high-resolution audio

At the end of May, Onkyo will start selling Dolby TrueHD 5.1-channel music downloads, first in Japan, and by the fall of this year worldwide. That's either a brave or foolhardy move.

Multichannel music formats -- starting with quadraphonic LPs and tapes in the early 1970s, DTS encoded surround CDs in the 1990s, and DVD Audio and SACD in the early 2000s -- have all suffered from a lack of consumer demand. Very, very few surround releases were initially recorded in surround; most rock and jazz titles are remixed from older stereo recordings. The Blu-ray format has now … Read more

High-resolution formats like Blu-ray, DVD-Audio, SACD, and LP are all capable of delivering superb sound quality, but having music in those formats doesn't automatically guarantee great sound. The recording itself would first have to sound great, or to put it another way, a great sounding MP3 would sound better than a heavily compressed and studio processed 192-kHz/24-bit Master Audio Blu-ray.

Worrying about what sounds better--FLAC, WAV, or AIFF files--is a total waste of time if you're listening to an Adele or Black Keys album: the music's processing levels are so extreme, there's nothing for … Read more

What audio product needs to be invented? I'll start with an easy one: truly wireless speakers. That would be great; all they need to do is figure out how to beam enough power to speakers to drive their internal amplifiers. I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.

Maybe an app that converts crappy-sounding iTunes to true 24-bit/96kHz files, or Bluetooth audio that sounds decent. How about surround-sound headphones to listen to all of the great music recorded in surround? Oh right, first we'd need great-sounding music surround recordings.

How about a great-sounding subwoofer that doesn'… Read more

Quadraphonic was the first music surround format, and the first to bite the dust. That was in the 1970s. The SACD and DVD-A formats debuted at the dawn of the century, promising vastly improved sound quality over the CD, and both formats flopped. Their futures looked bright, so why did they fail?

Of course the record labels knew selling a new format on the basis of sound quality was a risky business, so they tacked on 5.1 surround sound. There were millions of households in the early 2000s with multichannel home theaters, so selling new music surround formats looked … Read more

Most of the music people enjoy doesn't sound very good. That's not to say it isn't good music, just that it doesn't sound great. I'm not picking on digital or contemporary music; most of my favorite Motown and Stax soul music from the 1960s and 1970s sounds like crap. Most rock music from any decade sounds cruddy; that's just the way it is.

A lot of today's best bands, including alternative darlings Arcade Fire, make awful-sounding recordings. I'm specifically referring to their Grammy Award-winning "The Suburbs" album from 2010; it'… Read more

Oppo Digital's Blu-ray and DVD players have found favor with the most demanding high-end customers. I knew that Oppo has collaborated with a number of high-end audio companies (Ayre Acoustics, MSB Technology, NuForce, and others) on a number of products, but I didn't know Oppo made improvements on its own products based on feedback from those high-end companies.

The Oppo BDP-95 ($999) may have a lot in common with the company's BDP-93 ($499) 3D universal Blu-ray, SACD, DVD-Audio player, but the BDP-95 really is a very different, potentially better sounding Blu-ray player. I say potentially because the $… Read more

Last month the Internet was ablaze with articles like Mark Milian's "Apple in talks to improve sound quality of music downloads." Milian did mention that the improved sound might be accompanied by higher prices, but no further details were covered.

He also said, "Many models of Mac computers can play 24-bit sound, and the iTunes program is capable of handling such files. But most portable electronics, and many computers, don't support 24-bit audio." Right, so I can't see why significant numbers of iTunes buyers would even consider purchasing higher-resolution files.

Download times for … Read more

I've referred to the AIX Records "Audio Calibration Disc & HD Music Sampler" Blu-ray in a bunch of my CNET equipment reviews, because it's loaded with terrific-sounding Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio music tracks. AIX refrains from using dynamic range compression, equalization, or signal processing, so the sound is as close to the original session as can be.

Now, with the release of "Goldberg Variations Acoustica" AIX has ventured into producing original 3D video programming. The new Blu-ray was shot with four prototype Panasonic 3D A1 cameras, and the sound was recorded in 96 kHz/24-bit high-resolution audio.

"Goldberg" maintains AIX's high standards for sound quality, but I'm an audio guy, so I called upon two of my video-reviewing CNET colleagues, David Katzmaier and Matthew Moskovciak, to comment on the disc's 3D picture quality. They watched the Blu-ray on a Panasonic TC-P65VT25 display and were generally impressed. They liked the picture's depth, but expressed concerns about visible crosstalk, which can appear as doubled outlines around onscreen objects, such as on the stand-up bass' strings. Katzmaier and Moskovciak also thought the image wasn't as sharp as it could have been. The crosstalk artifacts varied from shot to shot, but Moskovciak still thought the "Goldberg" Blu-ray might be the best live-action 3D picture he's seen "in a home theater setting" (the 3D image quality of "Avatar" in a movie theater was better).

Regarding the crosstalk, Katzmaier said it wasn't the disc's fault, and the crosstalk might not show up on future generations of 3D TVs. "Goldberg" is fully compatible with standard 2D Blu-ray players and displays, so you can enjoy the disc even if you don't own a 3D set. … Read more

I read Geoffrey Morrison's review of the Olive 4HD music server on the Home Entertainment Web site with great interest, because I recently heard the 4HD at a friend's house. The review provides a lot of information that I'm not covering here.

It's a cool-looking device, and I really like that it can be used without being hooked up to a computer. It's more like a CD player with a built-in 2TB hard drive.

There's a Gigabit Ethernet port and a Wi-Fi module if you're into the home network thing, and a free … Read more