DVD-Audio backers - What Happened?

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My guess is this is the truth. Microsoft just said see ya later to CES. Dolby is not in the battle they were with DTS when every year they even battled for the greatest party. I would get to meet Al Schmidt, Elliot Schenier, Ed Cherney, David Tickle, Robert Margouleff all at one party. The band would be a DTS band like The Mavericks. One year i watched as Edgar Winters, Alan Parsons, and Jeff Skunk Baxter took off to finish off the evening. That was quite a sight, for many reasons. These parties rented out whole restaurants like the Harley Davidson themed joint. This was when they battled for space on the disc, with blu the battle is over. The battle is now to stay relevant.

But is it true? Did Bob Stuart or some other informed insider tell you this? How exactly did Dolby go about killing off high quality audio?

As for the company's absence at AES etc....the economy's been kinda troubled for the past few years, to put it mildly. A lot of companies have 'downsized' their convention presence. Dolby may well be hurting along with the others. And perusing the stock charts I see Dolby got killed this year in the market by the announcement that Microsoft might not include Dolby's DVD/Blu-ray playback codecs in Windows 8. That would be a huge licensing revenue loss for Dolby. To make it up, Dolby is going to have to try to license its tech to the computer hardware side, e.g., Dell, HP etc.
 
But is it true? Did Bob Stuart or some other informed insider tell you this? How exactly did Dolby go about killing off high quality audio?

Because as we know, Dolby didn't kill off CDs (which hold 'higher quality' audio than AC3). And you can't blame the anemic market performance of DSD or SACD on Dolby. And Dolby itself now touts its high rez, lossless, multichannel-capable MLP-based compression audio for DolbyTrueHD on Blu-Ray discs. And I don't see from what you wrote how Dolby even killed off DVD-A specifically.

As for the history: Dolby first made its name in professional noise reduction and cinema sound -- not lossy compression. It migrated both of these to home audio. And some of its products remain pretty widespread today : for example, DPLII in some flavor is a feature of damn near every AVR marketed for the past decade or so. They're still making cinema products too. Wikipedia tells us "On June 18, 2010, Dolby introduced Dolby Surround 7.1, and set up theaters worldwide with 7.1 surround speaker setups to deliver theatrical 7.1 surround sound. The first film to be released with this format was Toy Story 3 which was later followed by 50 releases using the format."


Btw, a lot of my DVD-As -- and I've been buying them since they first appeared on the market -- have DTS tracks on them; that's an odd thing indeed if Dolby was or is in fact controlling the fate of DVD-A.

As for the company's absence at AES etc....the economy's been kinda troubled for the past few years, to put it mildly. A lot of companies have 'downsized' their convention presence. Dolby may well be hurting along with the others. And perusing the stock charts I see Dolby got killed this year in the market by the announcement that Microsoft might not include Dolby's DVD/Blu-ray playback codecs in Windows 8. That would be a huge licensing revenue loss for Dolby. To make it up, Dolby is going to have to try to license its tech to the computer hardware side, e.g., Dell, HP etc.

I see most BR movies are just dts master audio. not many DD HD. Yes the same w/ dvd-audio most are mlp or dts. In fact the FZ stuff is just MLP and dts HD or SD
 
But is it true? Did Bob Stuart or some other informed insider tell you this? How exactly did Dolby go about killing off high quality audio?

Because as we know, Dolby didn't kill off CDs (which hold 'higher quality' audio than AC3). And you can't blame the anemic market performance of DSD or SACD on Dolby. And Dolby itself now touts its high rez, lossless, multichannel-capable MLP-based compression audio for DolbyTrueHD on Blu-Ray discs. And I don't see from what you wrote how Dolby even killed off DVD-A specifically.

