Media Reports

Audio/Video Split? Microsoft & Music?
By Barry Fox
Multimedia Manufacturer, March/April 2005
(Reprinted with permission from Hi-Fi News, Jan. and Feb. '05.)

There is now a rapidly emerging split between stereo for music listening and multi-channel surround for video. Few people are interested in surround for music. Lack of software has virtually killed off DVD-Audio; SACDs are selling mainly as CDs. There was very little promotion at CES, or the Heathrow shows in the UK.

Vinyl is increasingly popular. The old Finial laser turntable has been re-vamped and can now play all sizes of grooved disc "for well over £10,500"—but a record cleaning system costing several hundred more dollars is an essential bundled extra because the laser cannot shovel dirt from the groove like a stylus, so the optics read any specks of dust as music. Repeated cleaning may do as much damage to vinyl as playing it with a stylus.

The latest fad is to cryogenically freeze cables because they then "communicate more depth clarity and timing in music." But the only A/B demonstrations I have seen had too many variables in the audio chain to prove anything either way.

The next hot topic in Europe will be whether Europe wants or needs high definition TV and yet more channels of surround. At the Heathrow show, specialist publication AVTech had collared the first sample of a £20,000 three-chip DLP Screenplay 777 projector from InFocus to fill a 20" screen with true High Definition movie clips (720p, with each picture built from 720 lines), with a seven-channel surround system including two 1kW subwoofers. The pictures were stunning and the sound was gut-busting. But few homes need a 20" screen and even fewer wives and neighbors will tolerate the sound levels.

Upstairs in a smaller room, the £5,000 single-chip Screenplay 7205 was projecting conventional PAL DVD material up-converted to 576p by its on-board Faroudja processor. For most homes and screen sizes the picture quality may well be good enough.

Sony was running a split-screen demonstration from Blu-ray disc which compared true HDTV clips from Lawrence of Arabia at 25 Mbps with enhanced 9.8 Mbps DVD material. But the comparison was between 1080 x 1080 line pictures built by interlacing) and up-converted NTSC video. So the improvement from using true HDTV is more marked than when PAL is enhanced.

A new audio battle-between DTS lossless coding and MLP lossless coding-is already brewing.

DTS is initially using Lossless Digital Sound for cinema movies. The first public screening was in June, of the large format film Sacred Planet at the North American Museum of Ancient Life in Utah. You can be pretty sure it will eventually spin off down into consumer applications.

Says Mike Archer, Director of Cinema at DTS, "The introduction of Lossless to the large format film industry is the first step towards enhancing film playback for all formats."

DTS describes lossless coding as "made possible by a new extension to the DTS Coherent Acoustics codec, which is used in applications including home theater . . . With this new development, DTS is able to offer a single, comprehensive system that can deliver quality levels from Internet streaming up to high definition." The compressed soundtrack is "bit-for-bit identical to the original master."

Computers routinely zip-compress data without losing anything, but can only work on a complete file package. For music and pictures you need a system that can work in real time as music and pictures flow. MLP was the first system to work on a real time waveform, by discarding any bits used to code spaces or silence, and then trying to predict what the waveform will do next. Because this prediction can never be 100% accurate, MLP looks forward and backwards in time to also send a signal which codes the difference between the predicted and actual waveform. The recovered signal is bit-for-bit the same as the original.
Says Robert Stuart of Meridian Audio: "DTS lossless is not MLP, it is a separate development by DTS, based on their lossy coder technology. It doesn't have the same efficiency or feature set as MLP but seems to be OK for digital cinema."

I asked DTS for technical information to flesh out the company's puffy claims. There was none available. DTS said it is writing a "white paper," but there is no date for when it will be ready.

So I did a patent search. It revealed that a DTS patent on predictive coding, with the sound split into sub-bands, was filed by DTS in December 1995. And in June 1999 DTS filed for a system which further improves DTS or Dolby AC-3.

MLP predictive coding was originally patented by the late Michael Gerzon in May 1995, before DTS. But there was no claim by Gerzon to sub-banding. The MLP patent rights were later taken over by Meridian-hence the name Meridian Lossless Packing-and are now licensed by Dolby.

Dolby won't comment. But my bet is that lawyers from both camps are already crawling all over these patents, and in the end they will all have to cross license.

But that won't answer the basic questions: does anyone really want or need a slight audio improvement for movie sound, and does music need another version of DVD-Audio?

As an industry veteran nicely put it, the world seems pretty happy with what they've got with CD and DVD; and as a rule of thumb, if any new format is to succeed, it has to be 6dB subjectively better in video quality, audio quality, and/or convenience. DVD-Audio didn't offer that 6dB, especially as MLP decoding is now built into budget players with poor audio circuitry that squanders any quality gain. DTS Lossless coding may well interest US patent lawyers more than humans with ears.

MICROSOFT AND MUSIC?
The relentless drive by the computer industry to muscle in on the hi-fi and home entertainment market is gathering momentum. Microsoft has a new version of Windows called Media Center 2005, which is supposed to turn a home computer into an audio, video, TV, radio, and recording center.

In London we were invited to see "over 20 Different Form Factors Join Together for The Future of Entertainment."

"Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 starts delivering on the dream of digital entertainment today," promised Alistair Baker, Managing Director of Microsoft Ltd.

The venue was the plush Titanic bar near Piccadilly Circus. Deafening music and large screen video made serious conversations difficult. Many of the PCs on show were cosmetically designed to resemble audio and video systems, some of them stylish cubes.

No UK Microsoft event is now complete without a gushing speech by Cynthia Crossley, an American Microsoft executive living in Britain who likes to tell how she uses Media Center to entertain her family, laced with boss Bill Gates' favorite phrases such as "rich experience."

"Media Center was launched a year ago and we have sold 1 million units. It's been an amazing ride and it's going to get even more incredible.

"We have had success in the study. Now we want to move into the living room experience. You can record two TV programs at the same time, or record one and watch another, with rich support for 7.1 sound, and burn TV recordings onto DVD, and Instant Message while watching TV . . . and with Portable Media Center it can be done on the go, too. This is a new category of PC, with stereo, TV, photo, and PC functions. We have 20 hardware partners, who are launching 11 new MC machines. Online partners like Tiscali and Napster are offering rich experience, and taking advantage of MC functionality."

The choice of venue, the Titanic, had some people sniggering. But whereas the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank permanently, Microsoft and the partner computer companies will go on relentlessly re-vamping and re-launching Media Center, making exotic promises and demonstrating Center PCs that have been set up earlier and tuned to perfect working order.

Never expect Microsoft to show how long it takes to switch a Media Center PC on, or switch it off, or what happens when there is conflict with other hardware or software that the owner has added, or what happens when the PC gets a virus from the Internet that deletes all the stored music, surreptitiously dials out to a premium porn chat line, or makes the PC behave as if it is full of treacle. Microsoft certainly won't ask music and movie lovers whether they want to keep upgrading the software on their player every few months to fix problems, add new features, and all too often produce completely new problems.

A hi-fi and video system that does not connect to a phone line could become a valuable sales feature. So could good old-fashioned wires instead of wireless connections, because even the cellphone companies are now getting in on the audio video act.

Motorola wants to turn a pocket phone into an essential part of a home entertainment system. Instead of the WiFi radio system, Motorola will use the quite different Bluetooth.

Bluetooth is an industry standard for wirelessly connecting phones and computers to each other by digital wireless link, and to add-ons like printers. Bluetooth also converts sound to digital code for headset links, using its own SBC (Sub Band Codec) system which splits the audio signal into four or eight frequency bands and then codes them with Adaptive PCM at whatever bit rate is available. Music phones transcode MP3 to SBC for transmission over the wireless link. The final sound is often very poor.

Motorola is using three recent improvements to the Bluetooth standard to try and make it work better for hi-fi. New Class 1 circuitry is more sensitive than the current Class 2, and this increases range from 10 meters to 100 meters. Ver 1.2 of the transmission standard lets devices hop frequencies to avoid interference in the crowded 2.4 GHz band shared by Bluetooth, WiFi, and microwave ovens. The new A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) lets a Bluetooth link carry stereo at 700 kbps, to give near CD quality.

Early next year Motorola will launch the new DC800 Home Gateway, which incorporates all three Bluetooth improvements and sits alongside a conventional hi-fi to receive SBC digital audio which is being "streamed" from a Bluetooth phone. The Gateway converts the Bluetooth digital audio to analog audio and feeds it into the amplifier's conventional analog inputs.

There has been no chance yet to hear the audio quality because manufacturers are only just getting the first A2DP chipsets. Motorola claims "near CD quality." We shall see.

Although a Bluetooth link is secure against eavesdropping by neighbors (because the Bluetooth devices must be "paired" by pressing consent buttons on both the receiver and transmitter), the digitally distributed near-CD quality music will be free for anyone in the home to copy. How will the music industry take to this idea?

Motorola's Fred Zimbric acknowledges that there "will be an issue with DRM" but assures that "it will be dealt with in the devices." Yet Motorola does not say how.

Quite apart from the audio quality and DRM issues, my recent tests with Motorola's Bluetooth wireless headsets and speakers have shown serious incompatibility issues, for instance with Nokia phones and Windows XP PCs. The phone and computer industry may be happy with supposedly standard equipment that doesn't work together. But not the hi-fi and music world. And this may come as quite a shock to Moto.

At CES Mr. Microsoft himself, Bill Gates, gave the keynote speech. Needless to say he used it as the opportunity to promote Windows for home entertainment. Unfortunately for Bill everything that could go wrong did go wrong. A slide show of his pictures from the airport repeatedly refused to show.

"Who's in charge of this company," quipped the presenter, late-night TV comedy host Conan O'Brien, as Gates looked all at sea and pushed buttons to no avail.

"Let me mention that there's gambling in this town," O'Brien continued, trying to keep things moving as there were more blank screens. "If anyone wants, they can hit the tables and come back when we get this thing working."

Only a fly on the wall will know whether when Bill went back home to his mansion he also went back to enjoying home entertainment the easy old-fashioned way with audio and video equipment that switches on (and off) at the flick of a switch and does one thing properly, not a whole range of things not very well.

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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