Is surround sound the future, or another Betamax?

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a perfect 5.1 system and will typically listen to music in the background in a way that undermines even stereo perception, much less surround sound, they note.

"I have to look at it from a consumer's perspective," said Tony Espinoza, the founder of the San Francisco Soundworks studio. "I don't think that listening to music usually coincides with sitting with a bucket of popcorn in the perfect location."

Others, like longtime Neil Young producer Elliot Mazer, are big fans. Mazer recently helped remix Young's Harvest album in 5.1 surround sound, and helped The Who's Pete Townshend set up a 5.1-equipped personal studio to work on that band's albums.

"I don't think that listening to music usually coincides with sitting with a bucket of popcorn in the perfect location."

--Tony Espinoza, founder, San Francisco Soundworks

"The effect is the same as stereo, but it's a bigger, more exciting way to listen to an album," Mazer said.

Backers point to cars as helping to drive the future of the medium, because the speakers can be set up by professionals, and listeners are rarely moving around. Acura, a division of American Honda Motor, already sells two models with 5.1 speakers, while hi-fi companies are increasingly installing such systems in cars.

"That capability gets people juiced, and they've got to have something to play on those systems," said Silverline Records President Jeff Dean, whose label, a division of the 5.1 Entertainment Group, focuses primarily on surround sound releases. "I think it's rapidly on the road to mass appeal and mass market."

As for Harrison, he said he'd like to continue working this way even when he finishes the Talking Heads catalog later this year.

"We've learned a lot about it, and gotten very good at it," Harrison said. "There are a lot of other people's records I'd love to do this way."

SACD

The article barely mentions SACD. It has gained a foothold in the classical and jazz markets as the defacto audiophile disc.
DVD-A is dead. Witness the Seal sales. Dual Disc is dead on arrival also.
SACD needs better support from the music industry, but it has potential.
And BTW, it is an AWESOME product. The sound is amazing. Far superior to cd.

[MCK68]

SACD

I couldn't agree more. Good SACD are noticable better sounding than good standard CDs even on relatively low quality playback hardware. (there are poorly recorded/poorly engineered examples of both)In my experience, on true Hi-Fi equipment SACD is good enought to reverse the old $/quality equation of vinyl to CD: that it took a $5,000 CD Player/decoder to equal the sound of a good, clean LP on a $1000 turntable/cartridge. A great LP on a silly expensive system may still sound the best but only a few people will ever spend $10,000+ on a music system to hear it. SACD is as convenient as any other CD and the SACD catalogs are growing. DVD-A has been an unfortunate diversion.

[Earl Benser]

I'm not sure...

... that I would agree with you about the 'great superiority' of
SACD. I've spent too many years listening to audiophiles trying
to blow smoke about one product or another when a difference,
if it could exist, was far below the capabilities of human
perception.

You like SACD's? Fine, and be happy. Are they better than CD's?
Unprovable. Anything can be better than a bad CD. A good CD
doesn't leave much room for real improvement. And unless you
are in an exceptinal audio environment, the pointis moot. On an
iPod, in a car, or with any other sort of portable audio, MP3
quality is more than adequate.

Anyhow, the article's point was 5.1 audio for HDTV, and its spill
over into regular audio. SACD could be 5.1 if it survives. So
could DVD-A. And even tho my ears have heard too many loud
noises for too many years, I'll still vote for 5.1 for superior audio
presentation. It's as big a jump over stereo and stereo was over
mono.

Too confusing for consumers

That the industry has "analoged" DVD-A and SACD so that it now takes 6 interconnects from player to receiver as well as the lack of good bass control on the receiver for such a setup, they have reduced this market to audiophile diehards. The music industry has shot themselves in the foot by not allowing a simple toslink interconnect for this source material.

audiophile diehards are also the only people that will sit in one spot to listen to a recording. 5.1 becomes pretty meaningless for the person that is moving around getting other things accomplished while listening to music.

The market for this idea came and went. It is time to cut losses and come up with another idea.

[CBS Orchestra]

Cure One Out Of Control Problem First

There's a major problem which needs to be addressed.
The record labels are all in a ridiculous "loudness race" these days. During the mastering process, they crank up the volume to obscene levels and then compress the living daylights out of the signal. The result is a clipped, drastically squashed sound file. You can hear the pathetic results on just about any decent sound system. The dynamics are all gone. There's just a clipped, distorted wall of mush.
Take those master recordings and put them on SACD or DVD-Audio, and you get 6 channel, pristine mush as opposed to 2-channel muddy mush.
Run the results through a typical broadcast chain, and it gets even worse: the processing equipment just gives up, and what comes out of the speakers is often an abomination.
Rip a 1970s-era CD. Then rip just about any modern day CD, and compare the waveforms side by side in your favorite audio editing application. You'll (literally) see what I'm talking about.
And no, I'm not a so-called audiophile, although I do appreciate good audio.
Search on "loudness race" and you'll see that I'm not hallucinating about this.

[skeptik]

greed

Amazing how perceptive the industry can be and yet resistant to fixing their own problems...

First off, the format wars. Duh! Nobody wants to be another betamax loser. Don't these guys learn anything? Before you offer new technology to the public, you MUST decide on a single format and commit to it on both a hardware and content level. And believe me, offering "exclusive" content in a given format does nothing but **** off consumers. We're witnessing this in the online MP3 market now. I'm not signing up for 4 different onlines services to get all the songs from the bands I like. I will however be pissed at the industry and the bands for expecting me to do this... for all of about 30 seconds until I go online and procure a "pirate" copy of the song.
Second - rebuying. OK, buying copies of music I already owned on tape and vinyl in CD format sucked, but there was some compelling reasons (better quality, no degradation from repeated playback, simplicity of programming and skipping around, etc...) and I did it. But how many times does the industry really expect me to "refresh" my collection of the Talking Heads catalog? And why is it that the new format always costs significantly more that the old format? Get real guys, I know even you realize that most of what you're releasing these days is crap, but trying to re-sell me the same old music over and over is not the solution to the problem.
Third -MP3. Well, I know the industry hates this format, and ironically it is lower quality than CD... but haven't they figured out is a convience thing? We put up with the lower quality because we like the ability to server our music how we want, where we want. Burnable CDs were a hit for the same reason. But offering us "legal" MP3s for the same cost as a packaged CD purchased in a brick and mortar store is way beyond reasonable. MP3s are the home grown mix tapes of the present. We should be able to purchase CD, SACD, DVD-A or whatever and make our own MP3s for our own use. That's the only reasonable use for MP3.

OK, I did not address the problem the industry has with freely traded music online. But MP3 isn't the issue. As bandwidth increases the public will begin trading 5.1 music rather than MP3s, which only succeded because at the time it was the most manageable format and size for swapping. I haven't offered the industry all the answers for their woes... but that, quite frankly is their job and if they would stop spending all their energy on trying to wring every last cent out of the paying public, they would come up with some very good solutions of their own. They did an excellent job with the CD format, but that's the last good thing they've done. Since then, all they've done is work very hard at screwing their own customers... to the extent of sueing 12 year old girls for thousands of dollars. Find me another industry that's taken that stance against their own customers and come out ahead.