The Holy Grail of Home Entertainment?
from the opposite-of-bleeding-edge-technology dept
If you’ve ever had a burning desire for surround sound for your CD collection, you may have to wait a little longer for a convenient technological solution. An attempt to create a hybrid DVD-CD format has been dubbed a failure. That’s really too bad. But this seems even less desirable to me than HDTV. Does anyone really listen for surround sound music?
Comments on “The Holy Grail of Home Entertainment?”
These hybrids aren't that new
The story is new, but I remember a couple of years back when I rented The Blair Witch Project 2 that it was a dual sided CD/DVD disc.
The movie sucked so bad I never bothered to check out the CD side or any of the DVD special features.
Maybe that’s why the hybrid was a failure? They used crappy movies…
Multi-format
Yeah, some people do. This in spite of the problem with outputs: the current digital output standards (coax and optical) were designed for 2-channel 44 KHz CD-quality stereo. They’re unable to handle the high datarates of DVD-A and SACD, so those formats require that the player have built-in surround decoders and built-in DACs, and the audio output is an octopus-load of RCA jacks.
In addition to which, if your sound system doesn’t have full-range speakers all the way around, you need bass management to redirect the bass from the limited speakers to the subwoofer. Most players don’t have that built-in, so you need to buy an external bass management box (and more cables). Sometimes it’s cheaper just to upgrade your speaker system.
Back to the multi-format DVD/CD: I don’t think they thought the idea through. People without DVD players wouldn’t care that it was DVD-capable, and people with DVD players can already play both DVDs and CDs. Besides, it seems inevitable that DVD mechanisms will start being used in CD players, at which point the combined format is obsolescent. This might’ve been a reasonable idea in the early days of DVD, but today it has limited potential.
Surround sound music
I’d love surround sound music…I even bought some Quadraphonic albums once because I thought they sounded better. To be in the center of the music, with different sounds coming from each speaker of my 5.1 system, that would be awesome.
However, I don’t understand the situation, we aren’t talking DVD-A here (which I own a couple, and despite the fact I cannot put them on my MP3 Jukebox, they do get played occasionally,) but the ability to play a DVD-CD on either a CD Player or a DVD Player. I am not sure why this would even be attempted, as I have no problem what-so-ever playing CDs on a DVD Player, and CD Players are for installing the operating system, not for playing music/video. Seems like a solution without a problem if you ask me, and one that has died because there is no problem.
I always love to listen to surround sound music!
Its called “going to a concert”