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CD format war and resultant music players

Anybody cares to speculate what's the next audiophile music media going to be now that SACD and DVD-A don't seem to get anywhere?

Audiophile market is such a niche market that the general public don't have the ears to understand as to why we are so fussy. However I do suspect that this high-definition video war will actually reach a preferred choice. Everybody likes movies and TVs. The widescreen HDTV business does take off. Perhaps the music equipment people would piggy back onto whatever video media format that wins out. The SACDs and the DVD-As have more memory space to store music data than your regular CDs. So would these high-def video media storage.
svhoang

Showing 2 responses by erasmusj

erasmusj
14 posts
 
One of the important advantages of both SACD and DVD-A is that it forces the recording studios and music companies to pay some attention to the sounds below 100 Hz and above 12 Khz, to use better microphones, and generally not process the sound to death.
If you record for example a short guitar piece with a top quality microphone with good digital gear in the right environment and play it back immediately then the quality is way better than anything delivered on CD, SACD, DVD-A or anything else available commercially. We are being completely short-changed in terms of sound quality at the production end, apart from the delivery end.
I suspect this problem will be dealt with by market forces once the record companies are out of the picture and distribution of music in the form of files becomes the norm.
erasmusj
14 posts
 
A lot of people have been working very hard for a long time to optimize CD playback. The likelihood of a leap forward at this point is very remote.

I think the issue here is not so much sound quality, but convenience. When you have thousands of CD's then it gets really hard to locate one specific track on one specific CD. PC based systems make a huge difference here. The sound quality can be the same if done with care.

I believe we are on a threshold of an explosion of this type of system. Two years ago it took twelve 120Gb drives to assemble 1Tb of raid storage. Now the same can be done with four drives at a third of the price. These are actual figures - I just added my second Tb of storage.

The only thing still missing is a good ADC solution for home use. Not everyone has access to professional equipment and the average sound card falls down seriously in this area. This won't bother CD only people though.

I have just been able to aquire an MFSL Ultradisk version of REM Murmur. The improvement in sound quality over the standard version is far greater than anything I could get by upgrading my equipment. I believe that in many cases we have reached the limit of what the record labels are prepared to market.

It isn't my style, but I have wondered what would happen if two keen music collectors, each with a few Tb of music met up and did the obvious thing with a network cable. Short of a re-enactment of prohibition, there is no stopping this.
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