As for the history: Dolby first made its name in professional noise reduction and cinema sound -- not lossy compression. It migrated both of these to home audio. And some of its products remain pretty widespread today : for example, DPLII in some flavor is a feature of damn near every AVR marketed for the past decade or so. They're still making cinema products too. Wikipedia tells us "On June 18, 2010, Dolby introduced Dolby Surround 7.1, and set up theaters worldwide with 7.1 surround speaker setups to deliver theatrical 7.1 surround sound. The first film to be released with this format was Toy Story 3 which was later followed by 50 releases using the format."


Btw, a lot of my DVD-As -- and I've been buying them since they first appeared on the market -- have DTS tracks on them; that's an odd thing indeed if Dolby was or is in fact controlling the fate of DVD-A.

As for the company's absence at AES etc....the economy's been kinda troubled for the past few years, to put it mildly. A lot of companies have 'downsized' their convention presence. Dolby may well be hurting along with the others. And perusing the stock charts I see Dolby got killed this year in the market by the announcement that Microsoft might not include Dolby's DVD/Blu-ray playback codecs in Windows 8. That would be a huge licensing revenue loss for Dolby. To make it up, Dolby is going to have to try to license its tech to the computer hardware side, e.g., Dell, HP etc.

As one of the co-developers and patent holders of DVD Audio, Dolby was very supportive of the format in the early days. They helped with marketing the format, engineering and producing DVD Audio releases, promoting DVD Audio in their publications, trade show exhibits, underwriting DVD Audio events, etc.

Dolby has always had their irons in many areas/formats as a company that makes money licensing technology (LaserDisc, AC-3, MLP. Dolby True HD, DVD Video, DVD Audio, Blu-Ray, etc.) I'm guessing that Dolby shifted its marketing resources and dollars towards Blu-Ray as time went on - but I doubt they "killed" DVD Audio. After all, Dolby makes money on every DVD Audio disc.
 
My guess is this is the truth. Microsoft just said see ya later to CES. Dolby is not in the battle they were with DTS when every year they even battled for the greatest party. I would get to meet Al Schmidt, Elliot Schenier, Ed Cherney, David Tickle, Robert Margouleff all at one party. The band would be a DTS band like The Mavericks. One year i watched as Edgar Winters, Alan Parsons, and Jeff Skunk Baxter took off to finish off the evening. That was quite a sight, for many reasons. These parties rented out whole restaurants like the Harley Davidson themed joint. This was when they battled for space on the disc, with blu the battle is over. The battle is now to stay relevant.

Agreed. Back in the day, the music concerts at CES vendor events - and even before that Comdex vendor events - were amazing. I remember a Comdex event where Word Perfect introduced a new version of their software by holding a concert with Ray Charles, his Orchestra and the Raelettes! And then there was the IBM introduction of OS/2 2.0 at UNLV Arena which was followed by a concert featuring what one IBMer described as "a scraggly haired guitarist named Kenny Loggins." Those were the days...

Back to CES. I stopped going a few years back when the show became more of a flat panel TV show each year - and other vendors in Technology and Home Theater began to pull up their stakes and left - most notably Apple. Microsoft will do much better by announcing products on their own schedule and in their own events vs. spending millions at CES. I'm surprised they didn't pull out sooner.
 
can't see any connection between Dolby and downfall of DVD-Audio.
after all DVDA is more medium to store different audio and video formats, than the format itself. even competing SACD uses same DVD medium to
store Sony's format. for all those years, particularly at beginning, i seen promo campain Sony in support of SACD but haven't ever seen anything similar in support of DVD-Audio. they both failed miserably. SACD due to Sony's greed, DVD-Audio - because lack of promo and hardware support from manufacturers.
 
It IS a pity that Jimby packed up his things and left...
I do agree with Jon that this is a Forum and there are people who will always butt heads, but , if he didn't feel like being around; well, there's nothing we can do about it...

We DID learn , however, that MCH (on DVDA) mixes did not make any money, but, curiously enough , it IS still alive and ...I wouldn't say well , but it is still alive and we still get a nice stream of MCH releases, be it in lossy , a la Tull DTS DVDVs (the FMacs!), the Yes, XTC and KCrimson (which are ALSO released on BD), along with some new/smaller artists which find it a very sensible way to get a lossless MCH out there without paying the ridiculous BD Sony fee.

