ear’ phenomenon where people fool themselves into hearing differences that don’t exist. A-B tests of 96/24 vs 16/44 are easily distinguishable. For example, from this link I just found:

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Not sure about that review, Sam Stone. For example, if “finger cymbals were confined” to a channel on a particular mastering, and on another, “spread across the stage,” it’s obviously not anything to do with the format. And the last paragraph of that review? Unless gongs aren’t actually hit by mallets, what is a recording of a gong supposed to sound like?

Nothing from me to add of substance, except disappointment at yet another nonsensical review not English in competent written.

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[QUOTE=Cerowyn]
Actually, the copy protection scheme allows studios to create discs that won’t play in certain players, but that’s aimed at shutting out hardware that violates the copyright protection standards. It would be used to effectively “deactivate” hardware known to be usably for piracy.
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This is another big roadblock: the aggressive DRM is a turn-off to a portion of the technophile audience who would normally be the early adopters of the new hardware. And the first time a whole bunch of people’s HD-DVD players suddenly stop working because a movie studio decided to turn it off… that won’t be very good PR for the formats.

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[QUOTE=Jaledin]
Not sure about that review, Sam Stone. For example, if “finger cymbals were confined” to a channel on a particular mastering, and on another, “spread across the stage,” it’s obviously not anything to do with the format. And the last paragraph of that review? Unless gongs aren’t actually hit by mallets, what is a recording of a gong supposed to sound like?

Nothing from me to add of substance, except disappointment at yet another nonsensical review not English in competent written.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, this is obviously a contentious and very subjective topic, which is why it has been debated endlessly in audiophile circles. There are generally two camps - the raionalist, engineering types who understand information theory, sampling theory, the Nyquist frequency, yada yada. Then there are the audiophiles who may have little to no technical training, but “know what they hear”.

I’m in the first camp. If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist. If it flies in the face of existing theory, I’m hugely skeptical. And most of the time, I think the audiophiles are wrong, and are victims of subjectivism and wishful thinking.

However, we are dealing with a very complex environment here, and sometimes just saying, “The Nyquist frequency is all that matters!” is just too simplistic. In the real world, filters are not perfect. Recording and mastering practices for CDs may be different than for other sources. There are interactions between components, both on the recording side and the playback side.

The fact is, there are a lot of blind tests that have shown that people can easily distinguish between a 44.1K CD and a 96K sampled wave file. But there are some that don’t show that at all. So it probably comes down to the underlying environments - the master, the type of equipment used to reproduce the sound, etc.

Another thing that may affect the sound (just as a guess) is the require to downsample studio masters in an uneven increment. Studio masters these days are usually done at 96K or 192K - this is done to get a very signal to noise ratio so that the noise floor is still plenty low after adding in reverb, other effects, compression, etc. Then the resulting mix is downsampled for CD. I wonder if the downsampling process in a lot of studios just isn’t that great when going from 96K to 44.1. Maybe 48K, a nice even multiple, would be more accurate. In any event, presenting the output in native 96/24 eliminates the downsampling step entirely.

Complicating matters even further is that SACD in particular uses an entirely different encoding mechanism for the bit stream, which has its own pluses and minuses.

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[QUOTE=chappachula]
anybody remember “quad” stereo? Four channels, four speakers, …obviously better than two, right? Lots of hype, but it failed dismally.
Not everything new is better.
[/QUOTE]
It failed dismally because it was not a huge leap over what came before, and because of a three-sided format war. Different content appeared exclusively in different formats, devices used one format and not another, and everyone ‘left the marketplace to decide’. AM Stereo failed the same way.

People waited until the format wars were resolved, and by the time devices appeared that could handle all formats, manufacturers and content providers (record companies and radio starions) had already given up on the affair, unable to throw money at it long enough.

Unless single-format HD disc players and recorders become very inexpensive very fast so that people will buy one of each, or unless combo BluRay/HD-DVD players and recorders appear within the next two years or so, or unless all the major content providers–movie studios and retailers, for example–release their content in both formats (which they really don’t want to do), the HD disc market will be seriously weakened by the format wars.

I quite agree with you on the possibilities of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray menus, Larry; I think their potential is far greater than that of DVD menus. But there will be that small learning curve which is just another strike against HD discs.

And on preview, what Joools about overly-aggressive DRM inhibiting uptake by technophile early-adopters.