Media Reports

Looking Forward, and Looking Back
By Barry Fox
Multimedia Manufacturer, September/October 2006

The technical specification for the first HD-DVD player, the Thomson/RCA HDV5000 and Toshiba HD-A1, tells a warning tale. The combined dead weight of HDMI, HDCP, and AACS content and copy control could add up to one very good reason to stick with CD and DVD.

HDMI, the High Definition Multimedia Interface, was developed by Intel’s Silicon Image, with Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Sony, Thomson (RCA), and Toshiba.

Silicon Image added High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection, with support from Fox, Universal, Warner, and Disney.
If you want to learn more, HDMI has an informative website: www.hdmi.org/consumer/faq.asp.

Simplay Labs was set up to test HDMI equipment for compatibility. It also has a useful website: www.simplayhd.com.

Dealers who sell flat panel TV screens at next to no profit are earning their money from the fat profit on hugely expensive HDMI cables. But consumers can expect surprises even after paying an arm and a leg for new cables.

“Depends on the HDMI receiver,” say more than a dozen sections of the spec for auto-adapting the ThomTosh player to different HDMI receivers. This is because receiver manufacturers cannot be relied on to ID-code their ROM chips correctly.

But this does not explain why the ThomTosh player always down-samples 96/192k PCM stereo to 48k—and also down-samples multi-channel audio when the screen is showing 480p pictures!
Simplay Labs and Silicon Image say their system has been approved to carry DVD-Audio, SACD, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD signals. There is no “legal” requirement to down-sample when HDCP encryption is used.

In addition there is practical iffiness over how far HDMI cables can carry wide bandwidth signals and whether the flimsy sockets can cope with the physical weight of the HDMI cables.
The sound fed out from the unencrypted digital outputs is capped at 48kHz and 16 bits. This is not just a bandwidth limitation of the customary S/PDIF digital outputs, it’s written into the Compliance Rules set by AACS-LA, the Licensing Administration for the copy protection that locks up both blue laser systems (Blu-ray and HD-DVD).

Simplay Labs at least tries to communicate. But as I have previously warned, AACS-LA has for two years hidden behind an unfinished website (www. aacsla.com/home). Even now the News and Frequently Asked Questions are still “Coming Soon.” When AACS called for comments on its technology, the e-mail address given rejected e-mails. AACS employs a PR company which initially refused to answer my questions and then accused me of not asking for comment.
Said an AACS spokesman, when I begged for clear written answers to questions asked for a recent rundown on blue laser audio options: “AACS tends not to provide info in writing beyond releases.”

After two years, and with blue laser players already on sale, AACS has still issued only two press releases (July 2004 and February 2006).

Because the AACS website has no search engine, and the News and FAQ sections are empty, there is no easy way to find the Compliance Rules that cover audio output constraints.
The blue laser players now on sale are made under an “interim adopter agreement” license, pending finalization of a “final adopter agreement” that clarifies issues such as Image Constraint Tokens (to quarter picture quality sent to unprotected outputs), Digital Only Tokens (that allow some program material to be transported only by protected digital outputs), Verance watermarking (to bury ID marks in analog sound and vision that work with AACS protection), and Regional Coding that invokes AACS to strengthen region playback control.

There is no date for a final agreement which will enforce some restrictions not yet enforced. So owners of today’s players do not know how they will perform in the future.

There is no standardized form and size for a logo, comparable to that which the RIAA specifies for DualDisc, to go on blue laser disc packaging to warn consumers that a program has ICT and/or DOT flags. So when consumers buy a disc they cannot know what the player may prevent it from doing.

Brad Hunt of the Hollywood trade body the MPAA has assured that DOT will be used only under “very specific and defined terms.” But AACS has not yet defined these terms, or said when DOTs will be used.

There is no firm date for an “analog sunset,” after which players can no longer have analog HD outputs.

In some countries this kind of Draconian prohibition may be illegal. If AACS must allow players with analog outputs in those countries, there will be a thriving trade in gray imports unless yet more hidden AACS technology is used to stop players working in different countries.
Add this to the absurdity of two incompatible formats and I am not spending a nickel on either format.

YESTERDAY TOMORROW
Many of tomorrow’s mistakes could be avoided by looking back at what happened yesterday. Unfortunately, most companies and organizations are staffed by modern managers who think they have nothing to learn from history.

