The Holy Grail of Home Entertainment?
from the opposite-of-bleeding-edge-technology dept
If you've ever had a burning desire for surround sound for your CD collection, you may have to wait a little longer for a convenient technological solution. An attempt to create a hybrid DVD-CD format has been dubbed a failure. That's really too bad. But this seems even less desirable to me than HDTV. Does anyone really listen for surround sound music?
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
These hybrids aren't that new
The movie sucked so bad I never bothered to check out the CD side or any of the DVD special features.
Maybe that's why the hybrid was a failure? They used crappy movies...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Multi-format
In addition to which, if your sound system doesn't have full-range speakers all the way around, you need bass management to redirect the bass from the limited speakers to the subwoofer. Most players don't have that built-in, so you need to buy an external bass management box (and more cables). Sometimes it's cheaper just to upgrade your speaker system.
Back to the multi-format DVD/CD: I don't think they thought the idea through. People without DVD players wouldn't care that it was DVD-capable, and people with DVD players can already play both DVDs and CDs. Besides, it seems inevitable that DVD mechanisms will start being used in CD players, at which point the combined format is obsolescent. This might've been a reasonable idea in the early days of DVD, but today it has limited potential.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Surround sound music
However, I don't understand the situation, we aren't talking DVD-A here (which I own a couple, and despite the fact I cannot put them on my MP3 Jukebox, they do get played occasionally,) but the ability to play a DVD-CD on either a CD Player or a DVD Player. I am not sure why this would even be attempted, as I have no problem what-so-ever playing CDs on a DVD Player, and CD Players are for installing the operating system, not for playing music/video. Seems like a solution without a problem if you ask me, and one that has died because there is no problem.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I always love to listen to surround sound music!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]