Media Reports

Dual-Disc Dance
By Barry Fox
Multimedia Manufacturer, July/August 2005

"At last! DualDisc is coming to the UK." In fact DD is coming to the whole of Europe. But so far only one company, independent Silverline 5.1 Entertainment, is committed to the launch, and only a dozen or so titles-with American NTSC video content but no regional coding-are slated. Considerable confusion surrounds the claimed support from majors Sony/BMG, Universal, Warner, and EMI. The official launch date at the end of April came and went without any firm news.

After test marketing DualDisc in Boston and Seattle in February 2004, the "flipper" concept (a half-thickness DVD bonded back-to-back to a thinner-than-usual CD) got the official go-ahead from the DVD Forum's steering committee last June and was formally launched by all the major record labels in the US in October.

The ratified revision to the DVD standard is called "single thin layer disc." After complaints from Philips, the CD logo is not used. Like conventional CDs and DVDs, flippers have a maximum allowable thickness of 1.5mm, but whereas the factories that make CDs and DVDs are aiming for 1.2mm, flipper presses are aiming for just below 1.5mm. So there is very little manufacturing tolerance.

The rival flipper format, DVDPlus, was developed by Dieter Dierks in Germany, with pressing initially by Sonopress in Germany, then Digital Valley, France. DVDPlus has already been test-marketed in Europe but most importantly Dierks claims European and Australian patent rights. Last December Sony (perhaps with unhappy memories of its twenty-year patent dispute with Andreas Pavel over Walkman) bought DADC a license to use Dierks' patents and press the Silverline discs. Silverline 5.1 has also now made a deal with Dierks.
Other pressing plants appear much less anxious to take a license, and may fight the patents before signing.

The European DualDisc launch announcement was held at Dolby Labs' offices in Central London, with Meridian in attendance because Dolby and Meridian license the MLP system used for DVD-Audio. Silverline discs have DVD-A surround on one side and CD stereo on the other.

DualDisc is really all about getting DVD-Audio into the CD racks, alongside hybrid SACD.
John Trickett, Silverline 5.1's chairman, gave a series of back-to-back briefings, showing parts of the same "now one disc has it all" promotional video that was screened at NARM in the US. He promised a "less American" version for the UK, but it had not been readied for the launch event.

Target thickness is 1.43-1.46mm. I measured the five discs given out as shrink-wrapped samples. They range between 1.45 and 1.47mm.

"Out of one million discs sold since the full scale US launch of seventy titles by majors and independents four months ago, less than 40 people have complained and ten of those were saying they couldn't download the content. There were no complaints over problems with hardware," says Trickett.

But some manufacturers have posted warnings about DualDisc on their websites. Have they now retracted?

"Manufacturers were concerned in the beginning because the CD layer is thinner. So you cannot blame manufacturers for testing for safety. I am not aware of any retractions. It will take some time," said Trickett.

Sony's website still carries the warning about playing the very discs Sony's plant is pressing.
Playing time for the CD side is claimed to be 73-74 minutes, with DVD capacity the full 4.7 GB. There are no plans yet for a dual layer DVD-9. Silverline's titles will sell to European dealers at a price that equates with premium top line CDs.

Although Trickett tried to give frank answers to questions, he was clearly in difficulty because none of the major record labels were in the briefing room to back him. "We have their unequivocal support," he assured, "believing" that the majors were in another room ready to confirm support. But an hour after start time there were still no majors to talk to.

Ahead of the launch Dolby had said: "There will be other record labels at the launch so you can ask them their exact release schedules then." Meridian had been expecting Sony to attend. Event Organizer Mike Chadwick of Essential Music and Marketing said all the majors were coming, but his colleague Maryann Melchor expected all except Warners.

One excuse given for the no-show was that there had been a music business awards event the night before and even the 12:30 PM lunchtime start for the DualDisc launch might be too early for the record companies!

An hour after the start time a party of three from Universal arrived. "We have heard about DualDisc and came to get information," said Universal's catalog manager.

"We have no launch plans. No plans at all. This is a fact-finding mission," said Universal's European Sales Manager Dave Bartholomew. "We don't know anything about it and came to learn more. As with all new formats you need the retailers involved. I don't know whether they have done that. If not it will be like SACD which is dying a quiet death."

Despite requests and reminders to Silverline, I have heard nothing from any of the majors that are supposedly planning a launch.

All five DualDiscs played on my consumer players (CD, SACD and DVD-A) but playback on an in-car CD player was very hit and miss. Only one disc played reliably, the other four often gave an error message, especially when the player was cold-even though it reliably handles conventional CDs and even CD-Rs with the extra thickness of a stuck-on printed label. The in-car player was also painfully slow at recognizing the DualDiscs, taking up to 20 seconds before either playing the music or displaying Error. I asked for comment on this but heard nothing.

One industry theory is that the pressing plants have gone to so much effort to keep DualDiscs within the mechanical 1.5mm thickness limit that they have sacrificed optical reliability; another theory is that some of the discs use copy-protection which is causing the playback problems on some players.

It's all academic, though, unless the majors get behind the project. For this they would need to be excited about DVD-Audio. But the world is now far more interested in blue laser and whether there can be agreement on a single standard unification between the rival Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats.

DVD-Audio and SACD have lost their buzz-and with them, DualDisc. At a DualDisc update for the record industry that Sonopress sponsored in New York recently, the few record company people that did show up (often late) showed only Kindergarten knowledge of the format that is supposed to help them sell discs.

Why do the words flog, dead and horse keep coming to mind.

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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