Post by Claude May 8, 2008 (61 of 72)
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I don't see a problem with room size. The large LCD displays are flat, they can be placed against a wall or hung to the wall.
I think installing a hifi surround sound system correctly actually creates more problems than installing a flat screen.
But once people have a large HD-ready screen, it's not sure they will invest into Blu-ray, just like not every owner of a hifi system invested into SACD or DVD-A.
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Post by Allen May 8, 2008 (62 of 72)
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Claude said:
But once people have a large HD-ready screen, it's not sure they will invest into Blu-ray, just like not every owner of a hifi system invested into SACD or DVD-A.
Fully agree on above points. The readily available large HD TV does not translate directly to BD's success. On the other hand, the upscaling of the current DVD player will actually delay BD's market acceptance.
I, for one, will not buy into the Bluray for the next year or two - well, if a Sony's BD player can play a SACD, that may help to change my mind.
On the other hand, I just built an inhouse media center using one of those NAS solution on the market to store all my itunes songs (lo-rez or hi-rez), and then stream the data to any of the rooms in my house.
As a matter of fact, my vision is a diskless world, and I do not see BD in it - it is just too late for BD to squeeze into this world. Microsoft is selling a home server, targeting this market, and with iTunes + a large NAS server, one can do the same thing already. Even for HD program, I have a friend who stores 20GB/per movie on his NAS server and reports very good playback. Diskless playing, that is coming faster than I want to believe.
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Post by hanser May 8, 2008 (63 of 72)
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My living room is not especially large, but I have a 2.55 m wide screen, with front projection. The screen is pull-down before the largest window, so it uses up no space at all.
Julien, I sincerly hope that you do NOT buy those pirated DVDs. DVD piracy is the main reason that Movie studios want to abandon DVD and move to the more secure BLu-ray format as soon as possible.
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Post by amatala May 8, 2008 (64 of 72)
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Allen said:
Fully agree on above points. The readily available large HD TV does not translate directly to BD's success. On the other hand, the upscaling of the current DVD player will actually delay BD's market acceptance.
I, for one, will not buy into the Bluray for the next year or two - well, if a Sony's BD player can play a SACD, that may help to change my mind.
On the other hand, I just built an inhouse media center using one of those NAS solution on the market to store all my itunes songs (lo-rez or hi-rez), and then stream the data to any of the rooms in my house.
As a matter of fact, my vision is a diskless world, and I do not see BD in it - it is just too late for BD to squeeze into this world. Microsoft is selling a home server, targeting this market, and with iTunes + a large NAS server, one can do the same thing already. Even for HD program, I have a friend who stores 20GB/per movie on his NAS server and reports very good playback. Diskless playing, that is coming faster than I want to believe.
I think you are right.
What we are facing here is a complete change of philosophy - optical discs are becoming an obsolete way of distributing audio/video contents.
Media Severs, Video on Demand, Streaming audio/video in all rooms of the house are the ways of the future - and they all represent very attractive and elegant solutions!
BD (as great as it might be) is simply another disc-based format and it only represents the industry's latest desperate attempt of squeezing the last bucks out of a dying concept: the optical disc. Moreover all advertising around BD is based on the huge quality improvement it can offer over standard DVD - all this in a world where the vast majority of consumers don't care about quality - only ease of use matters!
People listen to music in MP3 format and watch DivX movies - they walk around with portable storage (flash drives or external hard disks) and exchange contents every day (I do not want to bring the legality of the matter into this into discussion) - and I am talking about middle-aged people here, not high-school youngsters who never bought a disc in their lives... Most of them know about BD but never actually considered the possibility of buying a player - they are perfectly happy with their small-sized low-quality highly-portable audio/video files.
So the BD sales will probably grow a bit in the next couple of years, but they will never be able to compensate for the declining revenues from disc sales. Eventually the BD will go the way of the Dodo together with all other disc-based audio/video formats - and this will happen much sooner than we think!
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amatala said:
I think you are right.
What we are facing here is a complete change of philosophy - optical discs are becoming an obsolete way of distributing audio/video contents.
Media Severs, Video on Demand, Streaming audio/video in all rooms of the house are the ways of the future - and they all represent very attractive and elegant solutions!
BD (as great as it might be) is simply another disc-based format and it only represents the industry's latest desperate attempt of squeezing the last bucks out of a dying concept: the optical disc. Moreover all advertising around BD is based on the huge quality improvement it can offer over standard DVD - all this in a world where the vast majority of consumers don't care about quality - only ease of use matters!
People listen to music in MP3 format and watch DivX movies - they walk around with portable storage (flash drives or external hard disks) and exchange contents every day (I do not want to bring the legality of the matter into this into discussion) - and I am talking about middle-aged people here, not high-school youngsters who never bought a disc in their lives... Most of them know about BD but never actually considered the possibility of buying a player - they are perfectly happy with their small-sized low-quality highly-portable audio/video files.
So the BD sales will probably grow a bit in the next couple of years, but they will never be able to compensate for the declining revenues from disc sales. Eventually the BD will go the way of the Dodo together with all other disc-based audio/video formats - and this will happen much sooner than we think!
Agree with your general points, especially ease of use. Also, the vast majority of people will settle for convenience over quality, even on their large plasma TV's.
In fact, I think the immediate future will be two-tiered, much like hifi.
You will have those who will have quality components all round, and you will have those who have convenient gadgets at the expense of quality.
It has also been so, actually thinking about it.
Just that quality now is even greater than before, and conevenience is even greater.
I think it will be a good decade, in the UK at least, before you can get high quality AND convenience. Reason in that high quality content that can be accessed any time requires a super-high broadband infrastructure - and that does nto exist in the UK.
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Let's face it....we are a nation on the move. No one wants to sit in front of a monitor or speakers for the hour or hour and a half it takes to "listen" to music. Neil Young just announced he will be releasing his entire back catalog on blu-ray and there are talks others will follow. In the meantime, T. Bone Burnett has announced his new hi-def sound extravaganza which he promises will make MP3 sound like CD (whoppeee!) Let's really face the fact that the BIG record companies are in BIG trouble and have NO interest in remixing their back catalogs for sacd multi-channel sound....if the beatles had gotten on the bandwagon long ago (I personally LOVE the DVD-A of LOVE by the Beatles) and Led Zep and all the other acts had followed, surround DVD-A and SACD might have had a fighting chance. HE WHO HESITATES IS SURELY LOST....and according to the experts, high resolution downloads for the masses is a ways off, especially high rez video
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rammiepie said:
In the meantime, T. Bone Burnett has announced his new hi-def sound extravaganza which he promises will make MP3 sound like CD (whoppeee!)
See this thread: /showthread/28593//y?page=first
I don't see how this solves anything. Why can't they just accept that high-res is a niche and SACD is the best and most established way to address that, and use the format to release this content?
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The Seventh Taylor said:
I don't see how this solves anything. Why can't they just accept that high-res is a niche and SACD is the best and most established way to address that, and use the format to release this content?
Because so many seem to like to push "SACD/DVD-A is no better than CD" angle. It's silly. Honestly, it probably bothers me less that companies are ignoring SACD and more that they continue to compress the music on the CD side (so-called 'loudness war') to points that I actually get physically affected by listening to it (even when listening it a bit more quietly). What bothers me most is that with it becoming known, they don't stop it...as well as the fact that what's been issued is ruined, possibly forever, because of it.
Sigh.
-Joshua
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I would like to jump in here. As far as I can see, yes the masses are only interested in convenience. But I wonder how this breaks down globally? I am assuming that it is mostly North Americans who are sacrificing quality as so many great peices of audio equipment are continually rolled out of places like Europe and Japan. A lot of what we are talking about here is probably based on where you live.
When recording companies like Pentatone and 2L continue to release SA-CD successfully and we as consumers are still buying it, I think this sends a clear message that there is a market for this product that is loyal, however small. I cannot predict how long SA-CD will last, but as long as there is a consumer base that expects hi-res audio formats, we should be able to consume it in some way.
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Post by dobyblue May 21, 2008 (70 of 72)
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Claude said:
Because it's a video disc, and most people (including the producers) don't care about their sound.
Blu-ray wasn't invented for better sound, but luckily for us audiophiles the potential for better sound was included. But you can't expect video producers to make use if it, if they are clueless about sound quality in general (as can be judged from the poor sound of most music DVDs in any genre).
I'd disagree with this - I have numerous music DVD's with excellent 2-channel PCM tracks on them, most often 24-bit. It's the ones without PCM on them that I find disappointing as you do. But the 24-bit PCM track on the DMB Piedmont Park DVD is excellent as is the 16/48 PCM track on the Howie Day Madrigals EP, to name a few. Some of the 1.5 Mbps dts releases are good too, like NIN's "...and all that could have been"
I also think that most of the "video" people have been paying much more attention to the sound on Blu-ray Discs before they've even gotten to the audio-only releases. The difference in sound between the 5.1 track on the DVD and the uncompressed or losslessly encoded multi-channel tracks on Blu-ray Discs is astonishing - like the difference between .mp3 and DVD-A.
It's not a "video disc" - it's a medium. You can't seem to get past that fact.
24/96 on Blu-ray is not AT ALL like 16/44.1 on SACD, that analogy is ridiculous. Blu-ray can have 24/96 7.1 and 24/192 5.1 alongside 1080p24 video when needed. There's nothing like that at all on SACD and/or DVD-V/A. You can have high resolution music, high resolution video, interactivity, pip, and downloadable content to avoid double-dipping, which is one of the main reasons Neil is releasing this on Blu-ray Disc only, because he can utilize BD-Live to give you any additional content he releases for a particular year when that year's disc is inserted.
There are movements to start releasing albums on Blu-ray Disc simultaneously with the CD release day and date and there is a very big chance this time around it will succeed where DVD-A and SACD failed - one format, one cable, all major content providers releasing on one format. I have spoken with the new product development team at SonyBMG and while it may not happen this year, it is in the works and all the major studios will look into it.
It will succeed provided they don't author the discs so that work on all Blu-ray Disc players.
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