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What’s really exciting, though, are two announcements made at CES this year that suggest Blu-ray’s potential as a viable medium for high-quality audio. First there’s Monster Music’s release of hip-hop artist Ludacris’s album Theater of the Mind. Monster's Kevin Lee took time out to speak with me about the March 10 release of this High Definition Surround SuperDisc (HDS). Part of Monster’s mission is to help consumers embrace the latest higher-definition video and music formats with this Blu-ray release that has exclusive footage and video as well. Lee said that Monster feels an audio-only disc is alien to consumers today, and that video is needed to sell the product. Although I am not sure I agree with that, I am anxiously awaiting this disc, since delivering high-quality audio is at least part of the motivation for creating the label: Kevin Lee’s father, Noel, created Monster Music because he is an audiophile. Monster Cable was created 30 years ago to sell speaker wires. Lee said, "We have tried to help retailers demonstrate the benefits of surround sound for music and games, not just for movies. We probably set up 200 retail showrooms in which we hooked up DVD-Audio, SACD, PlayStations, TiVos, and iPods and programmed the remote so that the retail salesperson could demonstrate to the consumer how good a theater surround sound system could be. As you could imagine, the minute we left the room, no one knew how to operate the setup. But sound still continues to be a passion for us. With surround speakers we felt that there was an opportunity to give the consumer an incredibly new music experience you couldn’t possibly get with stereo. We also wanted it to be as close to high definition as possible without it being DVD-A and SACD." What Lee says he disliked about DVD-A and SACD is that you needed specific players. Now, with Blu-ray, which seems to be the mainstream chosen optical disc format of the future, creating a music technology with amazing sound for that format seemed to make sense. "My father developed his own proprietary process with his know-how of surround sound mixing. He figured out how to get 12 points of surround sound." The big challenge in marketing a new and improved format, has come in the form of content--or, rather, the lack ot it. "In the process of coming up with demonstration content for these home theater showrooms, we couldn’t come across relevant, current, megahit music that appealed to the masses," Lee says. That’s where the idea came from for Monster Music. "It was time to go to major artists in different genres." Ultimately, Monster worked on releases from 3 Doors Down, Ray Charles, Peter Cincotti, Al Jarreau, and George Benson, not to mention a surround mix of Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas. The discs they came up with are called High Definition Surround (HDS) SuperDiscs. While Lee said their discs have been successful thus far, they never created a hip-hop release. The idea was actually presented to Ludacris about three years ago. Monster funded the release, giving Ludacris’ label, Distributing Tha Peace, only the financial burden of taking the orders and manufacturing the discs. The album is finally ready for release. "We were so excited to have Ludacris with us to introduce the disc as CES." The Blu-ray release will cost about $25. Perhaps, a little more ambitious, at least in terms of convincing consumers they need a new audio format, is the proposal by Grammy-winning recording engineers Bill Schnee and Doug Sax, who have teamed up with Pioneer Electronics in the hope of progressing an audio-only standard for Blu-ray Disc. Pioneer USA's chief loudspeaker designer, Andrew Jones, told me that there is no standard yet. However, Schnee and Sax are looking further at a standard that does not necessarily embed the audio into video streams, but rather does the job entirely independently. Both men do all of their recordings in 24-bit 192kHz and put music onto a WAV file into the data portion of the disc. If the player is capable of outputting that music directly digitally, you can then take it out and put it into a converter. If the player offers high quality with a digital-to-analog converter built in, you could go through those, Jones said. Like Lee, Jones says there is a greater opportunity for Blu-ray audio than there was for SACD or DVD-Audio, because Blu-ray Disc players are the same machines used to play the mainstream movie format. In that sense it’s a no-brainer to purchase a Blu-ray audio disc. But there are other obstacles--namely, a cultural shift in which portability has become more important than quality, and the most common listening platform for music isn't even a disc anymore. "The media has stopped writing about, and consumers have stopped caring about audio. Audio has been redefined as an iPod." While neither Lee, Jones, nor I, for that matter, expect Blu-ray audio to become the format of choice for audio, or expect consumers to junk their iPods, we all hope that consumers will be offered a choice as to how to listen to their music in the home, in their cars, and on their portable devices, and recognize the value of higher-resolution audio as a significant factor in their listening decisions. Debbie Galante Block (debgalante at aol.com) is a freelance writer based in Mahopac, N.Y.
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