Media Reports

HDMI: Widespread Confusion?
By Barry Fox

US company Honeywell says one out of three custom installers has recently had problems with HDMI connections for high resolution audio and video.

I’ll drink to that; I always keep an analog link up and running so that I can use it to fault-find when the HDMI link decides to stop working.

Even the HDMI Licensing organization, which has produced the problems with a confusion of standards and inadequate policing, is now forced to admit: “The consumer is vastly confused.”

The first HDMI standard was set in 2002 by Hitachi, Matsushita (Panasonic), Philips, Silicon Image, Sony, Thomson, and Toshiba, and it has taken until now for HDMI Licensing to introduce a scheme that tries to “bring consistency and meaning to the way manufacturers market and retailers communicate HDMI-related features to consumers.”

HDMI adopters are now required to “implement Trademark and Logo Usage Guidelines”; but not until October 2008.

“Manufacturers can no longer just put a version number on HDMI equipment,” says HDMI spokesman Steve Venuti. “They must put the version number and the names of the features offered.” He gives the example, “HDMI (V.1.3 with Deep Color, x.v.Color).”

But very few consumers will understand labels like this.

“Discussions are under way on an HDMI logo that will be much easier to understand,” says Venuti. “It would tell consumers all they need to know—a kind of laundry list of features. But it will take at least another six months. It may not happen.”

Honeywell is offering cables with CURxE Light; an active component in the plug compensates for impedance mismatch to “automatically correct corrupted HDCP and EDID data,” while LEDs give diagnostic feedback.

But because Honeywell wants to keep most of the technology secret and is reluctant to provide review samples, it is impossible to say whether the company’s claims stand up.

Noting that Monster Cable has been promoting data speed as a benchmark for cables, Honeywell wants it known that speed is only one of 13 parameters covered by In-Visions Technology’s new Digital Performance Level rating tests. But the DPL website fails to list the parameters.

Noel Lee, “Head Monster” of Monster Cable, says HDMI makes him “feel born again.”

HDMI, he says, is “both Beauty and Beast”; a one-cable solution that is “Scart on steroids,” but crippled by five back-to-back standards over the last five years. Compatibility issues “add to the misery.”

Monster’s slogan is “Need for Speed,” and the company has cooked up a labeling system which is quite different from the DPL and HDMI Licensing schemes. Standard Speed, 1.65 Gbps for basic HDTV; High Speed, 3.71 Gbps for 1080p with 8-bit color; Advanced High Speed, 5.57 Gbps for 1080p and 12 bit color; Ultra High Speed, 7.43 Gbps for 1080p at 100Hz with 8-bit color; and Ultimate High Speed (to be launched next year), 11.14 Gbps for 1080p, 100Hz and 12 bit color.

In addition, Monster is using certification labels, such as Certified 1080p+, x.v.Color, 100Hz and 12-Bit Color.

“The HDMI Organization is in favor of what we are doing,” Lee assures.

During a London briefing Lee and his engineers ran “eye pattern” tests to compare Monster cables with unbranded cables and branded rival cables. Capacitance and inductance in the cable round off square wave pulses, and if the distortion becomes too extreme the squares are no longer recognizable as pulses.

“We need your help to educate consumers,” said Lee, after mocking advice on the Internet, including some written by a 19-year-old student.

Monster has published a color brochure, “Overview for Monster Retailers—HDMI, the technology and controversy,” to help dealers educate customers. This twice explains that Gbps stands for “gigabytes of data per second.”

Surely, Gbps stands for gigabits per second, which is an eight-fold difference from gigabytes?

After checking, a spokesman for Monster confirmed: “The document will now be amended—and, believe it or not, you are the first and only person to have noticed it!”

GLORY DAYS
Formats come and formats go. They go faster when they befuddle the consumer. Like this...

Super Audio CD is a single-sided hybrid with a Red Book CD layer and a DVD-like layer which holds DSD better-than-CD stereo or surround. So it plays either on a CD player or SACD player.

A DVD-Audio disc has MLP lossless audio and lossy Dolby Digital on one side, but no CD playback.

Dual Disc is a “flipper” with CD on one side and DVD on the other. Copyright royalty issues made the original idea of offering audio and video versions of a concert far too expensive. The DVD side can hold DVD-Audio, so Panasonic et al. saw Dual Disc as a neat way for DVD-Audio to challenge hybrid SACD.

