Not wasting my time on new Digital

Muralman, the Consonance 120 has upsampling, doesn't it?

Very interesting discussion. Makes me want to hear some of this retro stuff.

How does the Channel Islands DAC stack up, does anyone know? Price is sure
right.

Ray Kimber's Isomike recordings demonstrate how effective rear channels can be
in delivering the (binaural) experience of listening to live music. Rest assured,
no pianos will play behind you.

Sean, I'm afraid I don't understand your post at all. Can you spoon-feed it to
me?

While it's not clear whether HD DVD or Blu-ray will win out, one of them surely will. Because unlike SACD and DVD-A, these new formats have compelling benefits for the mass market.

The recording happens in a space, that space unless anechoic will reflect and reinforce sound creating a tone, that tone is captured onto the recording. This is inescapable, that somewhat unimportant information is not as damaging to analog sound because it simply doesn't have the S/N ratio and the linear performance, so that medium masks effectively this information. The CD does not mask this information and two channel simply crushes that noise, ambiance and room tone back on top of the soundstage. Think of live recordings where all the people are clapping in a compressed area in front of you. That is not correct, that is simply the standard. Surround expands and sorts this off subject sound and places it properly in a soundfield.

Very thought provoking.

Both CD and DVD offered advantages to consumers that made them a no-brainer to adopt once software became plentiful and hardware prices dropped. With the new DVD formats, the advantages are clearly less but they are more compelling than just "better sound". Through mainstream systems, the better sound of SACD and DVD-A was not better enough. But I think the better picture of the HD DVD formats (on HD displays) will be better enough, and combined with the greater capacity of the discs, you have something that will move consumers to upgrade. And the barriers to adoption are fairly low. The new players will play old DVDs, correct? So you won't replace your old collection necessarily, but you may be motivated to get a new DVD player by the prospect of buying (or renting) an entire season of Deadwood on a single disc.

The improved PQ of 1080p over DVD's current 480p is pretty obvious and most of us who have HD displays, even if not 1080p, will go for an HD player as soon as Netflix starts offering the formats on a good number of new or interesting older releases. Netflix, along with Blockbuster, has some power in how this plays out (which formats do they offer?). The studios probably have more power.

Blu-ray at least promises interactivity, and I imagine that what this really means is you'll be encouraged to buy things directly while watching content. That's a big enough carrot to drive development of some pretty clever promotions, which may suck consumers in.

The next generation of broadband into the home is a wildcard here if HD on-demand begins to materialize.