Digital is turning every industry upsaide downs and into battlefield for platform wars. The newly ended one was the war between HD DVD and Bluray between Sony and Toshiba. Before that there was the Toshiba DVD-Audio and Sony’s SACD war. I really hoped that SACD would win out as I really like the quality jump and it was great when I played the Nora Jones SACD. It was like she was performing in our living room.
These platforms war usually consists of both a hard ware and software play and content drives adoption.
The first one is DVD-Audio was launched in 2000, a standard that’s obviously connected to the DVD video discs. The group includes Toshiba, Philips, Pioneer, and surprisingly Sony and you wonder why (hedging I guess?). The format supports a bit depth of 24-bit, 5.1 audio tracks encoded up to 96kHz, and 2-channel stereo tracks up to 192kHz. In comparison, CD Audio resolution is 16-bit at a sample rate of 44.1kHz. That was a big jump. And below is a player that plays CDs and vinyl records, clever.
Super Audio CD or SACD format comes from Sony and Philips, the same two companies behind the audio CD. SACD is stored in a format called Direct Stream Digital (DSD). It brings back the warmth which was missing in early digital CDs and the dynamic range was drastically improved particularly on the higher frequency end. I hope it will finally come back and get adoption since having four speakers in a room is very common now.
The format war was not the concern of main stream users, just for the audiophiles. People are generally happy with burning CDRs and the SACD or DVDA content available was very limited. And SACDs were expensive.
Then came the launch of iPod, people jumped on it and ignore the quality issue. The market was divided into portable mid-quality music or audios remaining and high-end music systems.
Obviously, neither DVD-A or SACD have been wildly successful, but I wouldn’t write them off just yet. Remember that the audio CD was originally launched in 1980 and it took about a decade for it to truly take off. When it comes to traditional audio formats, it can simply take a while for the public to accept it.
Now slowly the quality gap is closed and people are asking the questions can a music server sound better than a CD player?
There’s server such as Olive's 4HD music server that many believe sounds. The beauty of that is it doesn’t require being hooked up to a PC or a Mac. It's more a like a CD player with a built-in two terabyte hard drive and there is a Wi-Fi module to hook up with the home network. It also comes with a free application to let you use your iPhone or iPod Touch as full remote control and that's a smart idea. The 4HD can store high-resolution audio files, up to 24-bit/192KHz on its hard drive.
Some are saying the quality is better than SACD which I have yet to be convinced. It costs $1,500 if you’re interested. BTW can they make it look a little sexier? One ugly expensive box. If they can't afford an industrial designer, I will do it for free. It is so ugly and undesirable. In the meantime, I am sticking to my CD player hooked up to my McIntosh systems and JBL speakers (see photos below of my audio/video room).The next 12 months we will see a proliferation of high end digital products with fill integration with our home networks.
