What happened to Blu-ray Audio?

I honestly think that streaming and not downloads is the reason any optical disc format sales are suppressed. Streaming might not be up the alley for many of us but for many, maybe most, younger music fans it is the media of choice. I just began using Tidal one month ago. My intended use of it to simply sample and discover new music quickly evolved into a means of "having" new music. It is so easy and accessible. It has its limitations that will effect others in different ways. I can't access everything I want. For those interested in surround sound it simply doesn't exist. So this is not a medium to meet 100% of everyone's interests but still it can easily be seen why it is surpassing everything else.

 

It died because as usual they didn't provide any interesting titles. Always the same ol' boring crap.

Yellow Brick Road
Pet Sounds

Have they learned nothing?

 

Blu-ray is currently my favourite physical medium for hi-res multi-channel music. The latest surround issues by Marillion, Kraftwerk and Alan Parsons Project were great and I'm happy to have them ripped to my NAS. FLAC (PCM) is still easier to use for me than DSD.

Bring on the music on Blu-ray, especially in surround.

 

+1

 

Yes this is why the labels and the artists themselves favor high resolution downloads. The artist or the label get no royalties from a resale of their work on physical media.

 

Try searching Amazon for "[Blu-ray Audio]" and you'll get pages and pages of stuff. Much of it still just 2-channel, which frankly doesn't excite me too much. Blu-ray Audio is no more dead than SACD, there are still some titles that trickle out. But it's a niche for sure.

 

And that kind of nonsense is another reason this stuff fails...

 

You mean the stupid DVD-A size that doesn't fit in a CD rack? THAT idiot size?

 

I think you are right and that it's a valid point. For BD audio to succeed it has to provide a tangible advantage over the older and established technology or a unique set of features. Higher bitrate or better sampling of the same 2 channel audio found in CD or SACD doesn't cut the mustard.

 

"When Sony gets Blue Her eyes get grey and cloudy...." Then she failed in the market place as the streaming services washed her away.

 

Oh yes, THAT narked. See also DTS releases in the same style of box. Ultra-meh.

 

Once upon a time I had to make a report about stick formats: SD vs Compact Flash vs. XD etc etc. My Japanese counterparts at the large electronics company where I work kept saying "Memory Stick will win, won't it? Won't it? WON'T IT?" piteously. So I made a PowerPoint slide will pictures of all the formats-may I can't even remember as they are dead now-with a title "Which Will Win?" and on the next slide it had the same picture with a red circle and slash and the title now said "NONE."

I explained that I understood it would be very nice if they could just pick one format to put in their hardware which would take care of everything, but that it simply wasn't going to happen. The market would stay fragmented, and that's my answer to you: "THE FORMAT" does not and will not exist.

Personally, I want to get stuff on Blu-ray, because you can just play the Blu-ray! No special player needed. Simple. And yet, here comes stuff STILL on DVD-Audio!* Why the hell anyone is still releasing that moribund format instead of onto Blu-ray is a total mystery to me. I mean SACD I can vaguely understand, as some people feel it is sonically great** but DVD-A?!?!? WHY?!?!? It seems SO stupid. Please post your conspiracy theories now.


*IIRC, some of Steven Wilson's Jethro Tull titles? And a few other things.

**My feeling is that has more to do with care and handling, not the technology at all. And definitely Sony's simplistic explanation of DSD (1-bit A/D delivered through to the end) is pretty much baloney. But SACD/DSD has it's own cult which is fed and at least some titles get made that way.

 

I think these are just DVD-V.

 

You are correct regarding the Tull titles, though the stereo layer is 96/24. The surround layer is fun in the car though.

 

I guess my original point was that, to make SACD work on any level outside of a small niche, every player manufactured from 1999 onwards should've had that capability, including cheaper models, car audio systems, etc, all discs should've been hybrids, and all should have had 5.1 mixes as a selling point. I remember seeing stuff like Journey's Arrival in SACD, stereo only with the same crappy mastering on both layers, and I'm thinking "no wonder this never took off."

I think the DualDisc was actually a pretty great idea, just with horrible execution, and a lot of discs released without any real worthwhile content on the DVD side.

 

[QUOTE="head_unit, post: ]
Personally, I want to get stuff on Blu-ray, because you can just play the Blu-ray! No special player needed. Simple. And yet, here comes stuff STILL on DVD-Audio!* Why the hell anyone is still releasing that moribund format instead of onto Blu-ray is a total mystery to me. I mean SACD I can vaguely understand, as some people feel it is sonically great** but DVD-A?!?!? WHY?!?!? It seems SO stupid. Please post your conspiracy theories .[/QUOTE]
Because some cars, including mine, can play DVD-A. None can play SACD (I don't care about the CD layer). I still prefer Blu Ray over everything, however.

 

I agree, but no way. You'd never get "every player" because what $$$ incentive was there for anyone but Sony? None, really. Now SONY should have done what you say-they could have made all their DVD players SACD capable, come out with more car players, more support on the Pro side, and had all the Sony music come out on hybrid. But there was not enough push from headquarters, which never decreed such. And absent such directive, each division did what was easier and did NOT fully support SACD because it would have been more expensive. DVD player prices would have been much more than competitors, album prices more (or, more realisitically, profit margin much less).

Barriers:
- Test discs had to be PRESSED, not BURNED, which is WAY more time consuming and expensive, since you had to stop a pressing plant to do so. I *think* this is still the case.
- Hybrid production was/will be always more expensive than a single layer disc
- Surround means double (or more) the work: additional mixing, plus mastering, plus test checks/listening by the band, etc. Not free either. And maybe not available-likely not all mixers/producers/bands would WANT to spend twice the time.
- Not everything needs surround. The Corrs In Blue? Nah, sorry, why did THAT get made? Does Nat King Cole need to be in surround? The Kingston Trio? Ed Sheeran? Not really. It's only certain "denser" music that truly benefits from being "opened up" via more channels.

So I don't blame Sony Music for their half-assed SACD support, or any of the other divisions. I do blame their leadership for not backing home-grown technology.

In the end, I think streaming would have killed the whole thing anyway. Now if someone comes up with multichannel streaming into the CAR...that might be interesting. But I think the vast majority of folks wouldn't really care too deeply.

 

This.

And you would think that Sony learned from the videotape days, when they kept the (by consensus) superior Beta product to themselves while the lesser VHS was licensed everywhere.

 

Blue Ray audio is gone, DVD high res audio is gone, several tries at improving Red Book CD's failed and CD sales are declining. We can buy DSD enabled DAC's but there is very little available to play on them beyond SACD's which have been ripped. We audiophiles live on an island in a world of streaming and dynamic range compressed music which plays loud enough to be heard over the sound of traffic.

 

It would have been a primitive version though, primarily used as an experiment in tape less recording/editing. I believe The Beach Boys' Summer In Paradise from 1992 was one of the first PT recordings, using a "Beta testing" model.
As demonstrated on the Sound City documentary, due to meagre computer RAM output (among other issues), it would take hours to complete a task that would take a few minutes or even seconds today. It was much more practical/convenient to stick with tape recording at that time, and limit one's pretensions!
I think 1999 is around the time ProTools started taking over the industry.

 

...and no bongos from the audience

 

I agree with most of this, except for the bit about the surround layer. It's desirable but not essential. Having better than CD quality stereo available on a Hybrid Disc was a very useful thing IMO, particularly for back catalogue releases - I wonder how many Beatles, Floyd, Zeppelin SACDs could have sold in the 1990s...

Another thing to mention is that Joe Public generally doesn't understand the purpose of DVD-A or Blue Ray Audio, they see these as VIDEO formats. Just take a look at Amazon reviews of Genesis Live 1973-2007 for example, a CD/DVD box set that featured 5.1 surround mixes but no substantial video content.

SACD doesn't suffer from that OTOH - the name states it and describes it clearly - SUPER AUDIO Compact Disc. Something practically everyone can understand the concept of, even if they don't think it's necessary or even possible.

 

I wonder which audience the industry is targeting with the Blu-Ray Audio: One major advantage of the format is the better sound quality over RBCD and Mp3. At the point BR-A showed up, most people who cared about that would've gotten themselves an Oppo or a stand-alone SACD player. For sound quality, BR-A does not offer any advantages to this group.

Audiophile digital media is already a niche market, and the section of the above group willing to buy into a new format for the benefit of 5.1 alone (which is far from being a standard in BR-A) must be tiny. No money to make here.
Unless there is a vast selection of BR-A titles not available on SACD, why would any SACD collector want to change?

I don't care about 5.1. I bought a small number of BR-As, just because they were cheaper than the SACD version, mostly vintage Jazz albums. I only ever found one single BR-A that holds an actual advantage for me over the SACD version: Art Pepper meets the Rhythm Section japanese BR-A contains the Mono version, while all previous HiRes releases had the stereo mix. Truth be told, I wasn't even aware of this. I mainly bought this because it cost about $10 and I only noticed the difference when the disc arrived.
What I'm trying to say is: Targeting the existing audiophile community with this (or any other) new disc format is pointless. There's no money to be made here.

So the actual challenge is to find an ENTIRELY NEW AUDIENCE interested in high quality sound, willing to buy into a new physical medium, AND willing to choose this new medium over the well established and well regarded SACD format.

In the days of downloads and free streaming, good luck with that. No wonder the big break for BR-A never came.

 

I think the surround was essential. "Better than CD quality stereo" is still debatable as to whether it's even perceptible given the range of human hearing. I think it is, but the difference is incremental, not substantial like going from DVD to blu-ray. Surround was the one thing the format had to offer that was new. High-resolution stereo was a nice bonus, but not the kind of thing that was going to get huge numbers of people to buy new players.