That’s why the Digital Radio Mondiale consortium made the same mistake the BBC made in 1995, when promoting a high-quality digital radio service when there were no radios. At the Berlin Radio Show last August the DRM consortium promised DRM digital world radios in the shops for Christmas. And there is still nothing to buy.

The BBC has done it again with HDTV, announcing free reception of the World Cup soccer and Wimbledon in HD, when in fact viewers must pay Sky or a cable company to receive the free programs—and in many cases those who paid did not get the equipment installed until after the World Cup and Wimbledon had finished. Thomson failed to deliver enough receivers to Sky.
Although the signal feeds from Germany came with Dolby 5.1 surround, the BBC did not bother to broadcast it, even with HDTV transmissions. All viewers got was stereo.

The BBC has not always been so clumsy. The first VHF FM mono radio started from the Wrotham transmitter outside London in May 1955. In 1958 the BBC started experimenting with stereo, and classical music station Radio 3 started going stereo in July 1966. The PCM digital distribution network was switched on in 1972, bringing stereo to many regions.

The first 625 line UHF TV program, BBC-2, began from Crystal Palace in London in April 1964. Color TV kicked off in July 1967, using the German PAL system which solved the phase problems with NTSC. Britain’s was the first color service in Europe.

TV sound was mono FM. In the late 1950s BBC engineers cooked up a neat way to test stereo—ten years ahead of regular VHF FM stereo broadcasting—without anyone needing to buy anything new.

The tests involved transmitting one channel by VHF FM mono radio and the other channel as TV mono. Plummy-voiced presenters told listeners how to space their radio and TV sets a few feet apart, adjust levels and tone controls, and sit facing the pair. Because there was no digital processing involved the two signals were almost in sync. The effect was stereo, albeit in quality spoiled by audio mismatch between the radio and TV speakers.

There is now an opportunity to hear a little bit of this history, in far better quality than ever heard at the time.

Last year a freelance broadcast engineer in Liverpool bought a “job-lot” of old tapes on eBay. One of the tapes contained a recording of a stereo broadcast, made off-air onto quarter-inch tape at 3.75 ips. The engineer sussed what it was and gave it to Mike Brown, who runs Original Sound in Cornwall and specializes in digital restoration.

Brown identified the recording as using Network 3 Radio for the lefthand channel and BBC TV for the right. The TV channel sounded very poor and was also slightly late compared with the radio channel, due to differing transmission paths. So he used a SADiE Artemis editor to slide the left and right channels into sync, along with CEDAR noise reduction—and ear skills—to clean up the tracks and balance the quality.

Brown listened to the content, deduced that the broadcast came from the Welsh Eisteddfod and checked with the Llangollen Eisteddfod organization to establish that the recording was made in 1959, on July 3.

Announcers Jimmy Kingsbury and Patricia Hughes introduce an hour of music including an excerpt from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, some folky stuff, and a Schubert Piano Trio.
Says Brown: “Although it’s apparent that the recording was made by direct connections, rather than placing mikes in front of speakers, the TV channel sounded inferior to the radio channel. When the image finally shifted into place it was quite exciting!”

I’ve heard the cleanup and it sounds terrific.

“So as far as I know the BBC does not have a copy,” says Brown. “I would happily let them have mine and I have tried several times to contact BBC Archives via the Treasure Hunt page on the BBC website but have never once received a reply or even an acknowledgment.”

“If you know of a better way of getting through to them, which doesn’t involve going to the BBC’s offices and standing outside their office window with a megaphone, I’d be happy to hear about it!”

All this brings back very unhappy memories of what happened many years ago when I visited Columbia University in New York, to research articles on Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of FM. The papers were in a mess and buried amongst them were several reels of decaying tape, which supposedly contained historic recordings of the Major’s early test transmissions and some early stereo too. There was no facility for listening to the open-reel recordings. There was no plan to preserve and transfer them to more modern formats either. No one at Columbia seemed to care.

If nothing was done then it is a safe bet that the Armstrong tapes will have long since shed their oxide and lost their audio. M3

Barry Fox reports on the audio industry as columnist for the British publication Hi-Fi News. His commentary also appears in every issue of Multi Media Manufacturer.

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