Media Reports
Classical to Classic Rock
By Barry Fox
Meridian is the latest hi-fi company to try and open MP3 ears to high-end audio.
“Meridian is the best kept secret in the audio world,” Chairman Bob Stuart told a gathering of non-hi-fi journalists at a “private deliberation on the authenticity of sound—from Handel to Hendrix and beyond” at the little known Handel House Museum, just off London’s Bond Street where Handel lived for 36 years in the 18th century and composed most of his music.
“Much as the Handel House is one of London’s best kept secrets,” added Museum Curator Sarah Bardwell, reminding that Jimi Hendrix lived next door for 18 months in the 1960s.
“Handel played to his friends here and sold tickets for his concerts from here,” she explained. “There were 40 chairs—which would otherwise be odd for a bachelor.”
After a live music recital on a 1998 harpsichord replica of Handel’s own instrument by a Handel House musician, Bob Stuart played Handel—and Hendrix—CDs through a Meridian 808.2 Signature CD player and stereo pair of DSP 7200 Active loudspeakers. An MP3 download dubbed to CD was thrown in to show how poor the sound is in comparison with CD.
Although video companies such as Pioneer now routinely stage “shoot-outs,” Meridian stopped short of comparing the sound of Red Book CD through high-end hi-fi with the kind of iPod or mobile phone docking audio system many people now regard as hi-fi. Next time perhaps?
If you are crossing the pond to visit London, check out the Handel Museum—it’s a rare treasure, slap dab in the middle of town.
BLUE NOTES
For a while it looked as though the high capacity of Blu-ray would put an end to the arguments over which audio coding system is best. With 25 or 50GB on a single disc, there is plenty of room for uncompromised audio, either from lossless coding or raw uncompressed PCM. And this turns data rate issues on their head.
Until now, low data rate has meant “bad.” Modern codecs such as AAC are more efficient at delivering good sound from low bit rates than older codecs such as MP3, but if all other things are equal a low rate will not sound as good as a higher rate.
But lossless means lossless. Compression “takes out the air” as Meridian’s Bob Stuart says when describing MLP. The number and pattern of bits coming out of a system are the same as those going in. It’s the way computer compression works because if you are compressing a spreadsheet or invoice so that it takes up less space in memory, it’s obviously unacceptable to round off decimal numbers or drop a few zeroes!
So a lossless compression system that uses less bits is “better” than one that uses more bits, because it leaves more bit capacity free for video and extras on the disc.
Both DTS and Dolby are now on level footing as Blu-ray audio standards. Dolby claims its MLP-based lossless coding is more bit-efficient than DTS. If and when DTS ever awakens from its corporate slumbers it will be interesting to hear any counter arguments.
Blu-ray has space for multi-channel uncompressed PCM. But paradoxically lossless compression may well be better for audio than uncompressed PCM.
When multi-channel audio is compressed the channels can be accompanied by metadata that controls relative levels and downmixing to stereo. With raw PCM there is no standard for metadata, so all the bass management and mix-down must be done by the AV system. How it’s done will depend on how the user has set up the system, and modern AV systems are so absurdly complicated that few users have any hope of setting them up properly.
“We were members of both groups, the DVD Forum for HD DVD and the BD Group,” Meridian’s Bob Stuart recently told me, “and we engineered MLP for eight channels with either format.”
“We also did some ‘political engineering.’ With DVD-Audio there were many different navigation systems, and with most of them you needed a screen display before you could play music, so it was no good for cars. We wanted to avoid that with HD DVD and BD. We wanted a disc that needed no screen and would work in cars.
“We did it by stealth. We said that any audio format had to be usable by the visually impaired. This appealed to everyone. After we got what we wanted for MLP we just sat on a very wide fence, along with a lot of other people. Anyway now it’s all academic.
“Contrary to what was reported, we never said we were going to make an HD DVD player. Microsoft said it at a Developers’ Conference in Seattle. We were at CES and people were asking about the HD DVD player they’d heard we were making. It was just a rumor.
“The format war was absolutely crazy. The people writing the specs came from a different generation even from the people who had written the specs for DVD and DVD-Audio. There is no corporate memory, only corporate pride. That’s how there came to be two formats—that and fears of the antitrust laws.
“Before there was a DVD standard there was MMC and SD but Warren Lieberfarb just said ‘fix it.’ Hi Def needed Hollywood to say ‘get it fixed or we won’t release titles,’ but they were worried about antitrust. It was insane. The formats couldn’t even have made enough to pay the airfares of the people writing the specs.”
FIRE SALE
When money gets tight, companies look for new ways to cut staff and overheads.
HMV is installing music kiosks in UK stores, for DIY downloading to portables or disc burning. Nimbus no longer presses CDs, and instead burns all orders to CD-R on demand. Universal has quietly introduced a similar service.
I recently heard a track (On Broadway) from a CD by 70s UK soul artist Jess Roden. The arrangement was so clever that I tried to buy the CD. I couldn’t find it in any shop but Amazon sold me one. It arrived by mail from a supplier called The Disc Kiosk (www.thedisckiosk.com/cdo.htm) which turned out to be Universal’s burn-on-demand service.
The sleeve art is as poorly printed as a counterfeit copy made on a home copier. The only information is a bare track listing with a very brief note which is inaccurate and illiterate:
Jess Roden “was the lead singer of the Alan Brown Set.” No, Universal, it was the Alan Bown Set.
Another of Roden’s groups “recorded on (sic) album.” Presumably that’s “one album.”
“This is a music and data disc, if space allows,” says the sleeve. “Insert into a PC or Mac to view additional sleeve notes.”
Although there is only around 35 minutes of music on the CD there are no sleeve notes.
At £10 a time this is just the kind of consumer ripoff that encourages people to look for a free download or borrowed disc to copy.
