On 23 Jan 2011, at 13:50, dave.mal...@york.ac.uk wrote: > On Jan 23 2011, Eero Aro wrote: > > >> In my opinion, you can skip the on-going discussion about UHJ, it's more or >> less academic. UHJ was developed in the 1980's, at the time when vinyl LP >> and FM radio were the most important carriers. UHJ isn't needed anymore. >> > > Unless, of course, you are a musician who wants to use vinyl (or even > cassette!) for aesthetic reasons which is what's driving my re-looking into > UHJ (ps Fons - nice analysis, very useful!). In fact, I'm only glad that > there are no stereo cylinder players as I'm sure someone would want that too > - see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10171129
I tend to disagree strongly. DVD-Audio, for greed of the record companies, has been a still-birth. SACD hasn't fared much better, and I will not buy any for religious reasons, because a) I won't buy a medium I can't back up, and b) it's provably an inferior and less efficient way of storing audio when compared to PCM. So that leaves for main-stream music distribution online and CDs, and the shift is going more towards on-line distribution and less to any multi-channel capable disk carrier. So for most commercially relevant music, it's the choice between lossy-compression Stereo in the form of MP3 or AAC/MP4 files, or lossless audio on a silver sliver called CD. This means, until lossles multi-channel audio is available on CD-Baby, Amazon downloads and last but not least iTunes music store; the most viable way of distributing music is UHJ encoded Stereo on a CD, just like Nimbus records did. G-Format on DVD-Video is an alternative, but it has all the disadvantages that come with a format that was meant for video rather than audio (navigation, channel bandwidth, etc.) and it works only if your speaker layout matches the 5.1 ITU setup for which it was pre-decoded. With more and more people going 7.1, 6.0, etc. the number of variations one would have to put on a disc becomes ludicrous. So we're back to B-Format, or for better or worse UHJ-stereo. Ronald _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
