Media Reports

Digital Rights—Or Wrongs?
By Barry Fox

In Europe TV viewers are getting their first taste of how video DRM (Digital Rights Management) can obstruct innocent viewing and listening.

In Germany the new HDTV services from satellite station Premiere cannot be viewed unless the receiver is connected to the screen by digital HDMI cable. In the UK satellite broadcasters BSkyB (owned by Rupert Murdoch) had to postpone a similar restriction because the company had been selling TV screens without digital HDMI connectors. So Sky receivers can work with analog component cables.

But this is only a temporary measure and there is pressure on all viewers to use HDMI cables.

The new blue laser players, both Blu-ray and HD-DVD, will only deliver full quality pictures and sound if connected by HDMI because only HDMI connections are fully copy-protected with HDCP (High bandwidth Digital Content Protection) and AACS (Advanced Access Content System).

Apart from the cost—several hundred dollars for a cable to cross a room—HDMI is still flaky because the standards are still being finalized—just like the standards for the AACS copy protection system which is still being built into Blu-ray and HD-DVD players under “interim”
license.

The proof of what can go wrong came when news broke that Pioneer’s top-of-the-range plasma screens would not work with the Sky HDTV receiver.

The HDMI cable lets the sound and vision connections exchange digital handshakes before exchanging signals. The handshake can establish the highest sound and picture quality which the system can support, and tailor signals to suit it; handshaking also exchanges encryption keys to check that a screen really is a screen, not a recorder.

Getting information on why the Sky box will not send pictures to a Pioneer screen has not been easy because Thomson, the French company which owns RCA and makes receivers for Sky, has mysteriously mothballed its UK operation, and speaks in riddles with the Paris HQ usually communicating through a publicity company in Ireland which seems to know little about the UK press.

Thomson has however now given me a reasonably clear explanation of the blank HD screens. “The implementation of HDCP in some television sets and set-top boxes, and the timing of the two-way communication, is not 100% compatible so when one piece of hardware starts the interaction and does not receive a response quickly enough, it turns down the communication.”

Thomson admits that “HDCP was not part of the compliance testing of HDMI. . . [and] there are ongoing discussions at HDMI board level about the compatibility question and whether HDCP should be taken on board as part of the HDMI compliance testing.”

With HDMI products, compliance testing is mandatory, says Thomson: “We expect HDCP will probably follow that route because at the moment there is room for misunderstandings.”

If Thomson, owner of RCA, and Pioneer, the company which has bet the bank on plasma technology and makes arguably the highest quality HD screens available today, cannot get it right with HDMI and HDCP, who can?

Ironically Pioneer and Sky are now telling people whose screens are being blanked by digital copy-protection to bypass the copy protection by discarding HDMI and using analog component connections instead!

The downside is that the HD screen can no longer shake hands with the receiver to display the best quality pictures possible. The Auto setting on the receiver no longer works; the owner must choose manually between different resolutions.

It was one of Pioneer’s own demonstrations that showed what this can lead to.

Pioneer was staging a quality “shootout” between two Pioneer HD plasma screens and an HD LCD screen made by Sharp. The aim was to show how Pioneer’s screens can cope with the 1080 line progressive scan output from a Blu-ray player, whereas most other HD screens can only handle a 1080 interlaced input which is then up-converted inside the screen to 1080 progressive. When fed a 1080p signal the Sharp set showed only “out of range” error message.

The HDMI signal from the Blu-ray player was going through a distribution box that fed three screens from one player. The Sharp screen could not handshake with the Blu-ray player, could not cope with the signal it was getting and so displayed only a blank screen and error message—much like a Pioneer screen connected to a Sky HD receiver.

Don’t feel secure because all this mess is about video pictures. Both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD systems rely on HDMI/HDCP to carry new generation high definition audio. We shall hear only the sound of silence when HDMI handshakes fail, and then must use analog or SP/DIF digital connections that degrade quality.

iLEGISLATION
Europe is catching up with the US by changing the laws which have so far made it an offense to listen to an MP3 player or iPod in a car by using a low power transmitter that radiates an FM stereo signal at the bottom of the VHF FM broadcast band. When the car radio is tuned to the modulator it plays music from the portable as if it were coming from a radio station. But in Europe this has been classed as operating an illegal radio station!

So the only legal way to play MP3 or iPod music in a car has been to use a cassette adaptor. A dummy cassette couples inductively with the playback head of a cassette player. But few cars now have a cassette radio.

Several manufacturers, including Pioneer in the early days of CD, have been caught by the law and had to stop importing FM devices.

Now the European lawmakers are making FM devices legal. But few people in Europe seem aware of the fact that in the US the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is now asking the FCC to crack down on car modulators. Out of 17 devices tested by NAB, 13 were transmitting too much power. Some spill outside the 200kHz-wide FM channel, producing interference with adjacent channels. The latest plan is to change the transmitter default frequency from 88.1 to 87.9MHz. But some radios may not be able to tune in.

The NAB was acting after consumer complaints. Car radio listeners were suffering interference on crowded roads and at traffic lights. National Public Radio is now running its own tests and will lobby international regulator, the ITU. Wireless modulators degrade the already poor sound of low bit rate MP3 because they are analog, made to a cheap specification, and work at low power polluted by interference.

Jack Buser, Dolby Labs’ “Worldwide Technology Evangelist,” warned recently:
“A whole generation of kids has been raised on 128kbps. Hopefully this MP3 generation will experience what the new blue laser systems can offer and say Wow. Then maybe, just maybe, we can convert them. SACD and DVD-Audio were both fantastic but iPod pulled the rug from under both of them. Now we have got another chance to move the tide towards higher quality. If we don’t do it well, we will be right back where we were.”

Too true. When cellphone company Orange recently launched a new Bluetooth speaker system for connecting a cellphone to an active pair of Acoustic Energy speakers, the demonstrator proudly turned up the volume to show me how “really good” the speakers were. The music, I Wish It Could Be Christmas, had been downloaded earlier to the phone from the online Orange Music Store and sounded excruciating. The demonstrator just didn’t notice. Nor, it seemed, did the gadget journalists who were present.

The AE speakers are perfectly respectable and the Bluetooth A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) is designed to handle MPEG, AAC, and ATRAC audio. The Orangeman demonstrator had no understanding of data rates, but my quick check on the file he was playing showed it to be just under 1MB in size, with just over four minutes playing time. That’s a data rate of 32kbps.

When a company with the clout of Orange tells journalists that the sound of 32kbps audio is “really good,” and no journalist bats an eyelid, you get a fix on how much work Dolby—and any others who care about sound quality—will have to do to re-educate a generation on the value of hi-fi. 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.

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