So, in a nutshell, if The Beatles are still releasing lossless MCH stuff (although in BD), and Steven Wilson is doing stuff with all of his various projects, Jimby was trying to be a "realist"(not a pessimist, just keeping it real) and gave us an inside view of the industry in 2010-2011, which , was a "low tide" time....so sad he didn't want to stick around-maybe he had more projects to do, or simply retired (or just passed away!)...

Thanks anyway, Jimby!
 
For the surround community, perhaps we should focus our energies on what we can do. Developing new legal surround markets from the ground up ourselves starting with local bands. I know as one who plays live that the opportunities are here, now. We have the skills and know how. Also, we can advocate and educate the general music listening audience about surround and Hi-Rez formats. We can blog here and there are free blogging tools out there as well.

There are Tons of Multi-Tracks waiting to be mixed on people's hard drives and we can get help here on how to do this. This is a simple postive step we can do that would not cost much if anything, and might be the start of many a surround business. By going into your local music scene and making simple deals with unsigned local bands to give them the Hi-Rez Stereo/Surround treatment and offering free sampler downloads for DVD-A (or whatever format), this is one front in many of moving the ball forward for surround.

IMHO we need to build the market from the ground up, just as what was done with MP3 not that long ago. I'm also confident that another surround era of many releases will come because the technology is already here. Folks just need some music for their players.

For anybody interested in this kind of thing, I encourage you to check out (and support) https://surroundmusic.one (and other outlets that offer up indie surround artists' work).
Jan's vision is to make it affordable for inde (and major) artists to offer up their multitracks for discrete surround mixing.
There are several flac albums (and maybe other formats) on the site already.

I'm a big fan of the discrete orchestral albums by cristale and proud of my own surround rock album, also mixed by cristale. There are relatively undiscovered albums available to enjoy, at least for those equipped to listen to downloads. And given enough interest, maybe some of these download albums will become DVDs or Blurays someday. :music
 
can't see any connection between Dolby and downfall of DVD-Audio.
after all DVDA is more medium to store different audio and video formats, than the format itself. even competing SACD uses same DVD medium to
store Sony's format. for all those years, particularly at beginning, i seen promo campain Sony in support of SACD but haven't ever seen anything similar in support of DVD-Audio.

Dolby did marketing for DVD Audio including funding DVD Audio samplers, DVD Audio events and they funded the production and mixing of albums into DVD Audio format.
Very much like Sony and Philips did for SACD and DTS did for discs with DTS encoding.

SACDs continue to be released every month these days, especially in the Classical, Jazz and Reissue markets.
DVD Audio and the succesor DualDisc format don't appear much any more. When they do, it's generally for a Special Edition release.
 
...SACDs continue to be released every month these days, especially in the Classical, Jazz and Reissue markets.
DVD Audio and the succesor DualDisc format don't appear much any more. When they do, it's generally for a Special Edition release.

Given that we still have SACD and Bluray Audio, my only concern is the eventual disappearance from production of hardware that supports DVD-A. Hopefully it's the equivalent of worrying about when the sun is going to burn out, but many of us have a lot of these discs in our collections.
 
Part of the problem with DVD-Audio was that they kept screwing with the software and firmware. I have owned several DVD-Audio players, and NOT ONE of them would play every DVD-Audio disk that I own. Some would play most, some would play almost none of them ... and differing authoring preferences made things much worse. I think that they were in a death-race with SACD and they released the format before it was ready, planning to make updates on the fly. Good riddance to it.
 
Given that we still have SACD and Bluray Audio, my only concern is the eventual disappearance from production of hardware that supports DVD-A. Hopefully it's the equivalent of worrying about when the sun is going to burn out, but many of us have a lot of these discs in our collections.

It's a valid concern. We saw some of that with the release of the new Oppo 203 and 205 disc players which no longer support HDCD disc decoding.
The good news is that the recent prediction by Naxos' CEO that music on optical discs (CD, SACD, etc.) still have another 5-10 years left suggest there will still be new optical disc players for somewhat longer.

But when you compare the ever declining number of audio companies that are making optical disc players with the increase of companies and products making digital music file players and converters (now over 500 for DSD files - see http://www.nativedsd.com/database), it's clear that the industry is moving in another direction. And it explains why many music fans are transferring their CD, SACD, etc. collections to music files.

The same applies to DVD Audio discs. They can be transferred to music files. And then played back on digital music players and converters (DACs).
Time to consider starting such a conversion project for those who haven't done so I'd suggest.
 
It's a valid concern.......The same applies to DVD Audio discs. They can be transferred to music files. And then played back on digital music players and converters (DACs). Time to consider starting such a conversion project for those who haven't done so I'd suggest.

Good advice, Brian. It's funny and ironic. After all of the hub-bub of the copy protection delaying DVD-Audio, and the encryption of DVD and SACD, just a scant decade later were are all moving to converting everything to files for future playback - doing the very thing that all of these companies were trying so hard to prevent.

And soon, their business model will be just that - selling downloads of their product.
 
Good riddance to HDCD. Over the past three decades, I tried really hard to hear a difference and just could not. Sometimes I thought I was hearing a slight difference but it was just that, or a placebo.

As far as 'other' formats that may disappear, the so-called optical disc prediction, in 5-10 years? Tell that to vinyl records Industry. I think it will be way longer than that. Another couple decades for me is all I care about. If I last that long. I see the compact disc going first before any of the HiRes Optical Disc formats.
 
I have owned several DVD-Audio players, and NOT ONE of them would play every DVD-Audio disk that I own.

I've played (parts of) the Beatles Love DVD-A in five DVD-A players and only one of them could handle the layer change at the end of Back in the USSR correctly.
 
Good advice, Brian. It's funny and ironic. After all of the hub-bub of the copy protection delaying DVD-Audio, and the encryption of DVD and SACD, just a scant decade later were are all moving to converting everything to files for future playback - doing the very thing that all of these companies were trying so hard to prevent.

And soon, their business model will be just that - selling downloads of their product.

Very true.

I remember interviewing a Universal Music exec years ago for High Fidelity Review about their Hi Res Audio plans and interest.

He told me among the reasons why UMG went with SACD before they put out DVD-A discs was the option of having Single Layer SACDs which only play in SACD players, have no Stereo CD layer and do not use audible watermarks.
(The SACD watermarking is physical, on the disc vs. embedded in the music file itself, when used).

UMG also was interested in SACD being a format with Stereo and Surround releases vs. primarily Surround with DVD-A.
They thought that was a better match in terms of what buyers were looking for (Stereo releases and CD Stereo option with the Hybrid SACD disc).

As a result, the first batch of Universal Music releases were an interesting mix of Stereo and Surround SACDs.
Some Hybrid SACDs (Stereo and Surround) and some Single Layer SACDs (Stereo and Surround). This, long after Sony Music switched to Hybrid SACD releases only.
Later UMG too went to Hybrid SACD releases - although we did see a return to Single Layer SACDs with the SHM-SACDs in Japan.

Today, we see what you said. The fastest category of new releases from the record labels are indeed Music Downloads.
That is followed by Stereo CDs, Vinyl LPs , SACDs, BD Audio and Analog Tape in that order.

Dual Disc and HDCD isn't on the radar. DVD Audio appears every once in awhile on collector and special edition releases.

As Bob Dylan would say, the times are a changin'.....
 
Good advice, Brian. It's funny and ironic. After all of the hub-bub of the copy protection delaying DVD-Audio, and the encryption of DVD and SACD, just a scant decade later were are all moving to converting everything to files for future playback - doing the very thing that all of these companies were trying so hard to prevent.

And soon, their business model will be just that - selling downloads of their product.

Just in time for the patents that DVD-Audio and SACD are based on to expire, too :)
 
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