DVD-Audio backers - What Happened?

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See what I mean. These guys know what they are doing.
Direct selling via their own website... bypassing all the music label nonsense.
Why not? I mean if the labels aren't value adding, why not just bypass them?

http://www.thekingoflimbs.com/DIGBP.htm

Wav files are a good first step....
Can somebody who knows their production guys, ask them to put up a 24bit stereo and surround version :)
 
All I can say is the number of shops selling new vinyl at very high prices ($29,$39 and $49 a disc) has grown here, the amount of wax in each store has grown as well.
I for one find DVD-Audio my favorite format, as I love the on screen menu, The SACD display is a joke, track 1, track2 what is this 1980.
 
Have a nice life. I won't waste anymore time here.

Way to treat your customers, Jimby. How about taking a course in customer service? No wonder the record companies are failing. What a joke.
 
That's good news about the 24 bit. Well, the word must be getting out there then.

One thing to consider based upon what we have here, the usual relationship for music was always between the player manufactures and the record companies. Computers and MP3 changed the business model 10 years ago, right when DVD-Audio/SACD were battling each other. And now since then there could be perhaps a moving target as to which way to go next. From the record companies point of view I'm guessing, they're taking a "wait and see" approach, waiting for the market to ripe again. At some point Downloads or some disc format or formats as with the new Rush "Moving Pictures" titles. The next surround music era feels better in regard to the fact we have many standardized Hi-Rez formats now, from DVD-A/SACD to BR and Apple DL.

While they're waiting though, one would hope they're properly digitizing everything in their vaults so there is product for future use in great condition. If it rots in the vaults and is gone there is nothing to sale in the future. And classic recordings of all types will always be of interest as with Turner Classic Movies and it's large library of material. They're constantly bringing to market DVDs of films never before released in any format.
 
I would welcome 2-channel Hi-Res audio because it's a start.

Ya gotta love the following line, pulled from that article:

Why don't record labels at least give retailers the option of working from higher-grade recordings?
"Why?" Jimmy Iovine, a longtime music executive, asked rhetorically. "I don't know. It's not because they're geniuses."
 
All I can say is the number of shops selling new vinyl at very high prices ($29,$39 and $49 a disc) has grown here, the amount of wax in each store has grown as well.
I for one find DVD-Audio my favorite format, as I love the on screen menu, The SACD display is a joke, track 1, track2 what is this 1980.
What SACD do you have that only displays "track 1", "track 2", etc.?

All mine have text showing the song titles. Maybe your player doesn't display the text?
 
In a world where the consumer no longer accepts a 480i standard for video, and has come to expect much more for video, why hasn't the same happened for audio? Hi Rez sound should be becoming standard now, maybe it will when blu ray takes over.
 
my Oppo and my friends Oppo different models both show track 1 etc
no text at all
Is there a setting
mine is the 980H
:mad:@:
 
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In a world where the consumer no longer accepts a 480i standard for video, and has come to expect much more for video, why hasn't the same happened for audio? Hi Rez sound should be becoming standard now, maybe it will when blu ray takes over.

Very Good Question. You would think the BR manufactures and or Record Companies would advertise this as another selling point to get people to buy. It seems though the word is getting out there from the ground up.

Certainly when you put a movie in a player hooked up to even any sort of AMP, you're going to get much better sound and people who are normally not hip are noticing this improvement of sound. We can do our part by getting the word out to family and friends. We just have to be careful not to throw too much info at once at them so their eyes don't glaze over. ;) But we can simplify it a bit and folks are not stupid, they do get it.
 
I just want to say how grateful to this forum I really am. I stumbled on this forum looking for a way to extract 24/96 and above stereo from this "DVD-A" format I had never heard of..

Well today I got a complete shock! My very first purchased DVD-A arrived from the UK. You simply can't buy them here in Oz. Whilst I have been waiting for it to come, I have been setting up a surround set up in my office with pretty good Linn gear, an old REL sub and an old NAD 773 surround amp running 5.1 analog direct from an "ancient" Toshiba DVD player I had almost discarded in the garage (I discovered it happens to do DVD-A)

I hadn't heard content from the disk I had purchased for probably near on 30 years. It was the very first LP I bought as a kid. I put it into the player, turned everything on. (making sure analog was truely playing straight thru the receiver..bypassing all the techno surround processing crap) and hit the "play" button on that now "worthless" Toshiba DVD player...

Holy Shit! What a sound! I was blown away. .... and the album:

It was Elton John Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Now I know what all you cranky ol' guys are all on about!!!

Good on you blokes. For sticking to your guns. For making sure this format and this quality of surround recording never (really) dies.... Good luck to you all !!

Regards..Wap
 
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You idiot!:D Don't you realize what you've done? Now you are cursed - wandering the barren surround landscape - desperately searching for albums that you'll never be able to have but never wanting to listen to stereo again.

:ugham: LOL!! That made me laugh....Your darn right!! It's now onto sourcing a copy of Deep Purple's DVD-A Machine Head. Having just watched the boys latest blu-ray attempt "Live at Montreux"...it really is time to wind back the years :smokin
 
Alright, we have to admit that the format was confusing and was difficult for stores to sell because no one knew what they were, and people wanted MP3 in their iPods instead of HiRez in their houses. That being said....

