It looks as if the release of DVD-Audio players will be delayed by several more months. Any comments about the situation?
COMMENTS
DVD-Audio is a vast overkill and will at best be a small niche format. Only DTS, among the "superhigh" audio formats have even a chance of popular acceptance. The industry should work with what we have - the existing DD 5.1 and maybe even DTS, to make them as good as possible, instead of flooding us with numerous unwanted formats.
Can no longer wait for the first units, as the family is wanting a DVD player for the holidays. So for now it's a lower-end DVD player (no decoder)until the manufacturers can get their act together. This is a blown opportunity to compete with Sony -- what's taking so long?
DVD-Audio is being pushed as a high quality multi-channel format. Most people can't afford adequate equipment to play back the low-quality (dolby surround) music out now. Very, very few people could ever really afford the kind of equipment that it would take to really take advantage of the DVD-A format.
My rant on the Soapbox says it all. I just hope that enough people buy SACD to finally get the message across to the DVD-Audio Forum. And Sony and company can help their own case substantially in the interim by getting lots of software out and (as much as I hate the idea) putting out some multichannel mixes to counter the DVD market monopoly on multichannel sound. They also need an integrated DVD-V/SACD player to sell to Joe Average in the $500-$1000 price range to make inroads before DVD-A is available. Make an SACD Discman while you're at it, and price it low. Work all the angles, and don't forget to reread "The Art of War."
I think that for most people the term dvd-a means nothing, for audiophiles ,it is everything.We have devored any information available and hopping to see the first gear and disc in the stores.Reality is; record companies need to be shure about piracy protection ; hardware comp. need an efective encryption program ; our disc collections are to big to be neglected and if we have waited until now for dvd-a, better they come with a final product not a prototype.I will enjoy my equipments and discs until something concrete happens so , see you in 2000.
I can't think of a better way for the DVD manufacturers to put a gun to their heads. Let's face it, any encoding system can and will be cracked. If they want DVD-Audio to succeed, we need product in the stores now, so software manufacturers will have a user base to support.
Don't really care. If 40+ years of observing the cultural scene have indicated any one thing to me, it's that if I think anything has promise, the mass market will ignore it and prefer its opposite; if I crave quality, the commerical industry will provide cheap crap; and every decision that can be made, when there's a choice, will be the wrong one. It's been this way in nearly every art for virtually centuries: first we learn to do it, then we learn to do it well, and from then on we learn to do it more more and more conveniently and cheaply. "Progress" takes the form of this continual contest to provide convenience and cheapness. Eventually, all the authentic quality is sucked out of anything dictated by markets and masses. Compare a finely bound book printed by letterpress on paper made from cotton rag to a typical book today; compare a 1910 platinum contact print to an APS snapshot today; compare elegant early Unix code to the gawdawful Microsoft junk software we're all stuck using today; compare a beautiful purist-miked jazz quartet recording of the pre-invasion years playing on a lovely tube-and-vinyl stereo system of the 1950s or '60s to whatever dumbass thing they're going to do with DVD. The new things may all have desirable properties, but high quality and/or aesthetic elegance is never one of them. I don't know what DVD-Audio going to be, but one thing I'm pretty sure it's going to be is: a disappointment.
Multichannel audio is a joke. There is no way the average (or even fanatic) music listener will be able to get it right. The only people who will like it are the compulsive tweakers, because that is what it will take to get realistic sound out of multichannel music (constant tweaking from one disc to the next). Add to that the fact that only crowd noise and some slight (measurable, but barely decernible by the human ear) wall reflections. I hope it dies a very quick death so we can get on with improving two-channel music.
No DVD players for six months? You're kidding!! Actually, I'm not surprised at all! Since when have we had anything in the audiophile world out on time that they get us excited about? Maybe this will give Sony the opportunity to put out some reasonably priced SACD players that we will all go buy because this format sounds light years ahead of DVD anyway. Yahooooo!
DVD-A, it's really a joke. Not on us, but on the companies that are investing and wasting millions on a new format, machines, and new software, when it could have been just "next year's" upgrade to regular DVD-V machines. Here's the solution to your copy-protection schemes: "Wherever there's a lock, there's a key." Just make the DVD-V better, because you guys are just ending up back where you started in the first place with the Universal players anyways.
First of all, it's not as if I'm planning on running out and buying a DVD-Audio player the day they are released, but it's a matter of principle. Companies have stopped caring about customer satisfaction entirely. They are soley obsessed with not allowing anyone to get away with a free copy of an outrageously overpriced album.
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