DVD-Audio

~ the last words ~

Between 2000 and 2005 the direction of travel for music where I lived was down, not up. Files got smaller, encoders got better at hiding what they threw away, and the whole point of the exercise was that a song had to fit through a modem or onto a disc you carried out of an internet cafe. DVD-Audio was the recording industry proposing that music should go the other way, up to 24 bits and 192 kilohertz, and it landed in exactly the years when nobody was going to take that offer.

The specification came out of the DVD Forum in March 1999 and the first discs reached shops in 2000. A DVD-Audio disc could carry stereo at 24 bit and 192 kHz, or six channels at 96 kHz, stored as linear PCM and squeezed losslessly with Meridian Lossless Packing so that 8.5 gigabytes went further than it sounds. Measured on any specification anybody had, it was a straightforward improvement on the compact disc.

The problem was the player. A DVD-Audio disc did not play in a CD player, and it did not play in most DVD players either, because reading the audio zone needed hardware that understood the format. Publishers worked around this by putting a normal DVD-Video layer with Dolby Digital on the same disc, which meant the flagship high resolution format's most common use in practice was as a slightly better than average surround mix. Buyers were being asked to replace a machine in order to hear something they had only been told was better.

Around two thousand titles came out worldwide across the entire life of the format, which is a rounding error next to what the CD was doing over the same period. In Turkey there was no shelf for it and no demo unit in any shop I walked past, and the hardware that could play the discs carried import pricing on top of import pricing. The format asked for a commitment that was never really on offer here.

~ the record ~

~ the war ~

DVD-Audio existed because of a royalty argument. Sony and Philips held the patents under the compact disc and wanted the same position on whatever replaced it, which became Super Audio CD in 1999. The DVD Forum, with Toshiba at the front of it, declined to pay and specified its own high resolution format instead. Two incompatible discs launched within months of each other, each with its own player requirement and its own set of committed labels.

Consumers had sat through this before with videotape and did the rational thing, which was to buy neither and wait. Warner pushed DVD-Audio hardest. Sony pushed SACD. Some labels hedged and pressed both, which made the shelf even harder to read for anyone who wandered into it without a briefing first.

~ the lock on the door ~

Both formats shipped locked. DVD-Audio used CPPM, administered by the 4C Entity, with a media key block that authenticated the player before the disc would decode at all. The stated reason was piracy. The practical effect was that you could not move music you had paid for onto the device you actually listened on, which by 2002 was a portable player full of compressed files.

CPPM was broken in 2005 through a hack of the WinDVD software player that let anyone dump the audio out as six channel WAV. By then it changed nothing. The format was already commercially finished, and the protection had spent five years making the discs less useful than the CDs they were supposed to replace.

~ how it ended ~

There is no shutdown date because there was no service to shut down. New releases thinned after 2003 and had mostly stopped by 2006. In 2007 the Guardian wrote the format off as extinct, and that sentence is the closest thing to an obituary it ever got. No disc was recalled. No player stopped working. The catalog simply stopped growing and the shelf space went to something else.

What replaced it was not SACD, which is still pressed in small numbers for people who care. What replaced it was the thing the market had already picked, a compressed file and then a stream. The high resolution argument came back a decade later as a download and then as a subscription tier, with no disc anywhere in it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »