Forthcoming EMI DVD-Audios

EMI listed some titles that had previously not been officially announced on inserts to some of the DVD-Audios that came out this week. They include:

The Band: Music From Big Pink
Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
Beach Boys: Surf's Up
Heart: Dreamboat Annie

Their status can now be updated from "rumored" to "announced with no street date".

[kidding]I know what you are thinking: What?! No Beatles?![/kidding]

Regards,

 

EMI has been putting their high resolution 2-channel mixes on the DVD-video part of the disc rather than using MLP compression and putting it on the DVD-Audio part. If you have a standard DVD player you can at least enjoy the 2-channel track at better resolution than redbook CD and a DTS multichannel mix until your hardware catches up or the format war is settled. Hopefully, they will continue to do this. I'm not sure if they offered the DVD-V compatible 2-channel mixes on the releases that came out today, though.

Regards,

 

Update. I had a chance to play with the Crowded House DVD-A from EMI this evening. It is very friendly to non-DVD-A types. If you have a regular-old DVD-Video player, you will have access to the original 2-channel mix in 24 Bit 96KHz and the 5.1 mix in either full bit rate DTS (i.e. the same as a DTS CD - a mild 4:1 or so compression rate) or 448Kbs Dolby Digital. You will also be able to access the song lyrics and the videos. The videos are in DD2.0 192Kbs only.

The only thing you appear to need a DVD-Audio player for is the 24 Bit 96KHz MLP multichannel mix.

Two minor complaints:

1) The labeling of the disc does not tell you what is accessible on DVD-Video vs. Audio players. It also does not tell you that there is a DTS track on the disc at all.

2) The disc is encoded with digital copy protection. If you use an outboard receiver to decode the 2-Channel PCM mix, it will be downconverted to 16 Bit 48KHz. You have to use the DACs on your player and use analog outputs for the 2-Channel to get the 24 Bit 96KHz audio unmolested. It's possible that older DVD players may not recognize the copy protection, but be aware.

If EMI keeps this approach, I will buy all of the above titles even though I do not have a DVD-Audio player.

Regards,

 

One additional irritant with the Crowded House disc. The 2-channel and DTS mixes have zero space before the opening notes of the first song. If your decoder is not instantaneous (and neither of mine were), you will miss the first few notes. I had this problem even if I scanned or chaptered back. The only way around it I found is is to set my player to search for the 0:01 time code, and then it worked. If I searched for 0:00, it took me to a DVD menu

There are a couple of other songs that had this problem if I chapter selected them, but since they were not the first songs, I could scan back.

Regards,