blu ray audio cd's?

huh? CDs are already lossless.

Limited to lowly 16 bit PCM encoding and a 44.1 kHz sampling rate...

There was a reason newer, superior audio formats such as SACD and DVD-A was released.

and also a reason they flopped...
i kind of doubt you'll see major labels trying that again with blu-ray. golden eared audiophiles are a small market.

You can add a lot of the blame to the demise of these two formats to the nonexistent marketing of those two formats.

You mean BD Audio discs? Or the Blu-Spec CD? Both formats are already available.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

Not to mention stereo vs. 5.1.

Stores have seriously cut back on shelf space for CDs. If they aren't buying CDs, why would they buy audio BDs? BD is becoming successful because movies on discs still sell. Look at DVD. No amount of marketing is going to make CD sell again, and no amount of marketing is going to make audio BDs sell.

Please stay away from the "why did hi-rez audio (almost totally) flop" discussion. Been there, done that, many times here. If you don't have an answer either way for the OP, please don't post. Thanks.

(I said "almost totally" above because there's a fairly substantial catalog of classical SACDs)

larry

Nine Inch Nails has a release on Blu-ray. Ghosts I-IV. The Blu-ray is recorded in 24-bit/96khz high resolution audio. It was actually released a couple of years ago.

I could see audio BDs being a niche thing like SACD or DVD-Audio, that's very much possible. But that's about it.

Offerings from 2L and AIX signal that BD audio discs are not impossible, but they will always be expensive and limited releases. Grab them when you can.

A brilliant album, sounds great on BD, although it is only in stereo and not MC. Unfortunately it was only available as part of a larger packaged set, not as a stand alone purchase. The set has long been sold out. I would love to see more hi-rez releases like this, especially in MC, and available as a stand alone purchase.

It is brilliant, isn't it? I bought it on pre-order back when it first came out. Just went the site and the $75 set can still be ordered (it has the Blu-ray version):


I'm guessing it's still available because that area of the NIN site doesn't look like its been updated for a while.

Eric

The DVD-A v SACD "format war" didn't result in the failure of either, most consumers never heard of either one.

The fact about retail outlets carrying less CDs than they used to is evident. It also brings me to a question I had: Are there any online retailers that offer music in a 5.1 format for digital download?

If people cared about a quality advantage in audio, they wouldn't be dropping CD for MP3s...

blu-ray video has 6 times as much visible resolution that's well within the ability of your eye to resolve. not hard to market that. blu-ray audio would be a tricky one.

BD does have an advantage that anyone who has a BD player will automatically be able to decode a BD- Audio disc. Now i'm sure we'll see some from the major labels, but I do think it will be a niche product.

One thing for sure, they will have to author the disc to be compatible without having to turn on the TV, also they will have to market it with the car audio systems from jump in order to establish that market, they will also have to add features like video and interactivity and perhaps even commentary tracks that can be mixed in the audio to expand features. Lastly it's got to have a digital copy of the file so that it can be Ipod/mp3 player compatable.

not tricky to implement - the disk space that BR affords makes it easy to ship lossless audio (PCM|DTS-HDMA|TruHD), so concerts whose audio is well (re)mastered are good candidates for blu-ray

but I guess you meant: tricky to market, rather than tricky to implement?
I do agree that there is not much appetite for hi-res audio out there....
part of the problem is that unless you have a complete HDMI chain you can't try out whether lossless audio sounds better to you than lossy formats - some people don't want to leap to a new AVR

there have been a few AVS threads on concerts on blu-ray, admittedly with video included - not sure if there are any audio-only BDs

Unfortunately, that is true. I, for one, would probably buy BD Audio discs if more were available. I listen 99.9% of the time to classical music, and classical really sounds great in multi-channel lossless. I already have quite a few SACDs and DVD Audios. Fortunately, there are still SACD hybrids being released in classical.

+1

I'm also a classical fan and my favourite BD is mozart's magic flute - lossless sound of course

publishers like opus arte (http://www.opusarte.com) are to be congratulated on releasing on blu-ray

There's also the Neil Young Archives volume 1 box and the Tom Petty live anthology also on Blu ray.

62 live songs on one bdcd from Tom Petty and it makes me want to find more of these discs. The resolution from a cd that has 62 live songs recorded back around 1975 and up far exceeded my expectations. Makes me wonder what a well recorded studio version would sound like. Obviously I hope the format takes off.

lets face the facts.. even the golden eared audiophiles would at best notice only a very subtle difference between 24/96 and 16/44.1

SD vs HD video is much less subtle... it's more comparable to stereo vs surround sound... which of course is one advantage to DVD-A, SACD, BD audio that everyone can notice but those surround mixes aren't something average joe can listen to on his ipod he actually needs his home theater to listen to it

the formats will exist but not everything will be on those formats...

It depends a lot on the source. If it's Neil Young's archives, you're coming from tape and running it through an analog/digital converter. You're losing something there no matter what. Hell, even making a copy of the tape you're losing something.

If it's something modern and high budget like Nine Inch Nails, you can expect it was probably recorded & mixed in 24/96. And still you're not going to hear much difference unless your engineers are total crap. There's more headroom, more dynamic range, really subtle changes.