The labels were giddy about surround's future: "Now that 5.1 music is here, listening to stereo is like watching black-and-white TV." To entice converts, record labels would pile on oodles of bonus tracks, videos, live concert footage, interviews, commentaries, photo galleries, lyricsand, best of all, multichannel sound. The DVD-A crowd's mantra of "added value" was supposed to put DVD-A over the top in the mass market. Great, but high-resolution sound alone wouldn't slay the Compact Disc. Stereo DVD-A boasts uncompressed PCM with a 24-bit word length and up to 192kHz sample rate six-channel surround DVD-As encoded at 24/96 employed Meridian Lossless Packing compression. SACD was designed around Sony/Philips' Direct Stream Digital (DSD) codec, which stores music as 1-bit data sampled at an ultra-high 2.8224MHz. The future looked bright back in 1999.ĭVD-Audio appeared a year later, launched by a consortium that included Matsushita, Toshiba, and Warners on little more than faith that the next-generation music format could ride on the coattails of DVD-Video's rousing success. Not only that, dual-layer, hybrid SACD/CDs were backward-compatible with standard CD players.
Thanks to the format's generous data capacity, a single SACD could contain stereo and 5.1-channel surround mixes.
This fall sees the tenth anniversary of the launch of Super Audio CD by Sony and Philips. Multichannel is just peachy for home theater, but good ol' stereo suits music just fine, thanks very much. A great stereo recording can produce such a full-bodied, three-dimensional soundstage that surround sound seems superfluous.
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