| Editorial November 2005
The Battle is Here
"The board is set, the pieces are moving. We
come to it at last -- the great battle of our time."
I recently answered a reader’s question regarding a
proposed shoot-out between one of the best CD-only playback systems and a state-of-the-art
competitor that played SACDs as well. When I reread my reply to check it for typos, my
thoughts surprised even me:
"SACD, at this point in time, is fading. CD is still
the king. In fact, I think it’s a safe bet to say that CD will be the last great
physical music carrier of our time. The future is downloadable digital -- music,
regardless of the encoding system, that can be bought and stored in myriad ways."
I believe this wholeheartedly. Now that SACD and DVD-Audio
have failed to capture the public’s attention, the writing on the wall is clear. It
took a while for me to admit this, especially since I enjoy multichannel music and believe
that, done correctly, it offers a strikingly realistic approximation of live music in the
home. And although multichannel music lives on in the form of DVD-Video, and will no doubt
be part of any future movie-and-music format we may enjoy, it won’t be in the form of
SACD and DVD-A as replacements for the CD.
The announcement of Apple’s Video iPod this week has
made me consider the further-reaching implications of my statement. Just what are the
futures of Blu-ray and HD-DVD -- the two imminent high-definition home video formats
we’ve lately heard so much about? Will they succeed with movies where SACD and DVD-A
failed with music? Might DVD be the last great physical movie carrier of our time?
The answer is unclear. Downloadable music is here now --
and in a huge way. Apple’s iTunes has now topped 500 million downloads. (Faith
Hill’s "Mississippi Girl" was number 500,000,000, for you trivia buffs.) At
this point, you can’t download movies with the same ease and selection that you can
music, but just how far are we away from iMovies? (I’ve tried registering that domain
name, and it’s long gone, so don’t waste your time.) A year? Two years? If
it’s more than three years, then yes, perhaps there will be one more physical carrier
of movies. But every format has a finite lifespan; I’m sure that any physical
data-storage format’s moment in the sun must be shorter than its creators would like.
With Sony/Blu-ray lining up to do battle on one side and
Toshiba/HD-DVD lining up on the other, the image is striking: of a third wave sweeping in
from the flank to wipe out both prospective combatants.
Remember the scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return
of the King, when the phantom army emerged from the shadows and, in a moment of
unstoppable force, overtook the legions of Sauron? Well, maybe -- just maybe -- the ghost
ship of downloadable video is on the march, soon the gathering armies of HD-DVD and
Blu-ray will see the sky turn black, and . . .
The future of high-definition home video may be lurking
somewhere at Apple Computers right now. If it is, then don’t hold your breath for
HD-DVD and/or Blu-ray. With a format war between the two likely to slow the widespread
acceptance of either, the end result might be a repeat of the SACD vs. DVD-Audio debacle.
The more I ponder it, the more I see it coming to pass.
...Jeff Fritz
editor@hometheatersound.com |