But along came Sony, with heavy investment in SACD. So Sony-BMG’s Dual Discs had CD stereo on one side and Dolby Digital surround on the other.

Because most DVD-Audio discs were being “sold” on their ability to play sounds around the room, regardless of sound quality, it did not matter whether the DVD side of a Dual Disc was MLP or Dolby Digital.

The format flopped anyway, along with SACD and DVD-Audio.

Sony-BMG recently announced that Barry Manilow’s “Greatest Songs of the Seventies” would be on a Dual Disc with a video of “Barry reflecting.” But the DD is only in the higher-priced deluxe version. The PR company hired to promote the release had to admit “the promo copies we were given were not dual disc.”

Philips and Sony have gone very quiet on SACD. Linn is one of the few companies promoting SACD music.

Sony’s Playstation 3 (PS3) used to read the SACD layer of a hybrid but then downgraded the sound for anything but an HDMI link to an external decoder. More recent models just ignore the SACD layer. Panasonic’s DMP-BD10 Blu-ray player had DVD-Audio playback, but all the new models, starting with the DMP-BD30, do not.

Sony BMG has been releasing music videos on Blu-ray. A Tony Bennett disc has a dance routine with John Legend, which looks so good that Sony uses it for Blu-ray demos. The Legends of Jazz Blu disc is a collection of good jazz performances in HD, but with bare set production values that are on a par with a community cable TV channel.

The Blu-ray version of Bruce Springsteen Live in Dublin is of only Standard Definition DVD or VHS quality, even though it is coded with MPEG-4/AVC-H.264 at 25 to 30 Mbps. The pictures are soft, grainy, and dingy, even though overlaid titles and credits are sharp and clear, and the surround audio is fine.

The video was shot in HD with nine cameras, but the video quality “is as the artist wanted,” Adam Sosinsky, vice president of new technology at Sony BMG Music Entertainment, has now explained.

Springsteen wanted granularity added to give the product a more analog feel, Sosinsky told a colleague of mine at a recent “Blu-ray Festival” in Hollywood.

“That’s Springsteen,” Sosinsky said, adding that The Boss won’t pass an audio-only CD recording until he has played it on a CD boombox to hear how listeners will hear it.

Springsteen is not alone in boombox checking. Studio engineers have, for many years, played master audiotapes through small speakers, to make sure the music sounds acceptable over the radio or on radio or budget and in-car systems. But the music still sounds better through a good hi-fi. Degrading an HDTV master video recording means that no one sees HD, and everyone wonders why there is all this fuss about blue lasers.

Is it perhaps possible that Springsteen has had enough of new formats and is making a point?

CONFUSION
Although HD picture quality is clear to see on a large HD screen, viewed from close range, few people will hear the superior quality sound offered on the new advanced audio systems from Dolby and DTS. Most home systems will either not decode the new tracks or fail miserably to do them justice.

The Blu-ray Disc Group recently held a small meeting in London to announce one million BD discs sold in Europe, and well over 1.5 million player “functions” (mainly PS3 Blu-ray games consoles). Actually this breaks down to far less than one movie or music disc sold per player.

More important, the meeting presented a golden opportunity to ask the BD Group about the confusion over interactive standards and regional coding. Franco de Cesare, who heads International Marketing at 20th Century Fox, insisted that there was “no confusion.”

Oh, really? Consider the facts.

The original Blu-ray standard or Profile was 1.0. This specified no interactivity and no Internet access. New Profile 1.1, variously called Full Profile or Final Standard Profile or BonusView, adds interactive options such as dual audio and picture-in-picture. Because this requires dual decoders, hardware can only be upgraded with new software if the secondary decoders are already there.

Likewise Profile 2.0, due in 2008, adds BD Live Internet interactivity. Players can only be upgraded if they already have Internet-ready Ethernet ports, such as Sony’s PS3 but unlike LG’s dual format player which had a port for service testing only.

The BD Group may not be confused by all this, but consumers certainly will be when they buy interactive discs which will not deliver the promised interaction on existing players.

There are also now plans for a completely new Profile 3.0, which is for audio-only discs where the data storage and 36 Mbps transfer rate is used for uncompressed multi-channel sound of previously unimaginable quality—much like a souped-up version of the DVD-Audio and SACD formats that flopped. 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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