| Warner
to Release Albums in DVD Audio Format |
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| New
York, NY, October 9, 2000 -- Warner Music Group on Monday took the music
industry's first step into the next generation of digital audiophilia: The
label announced it will release seven albums in DVD audio format, a technology
that offers audio resolution more than twice as accurate as that of a conventional
CD. The first-ever DVD audio offering by a major label will include works by artists ranging from Beethoven and Ravel to Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Natalie Merchant. More titles will follow on a monthly basis. Warner's new discs will carry music in three separate formats: Advanced Resolution stereo and surround, as well as the six-channel Dolby Digital format currently used for DVD movies. The sound quality on the Dolby Digital track is similar to that of a DVD concert video and can be heard by anyone with a conventional DVD player. The Advanced Resolution tracks, by contrast, take advantage of the DVD's mammoth storage capacity to offer higher resolution audio (24-bit audio and at least 96-khz sampling vs. 16-bit and 44.1 khz, respectively, for CD) piped out through two channels for AR stereo and six for surround. For those less familiar with the nuances of digital audio engineering, that translates into a sonic improvement that's not far from what people experienced when they upgraded from analog to digital in the first place, according to Warner senior VP for new technology Jordan Rost. "Your ears are the only senses where you get information from behind as well as in front, Rost said. Because of that, "DVD audio really gets you much closer to the live experience." Veteran audiophiles may find that the idea of using more than two channels of audio sounds suspiciously similar to 1970s-era "quadraphonic," or four-channel, sound utilized by bands like Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. While quadraphonic sound eventually proved to be more of a technological headache than it was worth, Warner's Rost said six-channel DVD audio benefits from nearly 30 years of advances in engineering and recording hardware -- not to mention computing power. "There just wasn't the same (storage) capacity out there for quadraphonic," he said. Getting closer to aural Nirvana does not come without a price: playing DVDs in the AR format requires a new breed of DVD audio/video player. Several manufacturers, including Panasonic, JVC and Kenwood have released or plan to bow DVD audio/video machines, the first of which currently list for $1,000 and up. It's too early to tell whether the new formats will be as successful with consumers as their CD forebears, but the response from the artists themselves has been warm so far, Rost said. "It's an extremely artist-friendly format," he maintained. "Musicians are excited about the fact that they don't have to shoehorn all of their sounds into just two channels." Source: Warner Bros./Reuters |
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