What happened to the DVD-A Forum, or whomever those folks were. They seemed to cave into the whole DualDisc thing, but half-assed. They never came through with over 100 announced (in various bits and pieces) titles projected to come out. They wasted some effort on the even more insane MVI discs (remember those?).

Actually, the squashing of DVD-A is a LOT more sinister than most people realize.

To understand, you have to know the history of the DVD-A format. It was originally developed and patented by Meridian Audio. Meridian realized (or was strong-armed to realize) that they didn't have the marketing muscle to get the industry to go along. Meridian then signed a "deal" with Dolby for them to market DVD-A and also get a license to MLP (the underlying technology, Meridian Lossless Packaging). It isn't known if anyone at Meridian found a horse's head in their bed or not.

Dolby then, in the view of many, set out to kill the format. Dolby itself is almost a dead-letter now. Exhibitions that they used to take huge booth spaces (AES, CES, SMPTE) they now have no presence. Dolby after all is a company founded on "signal processing". As the bandwidth available now exceeds any conceivable uncompressed audio format, the reason for Dolby's existence has ended. Even in cinemas the new digital systems carry uncompressed AES PCM tracks.

Dolby is the black hand that killed off high-quality audio. A pity, really.
 
I don't know if anyone is reading this who might be able to pull something like this off, but here goes anyway.

Figure out how many prints of a surround album you need to sell to make a profit.
Let's say it's 1000 copies at $20 each.
This must cover your marketing, printing, shipping, etc.
Put up a web page that allows people to pledge $20 for a copy.
Wait until you get 1000 pledges. Print and ship.

Notes:
* The pledges have to be binding. No way to back out. A pledger either gets the disc when the limit is reached, or his money back if the limit is not reached. The easiest way to do this is pay-up-front.
* You would have to set a time limit. Say 2 or 3 months. If you do not get enough pledges, refund the pledgers. You could have the money in some interest-bearing account during the wait to cover the admin costs.
* Put up a "count-down" on the site showing how many pledges are still required to meet the goal. This will drive interest as the limit gets closer. Combine with email alerts for added "spread the word" effects.
* If interest in a release is much higher than 1000, figure out a way to make the price lower for everyone. This will drive the social effect and make the system more popular.

I am sure a professional marketer could come up with other smart details to make this work really well.

yeap, and those professional marketing "geniuses" came out with their brilliant idea... to fill up the boxes by
dollarstore's marbles and coasters, synthetic scarves, LP records (even that those consumers in majority don't
have means to use it), fake tickets and so on. perhaps in next batch we should expect a tarot cards, replica of
magic wands, set of clothes for Barbie... anyway, one can check out local "dollarama" to see what is offered from
China for next season.
your model is perfect, except... it won't work for hugely bureaucratized and corrupted big labels. CEOs to get their
bonuses, won't mess up with their annual report to shareholders, how many consumers they got subscribed to this
or that artist or album. they want all but for doing nothing, period.
 


Actually, the squashing of DVD-A is a LOT more sinister than most people realize.

To understand, you have to know the history of the DVD-A format. It was originally developed and patented by Meridian Audio. Meridian realized (or was strong-armed to realize) that they didn't have the marketing muscle to get the industry to go along. Meridian then signed a "deal" with Dolby for them to market DVD-A and also get a license to MLP (the underlying technology, Meridian Lossless Packaging). It isn't known if anyone at Meridian found a horse's head in their bed or not.

Dolby then, in the view of many, set out to kill the format. Dolby itself is almost a dead-letter now. Exhibitions that they used to take huge booth spaces (AES, CES, SMPTE) they now have no presence. Dolby after all is a company founded on "signal processing". As the bandwidth available now exceeds any conceivable uncompressed audio format, the reason for Dolby's existence has ended. Even in cinemas the new digital systems carry uncompressed AES PCM tracks.

Dolby is the black hand that killed off high-quality audio. A pity, really.

Thanks for the reply WideBandBill.

So much back-stabbing and in-fighting with DVD-A and to a lesser extent SACD, each camp wanting to claim victory over a market each failed miserably at creating and supporting. If handled differently, these formats could have faired better, but they were both abandoned at a point where they actually started to get some mainstream media recognition, only to be doomed by the failed DualDisc and MVI formats. One bad step after another.

At least they got their shit together for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray. There was so much press when HD-DVD folded. No one ever let loose a press release when DVD-A and SACD stopped appearing at your local "record store" and new releases every month dried up.
 
Actually, the squashing of DVD-A is a LOT more sinister than most people realize.

To understand, you have to know the history of the DVD-A format. It was originally developed and patented by Meridian Audio. Meridian realized (or was strong-armed to realize) that they didn't have the marketing muscle to get the industry to go along. Meridian then signed a "deal" with Dolby for them to market DVD-A and also get a license to MLP (the underlying technology, Meridian Lossless Packaging). It isn't known if anyone at Meridian found a horse's head in their bed or not.

Dolby then, in the view of many, set out to kill the format. Dolby itself is almost a dead-letter now. Exhibitions that they used to take huge booth spaces (AES, CES, SMPTE) they now have no presence. Dolby after all is a company founded on "signal processing". As the bandwidth available now exceeds any conceivable uncompressed audio format, the reason for Dolby's existence has ended. Even in cinemas the new digital systems carry uncompressed AES PCM tracks.

Dolby is the black hand that killed off high-quality audio. A pity, really.


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.
 
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