Media Reports
New Formats: Prospects and Pitfalls
By Barry Fox
I have seen more audio and video formats launched than I care to remember. They all limp a bit when launched. But Blu-ray and HD-DVD are crippled by self-inflicted foot-shooting.
The most important and obvious damage is down to the insane standards conflict. Early talk—by Samsung and LG—of dual standard players that will handle either Blu-ray or HD-DVD
discs has faded, due to the complexity of making a dual standard player.
A dual standard player would be absurdly expensive, with the premium for dual-play wasted if one format fails or all titles are available on both formats.
I recently found and reported on a patent filed by two well-respected Warner engineers on a way of making a single disc play the same movie on a DVD, Blu-ray, or HD-DVD player. My report
was ripped off and garbled by numerous pundits who clearly never actually read the patent. If you want to read it just go to the US Patent Office website and enter application number 20060179448.
Blu-ray uses a 405 nm laser to read data from a 0.1mm optical skim on the top surface of the disc. HD-DVD uses the same wavelength laser to read a recording at a depth of 0.6mm. Warner’s
plan is to make the Blu-ray top layer work like a two-way mirror so that just enough blue light passes through for an HD-DVD player to ignore the Blu-ray recording and read the HD layer underneath.
The top layer also reflects just enough blue laser light for a Blu-ray player to read it. One option is to put an ordinary DVD recording on the other side of the disc, for an ordinary red
laser DVD player to read.
Warner suggests many more options, including “a dual or single BD data layer on the same side of the DVD at a different depth (or) discs that have a dual or single BD data layer on
one side of a disc, and a dual or single HD or DVD layer on the other side of a disc (or) discs that have a dual or single BD data layer and either of a dual or single HD or DVD layer on
one side of a disc.”
A triple standard disc will cost more to make than a single standard disc, but it will still be cheaper than pressing three different discs, and shops will not need to stock three inventories.
That’s how Warner’s DVD-Audio died.
Hollywood created the standards battle by agreeing to back two formats, so let Hollywood pay for it.
Hi-fi and video buffs will be happy to pay hundreds of dollars for the HDMI cables needed to connect a blue laser player, and so avoid the deliberate signal degradation imposed on analog
connections. But others may well make do with analog leads and hear and see no improvement over DVD and CD.
Blu-ray players and discs are using regional coding from Day One, with the world divided into three zones. These are not numbered like DVDs (1, 2, 3, and so on) but identified by letters.
A is for the Americas, and Asia except China; B is for Europe and Africa; and C is China and Russia. The hardware manufacturers have pledged to make their players as hard to hack as possible.
This is bad news for blue laser because in Europe it has become normal for chain stores to sell a DVD player with a piece of paper that tells how to disable regional coding by keying a simple
code like 00000 into the remote control. There will be none of this with Blu-ray.
HD-DVD will almost certainly adopt similar coding as soon as Hollywood forces the DVD Forum into what it knows will be an unpopular decision.
The first Blu-ray discs have no explanation on the outer packaging of what the A, B, C rating means. This is a surefire way to confuse consumers and generate badwill.
Another new patent filing, this time from Philips (US 2006/0248595) could make anyone watching a movie in the wrong country liable for 10 years in jail or a $1 million fine.
Current copyright law does not stop regional code-hacking. But the Philips patent covers a sneaky way to tie regional coding to copy-protection, which is very strongly enforced by America’s
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and similar laws coming to Europe.
A regional code stored on a movie disc is checked against a regional code stored in the player. If the codes match, the movie is decrypted and played. If the codes do not match—because
the disc is from another country—the movie remains encrypted. If someone defeats the regional code they are inevitably also tampering with the encryption and copy protection. So the
full force of the law is unleashed.
Although it is probably too late to modify existing DVD discs and players, the AACS copy-protection in the new Blu-ray and HD-DVD HDTV players has been specially designed so that it can be
modified at any time in the future—without the owner even knowing it. The modification instructions are hidden in movie discs. So Hollywood could adopt Philips’ sneaky system.
Both blue laser systems are being sold on superior sound quality as well as HD pictures. But does the mass market care about sound quality any more?
WHAT?
Not only are we breeding a new generation that judges sound quality by a gold standard of 128 kbps compression, we are breeding a generation which has never heard the sound of a live musical
instrument. There is no longer any yardstick for audio quality.
Any concert needs amplification if there are to be enough customers to pay the performers. Years ago Benny Goodman played with a small group at a British open-air music festival and refused
to allow full blown amplification. Even in the first few rows we could barely hear him.
Even big bands playing in small rooms now over-amplify. It takes a lot of clean watts to add volume without distortion. Often the sound system is only adding a rough edge to the live sound.
A recent concert of big band music by the RAF Squadronaires in the Queen Elizabeth Hall at London’s South Bank Centre was so over-blown by the rock sound engineer that the only answer
was to get up and go.
The idea of “unplugged” concerts was conceived to let competent musicians display their talents by performing without amplification. Even that concept has now been devalued.
Telecom giant Orange invited me to an “exclusive live and unplugged concert” by Charlotte Church, the British classical diva who embraced pop and rock. It should have been a great
opportunity to hear her voice, live in a small room.
She was backed by a very heavily amplified four piece band of guitar, bass guitar, drum kit fit for an octopus, and electric piano; and to be heard she had to sing close into a microphone,
which added horrid distortion.
The next day I receieved an e-mail from the event sponsors boasting that “last night, Charlotte Church performed an exclusive unplugged set.”
But all is not lost. At the New Orleans Jazz Festival ten years ago I was thrilled to hear subtly amplified sound on some of the open-air stages. At the Newport Rhode Island JVC Jazz Festival
in 2006 I heard equally good sound.
When John Pizzarelli’s Big Band played a salute to Sinatra, the sound of his father Bucky Pizzarelli’s acoustic rhythm guitar cut through the wall of brass and saxes like a pulsing
knife. All around the huge arena the stereo image was as firm as a studio recording.
Behind the scenes I found John “Klondike” Koehler, the same sound engineer I had found behind the sound at New Orleans ten years ago. What’s the secret, I asked.
Apart from the obvious, amplifiers that have enough headroom to handle any peaks without clipping, the key ingredient is delay. The main stereo speaker stacks that fire into the audience
from around the stage are assisted by smaller stacks spread around the audience like surround sound speakers. The assistance sound is electrically delayed so that it arrives at listeners’ ears
in exact sync with the sound, which is coming through air from the stage. That way the sound and stereo image is assisted without the need to pump huge levels from the front.
At the Pizzarelli concert the top front speakers were beaming tightly focused sound into the bleachers, far away from the stage, while the lower stacks were more loosely focused into the
nearer audience. The same sound mix was fed to 12 separate zones down the two sides of the audience, with different delays to all 12 zones.
All this has to be mapped during the system setup, with frequency equalization dependent on air temperature and humidity.
“Sound travels and spreads much further when the air is cool and damp,” explains Koehler. “If you set the levels and HF EQ during a hot dry day it will be completely different
in the evening. I can always tell when the air has hit dew point during a late concert. My mobile starts ringing from people around town telling me too much of our music is escaping.” 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.