FRESH AIR?
If you are in London in the summer (and it’s not raining), the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre puts on great shows and has a fine tradition of producing musicals with live music played by an off-stage band. This year Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was staged with musical additions; the wonderful British song and dance man Clive Rowe took time out from shows such as Guys and Dolls to play Feste the fool.
The musical accompaniment for Clive Rowe was a poor quality canned recording from speakers hidden in the trees. Rowe sounded uncomfortable and below par. Theatre Director William Village says he is “confused” by my objection to seeing his theatre save money by reducing Rowe to karaoke.
WASTE NOT, WANT NOT
The consumer electronics industry has been late waking up to the cost—in waste and expense—of excessive power drain in standby mode. The white goods industry has done a far better job of tackling this than the AV industry, with around 40% savings from kitchen appliances over the last ten years. IFA’s decision to include both white and brown goods in the Berlin show could shame the AV companies into trying harder.
The AV industry is unlikely to learn much from the camera companies though. Modern digital cameras are hugely wasteful. Instead of using a passive look-through optical viewfinder, they rely on an active LCD that gobbles battery power to try and compete with the sun. On a bright day the only way to see the screen is to put a blanket over the camera, as old style photographers used to do when composing shots on a ground glass screen. That’s progress?
Japanese company Olympus recently showed off its new digital cameras. I was offered one, and took it home to compare results with my own digital cameras.
After trying in vain to press the control buttons the truth dawned. Olympus had meticulously crafted dummy cameras that looked exactly like real cameras. So the camera and packaging went straight into a rubbish bin, for landfill.
Isn’t this just the kind of waste the world is now trying to avoid, I asked Olympus?
“The dummy camera you received was actually part of a campaign we are doing called ‘Pimp your camera’,” the company explained in Arnie-speak, “It basically involves putting different stickers on your camera to make it look different depending on your mood.”
My mood was pretty black because I was cursing Olympus for absurd waste. Here’s hoping that we don’t now see electronics companies meticulously crafting dummy amps, projectors, speakers, and disc players for people to “pimp.”
FIGHT CLUBS
The battle of the shows is heating up. The Consumer Electronics Association of America, which runs the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is tightening its grip on trademarks for the three key words Consumer, Electronics, and Show.
The CEA has started to take legal action against rivals with “confusingly similar” show titles. First in the firing line is ACES, “Americas Consumer Electronics Shows,” to be held at the Miami Beach Convention Center next March. A court in Miami has granted the CEA an injunction and CEA is now asking the Court to hold the organizers in contempt for ignoring it.
CEA/CES and IFA in Berlin have coexisted as rivals, largely because IFA is open to the public and CES is not.
In past years, IFA has been billed as “the world’s largest Consumer Electronics trade show” and “the world’s leading trade show for consumer electronics.” This year, significantly perhaps, IFA was more modestly advertised as “One of the World’s Largest Consumer Electronics Shows” and “One of the world’s largest and most important Consumer Electronics events.”
IN THE BLU CORNER
Despite dropping HD DVD, Toshiba has still not committed to Blu-ray and has instead been promoting its obsolete HD DVD players as ideal for up-scaling ordinary DVDs to near HD quality. Prime supporter of HD DVD, Universal still uses an HD DVD player in the reception room of its London office, upscaling DVDs for display on a huge Sharp LCD screen.
Now Toshiba has launched low-cost DVD players ($149 or less) which scale DVD resolution up to or even beyond Blu-ray quality. Ironically the up-scaling technology flows from work on the Cell Processor chip which Toshiba jointly developed with IBM as the heart of Sony’s PlayStation 3 videogame console—which was the deciding factor in Blu-ray’s defeat of HD DVD.
Blu-ray still has two things going for it, though: more advanced interactivity and better sound than DVD. The jury is still out on whether consumers are interested in enhanced interactivity, but the huge capacity of Blu-ray (25 or 50GB per side) makes it possible to deliver lossless and far higher surround sound quality than DVD, which has a maximum capacity of 9GB per side.
The Dolby and DTS DVD audio compression standards are set in stone, so unless there is a technology deal between Toshiba, Dolby, and DTS it is unlikely that Tosh can offer any improvements to DVD’s audio without backing Blu-ray.
MEMORY CLAIMS
Memory-Tech of Japan, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of blank CDs (with a domestic market share of around 30%) is claiming higher fidelity from a new kind of CD. HQCDs will cost five times more to make than conventional CDs, so will sell for premium prices and be aimed at classical music and jazz enthusiasts.
Memory-Tech says High Quality CDs promise “a higher signal reflection ratio” thanks to a coating of silver-based alloy instead of conventional aluminum. A new polycarbonate plastic also has “a higher light penetration ratio.”
This, says Memory-Tech, “translates to more accurate data-reading by the optical pickup, resulting in more precise audio playback.”
US company Mobile Fidelity has used gold instead of silver to press limited edition CDs, but Memory-Tech will convert six of its CD production lines to High Quality CD production and promises to start making 2 million a month in August for sales to begin in September.
So I asked for harder fact information, for instance on the percentage light reflection and transmission of the new HQCDs compared to current conventional CDs.
I also asked Memory-Tech to quantify the claimed improvements in sound, and explain how the company believes the sound of conventional aluminum CDs has been compromised, given that the powerful error correction provided by the basic Red Book CD standard repairs all but the most serious read errors and delivers a “perfect” signal for the player electronics to decode.
In reply, a spokesman for Memory-Tech sent only a Japanese newspaper report based on the company’s original publicity, and has so far failed to offer any additional substantiation to the claims.
So it is very hard to take Memory-Tech’s claims seriously. M3
Barry Fox reports on the audio industry as columnist for the British publication Hi-Fi News. His commentary appears in every issue of Multi Media Manufacturer.