2 posts tagged “sun”

The other day I was browsing the CD / DVD section of a regular department store. Suddenly my eye fell on a new release by Porcupine Tree, a band I had only recently discovered when I bought their CD "Fear of a Blank Planet" with an Amazon gift certificate. Or to give credit where credit's due: through listening to the Silhobbit.com podcast who regularly feature Porcupine Tree.

The release I found was a rerelease of their 2000 album "Lightbulb Sun", consisting of a CD with a 2007 remix of the original album plus a DVD-Audio. I did not pay any attention to the DVD-Audio, because I did not own a DVD-Audio player (or actually I did, as I found out later). The package was reasonable priced, certainly worth buying it for the CD alone.

After having listened to the CD for a couple of days in my car, I decided to pop the DVD-Audio disc into my laptop's DVD drive to see what would happen. To my surprise, I was able to play the DVD-Audio tracks just fine! Even better, I discovered that the DVD-Audio played in our regular DVD player as well.

In both cases I had to use the 24-bit Linear PCM mix. I was not able to play the 5.1 DTS Dolby Digital Surround mix, because neither player supports DTS, but that is actually not a problem, as I do not own a 5.1 surround system. Nevertheless, even on my mediocre HiFi system / laptop I could hear the difference between the regular CD and the 24-bit LPCM DVD-Audio. For me it brought a whole new dimension to listening to the album. It is a superb album and it just sounds fantastic in this new format!

The outcome is that I will most probably buy more DVD-Audio releases quite soon. There is a bit of a format war going on between DVD-Audio and the Super Audio CD (SACD), but since the DVD-Audio plays on regular DVD equipment it is currently the clear winner for me. SACD would require me to buy a new SACD player.

The only benefit the SACD seems to have is that it contains also the regular CD tracks so it can be played back on regular CD players, like in cars (and it means you can rip it to your favourite MP3 player). With DVD-Audio that is not possible.

Perhaps it is also worth to point out what the CD + DVD-Audio package gives me in terms of content in this case:

1. CD with 2007 remixed album
2. DVD-Audio with 5.1 DTS Dolby Digital mix + 4 bonus tracks
3. DVD-Audio with 24-bit Linear PCM stereo mix
4. DVD-Audio with original 2000 CD stereo mix

It seems that the music industry is so messed up with looking at the negative issues, like illegal downloads and DRM, that there is no room anymore to talk about new developments that could bring some more positive interest into new music formats.

Or is everybody just happy listening to lower quality MP3s....?

Lots of snow and lots of sunshine