Happy Blu Year - 2009!!!
Despite entering a new year with the worst economic
crisis since The Great Depression, the entertainment business saw some of the
strongest performance of old and new franchise feature film releases to date,
while some music acts old and new were showing strength and even TV was not
fairing badly. With CD sales rightly
declining for several reasons, the least of which it is only three years
younger than defunct analog tape systems like VHS & Beta, the music
industry needs to make 2009 the year they totally embrace Blu-ray the way the
movie studios have, while still issuing DVD and CD releases.
One possibility is an audio-only Blu-ray (dubbed
BD-Audio Profile 3.0) that would not only play on all Blu-ray players and PS3
machines, but would play on virtually every single CD player manufactured by
meeting what is known as CD’s Red Book standard. All the discs would have 2-channel stereo or
mono, but the quality would be far higher than the tired 16 bit/44.1 kHz sound
the old format has had since it debuted.
Besides CD that are just too old from their transfers to sound good and
ones that have rotted over the years, you have better editions that have been
remastered and reissued. You even have
Gold CDs, DVD-Audios and SA-CDs now out of print that are very desirable.
But the reason downloads have been able to overtake
CDs outside of price is the fact that despite the usually awful sound quality
of MP3s that will sooner or later be blamed for a new generation of hearing
damage (turning it up louder does not
make it clearer) too many new CDs have not sounded very good and the cheap ones
they are trying to sell off for good are also dated. The minority of better older CDs that are out
of print (like film soundtracks) are collectible and thousands of albums plus
millions of songs form the vinyl years have never been issued on CD. Many cannot be found in downloads either.
While sales of feature films, TV shows and concerts
fuel the climb of Blu-ray, the lack of Music Video and classic concert product
is a problem, but Neil Young may change that when his Archives Blu-ray box set arrives.
The entire entertainment industry has its eyes on what may be a
watershed release from a man who has always backed the high fidelity playback
of his catalog. The CDs were issued with
HDCD encoding that makes the sound better, whether you have HDCD capacity or
not, then most of his albums arrived in the mostly defunct DVD-Audio format
(reviewed elsewhere on this site, with many gems outshining their vinyl equivalents)
in 5.1 music mixes and 2-channel stereo for purists. Many of those mixes are likely to show up in
this set and if it is the hit it is expected to be, watch the record labels
rush to afford the same release to other artists with a large catalog. It could also finally mean the comeback of
music by artists with talent and something to say, though you know someone is
going to try to streamline and gut it out for maximum profits somehow, but
consumers will (especially with this lame economy) reject that.
But even if the music industry is slow to adapt,
the movie studios are going to see Blu-ray climb in popularity as people start
to see DVD as being as old as VHS was when DVD arrived, even if the differences
are not as dramatic on some titles, especially the bad films where the image
has been so degraded for fancy or would be “artistic” reasons that you could
stick with VHS and not notice the difference.
This will be Blu-ray’s first full year of High
Definition dominance and more HDTVs out there than ever, even those usually
half-witted HD downloads offer weaker and glitchier playback than a clean,
direct Blu-ray playback. Now, it is up
to both the music and film businesses to offer top quality releases and set new
standards for how great films and especially long-suffering music has for too
long can perform.
