Hindsight: 20:20

As the Blu-ray vs HD DVD stalemate drags on, I found a great deal of wisdom (as well as, thankfully, synergy with my past comments) in an interview conducted with Bob Stuart in the September issue of Stereophile.Bob, for those of you who don't recognize his name, is the chairman and technical director of Meridian Audio, a company who was at the forefront of DVD-Audio and DualDisc development (the 'M' in MLP, the lossless packing algorithm that maximizes the format's playback time, channel count and per-channel resolution and sampling frequency, stands for Meridian). Meridian Audio also recently took over design, manufacturing and marketing of Faroudja video processing and projection systems from Genesis Microchip.

When asked for his thoughts on Blu-ray vs HD DVD, he answered the question by first giving a historical perspective on the DVD-Audio vs SACD format war (with candor that, not surprisingly, was absent from his pro-DVD-Audio discourse when the war was being waged ). I'll toss a few tasty quotes at you in the paragraphs that follow; I encourage you to snag a copy of the magazine (which is quite excellent, on an ongoing basis) for the full writeup.

We tried to bring DVD-Audio and SACD to market at a time when the music industry was at its sickest. The five majors were just shedding people all the time, consolidating, their market share was falling. There was nobody in the music industry anywhere that had the bottle to say, "We're going to invest in this and make it happen," because when the company's losing money and everything's sort of imploding as far as the music industry itself is concerned, that kind of decision could lose you your job. It was a very bad time to try for higher quality.

Everyone in the upper part of the music companies definitely understood that if you could make a premium product that you could charge more for, then that would be good. But they did try to get the whole thing tangled up in an agenda-copy protection-which was nothing to do with the customer's benefit….The music industry said, "Yep, that'll be cool, but they're not going to notice the sound-quality improvement so much, so we've definitely got to give them surround sound. We've got to give them this feature and that feature, we want pictures, and we want menus. But also, beyond anything else, we want copy protection, because our biggest problem is that we're being ripped off."

Even if it had been the right time, a format war is a nightmare, because the consumer quite rightly says, "Well, I don't know which one to buy. I'll buy nothing." If the entire industry had been behind DVD-Audio, it would have gone a lot further and faster than it did….DVD was a radical step up from VCRs-menus, features, skip through the chapters, sound quality was better, picture quality was better. But to expect the bulk of the market to want to take it to the next level is where the challenge was. Because a format can only exist if there are millions and millions of people who want to buy the titles.

If you try to limit your market to people who are interested in high resolution only, this is really not a lot of people. You have to turn it into a mainstream format by providing features and benefits that the main people can relate to, like the menu stuff, the pictures and surround sound-everyone can hear that it's better in surround sound, or at least it has that potential-but improving sound quality alone is not going to fly. If DVD-Audio had just been no pictures, two-channel, higher resolution-it's even harder to sell that. And that's where SACD started. You know, better-sounding CD.

So yes, we wanted better audio quality, the music industry wanted a higher-margin product that couldn't be copied, Sony and Philips wanted to replace their royalty stream [from the CD patents]. These are all objectives which don't necessarily line up with what consumers want.

If there hadn't been a war, I think we'd have got a lot further. You'd think the industry would have learned that from Beta and VHS. You'd think they'd have learned it from Elcaset, DCC-there's a long list of things that Philips and Sony were involved in where they got this wrong. They got it right with Compact Cassette. DCC flopped, Elcaset flopped, Beta flopped. But CD was brilliant because it was one standard, at a time when the consumer could adopt it and could see real benefits.

Continued with 'More from Bob Stuart'….