In recent years, consumers have been all about video quality—digital, high definition, giant screens, high capacity disks. Audio quality, not so much. In fact, the move to compressed audio stuffed into iPods and other mp3 players and hard disks that act like home jukeboxes has continued the downward trend in audio quality that started with the move from vinyl record to CD.
At least one artist has decided to do something about it. Rocker Neil Young is releasing his audio archives not on itunes, not as a multi-CD boxed set targeted at Christmas shoppers, but on Blu-Ray discs. Actually, a series of Blu-Ray discs, that will start shipping this fall. The discs will include archival video and stills as well as the audio
files. He made this announcement this week at the Sun Microsystems JavaOne Conference; the Blu-Ray discs will use Java for interactivity.
Of course, the vast majority of today’s Blu-Ray players in consumers hands are part of Sony Playstations; it’s not clear just how many Playstation owners are Neil Young fans.
Could Blu-Ray, besides knocking out its high-def competitor HD-DVD, and perhaps, eventually, replacing the DVD, kill the CD business as well? After all, DVD-Audio and Super-Audio CD, both high fidelity formats, didn’t make much of a difference. However, if you figure that regular listeners will all move to digital downloads, leaving only the audiophiles purchasing round pieces of plastic, perhaps Blu-Ray will finally mean they can stop pining for vinyl. At least they won’t have to have a separate box in their home theaters for audio.
And Neil Young and his fans will have shown the way.
Comments (2)
This are really good news as the blu-ray is the media of the future. The quality is much much better than what we knew before.
Posted by Lydia | May 9, 2008 8:49 AM
Posted on May 9, 2008 08:49
I do not think Blu Ray will kill a need for consumers to buy data from retail stores. With ISP now talking [ and some enforcing] download limits to arbitrary gigabytes/month, using up an entire quota can be had downloading just a few BR disks, noting BR is 25G per side. One assumes that vendors will upgrade servers to tool for mass downloading large files as cheaper than retail sales; it can be done now, but is it cost effective for ISP to expect this type of loading? Already there is controversy over the bit-torrent networks, what then if the majority of Internet users download instead of picking up retail BR DVDs?
The beauty of Blu-ray is that we have a standard, so there is no VHS vs Beta confusion.
Will it kill CD or DVD? The CD is certainly worth killing because the cost of disks is on par with DVD, and downloading 700M of data is now trivial with broadband. Per disk, DVD premium brand disks versus Blu-ray are $ 0.33 vs $25 each [ cost wise, 25G = 5 DVD = $1.65 vs $25], so its likely the semi-permanent media to come will be DVD.
IEEE Member
Posted by Marv Gozum | May 12, 2008 10:59 AM
Posted on May 12, 2008 10:59