Initially the discs were available in FNAC retail outlets, but they're now available in most global music markets –- including the UK, where a typical platter sells for £17. The first release was the 50-track Rolling Stones GRRR! compilation. In December 2012, High Fidelity Pure Audio was given its worldwide launch in France. Feed that Blu-ray player into your audio system and, with a High Fidelity Pure Audio disc, you're in for a musical experience that gets close to vinyl – but with none of the effects of wear associated with repeat listening. The UMG bigwig also reckons that Blu-ray will 'take over from DVD in 2015' – a stark reminder to those of us who have been using Blu-ray for seven years that we're not the norm – and says that living-room hi-fi (as opposed to the multichannel home cinema hardware familiar to HCC readers) is a 'massively growing segment'. '60% of the population will soon have access to Blu-ray,' he claims, a figure no doubt aided by cheap-as-chips players bundled with TVs and today's BD-spinning consoles. The widespread adoption of high-quality video in the home, reckons Robert-Murphy, presents an opportunity for high-quality music. This was followed by the Compact Disc (which enjoyed 25 years of great success), MiniDisc and finally MP3s.' 'We started with vinyl, one of the best sounds you could get, and then we had cassettes – I'm sure you remember winding up slack tape with a pencil. Although video has improved in performance terms and convenience since the late 1970s, audio has concentrated on 'portability' rather than sound quality. When I met with Universal's head of global new business (and High Fidelity Pure Audio advocate) Olivier Robert-Murphy, he compared the evolution of video in the home – VHS to Blu-ray – with that of domestic audio. And it is plundering these for releases on High Fidelity Pure Audio discs – a brand-name for a marketing initiative and standardised form of Blu-ray audio. Among these are such household names as Capitol, Geffen, A&M, Motown, Decca, Virgin-EMI, Blue Note, Def Jam and Island. UMG is an enormous umbrella of record labels covering many different musical genres. Step forward the Universal Music Group (UMG) and its High Fidelity Pure Audio drive. Audio-only Blu-ray discs were introduced fairly early, but were the province of specialist labels like 2L in Norway, whose releases tend to be specialist audiophile recordings of demonstration quality, among them Trondheim Solistene's excellent Divertimenti – a selection of chamber pieces from Britten, Bartok, Bjorkland and Bacewicz.īut what about more mainstream releases? They're usually the province of big record companies, and we've had to wait much longer for one of these to embrace Blu-ray's musical potential. From the outset the format supported audio with 24-bit resolution and 96kHz/192kHz sampling rates, and it offers a choice of uncompressed PCM, or the Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio lossless codecs. An obvious solutionīlu-ray has similar hi-res audio capabilities to DVD-A, and it's surprising that more hasn't been made of this. Not even the formats' specific advantages – SACD's 'hybrid' CD layer for backwards-compatibility with older disc players, and the DVD-Video compatible content of some DVD-A discs – could save them.īut, as download sites catering for audiophile tastes continue to gain fans, is disc-based hi-res audio dead in the water? Not yet, apparently. Buyers didn't know which format to back, at a time when DVD-Video was becoming mainstream, and continued to buy CDs. The problem was, as ever, a question of marketing and consumer confusion. Yet for all their good intentions, SACD and DVD-A failed as mainstream choices. New material also made it onto the formats, too. Back catalogues of material were released, with music fans able to enjoy 5.1 versions of such classics as Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon or Don Fagen's The Nightfly. At their best, they matched (or got close to) vinyl's sheer musicality while providing CD's longevity and convenience, and added discrete multichannel audio to boot. At the turn of the millennium, the SACD and DVD-Audio high-resolution disc formats were introduced, unimpeded by audible compression artifacts. The hi-def revolution creates a gateway for better-quality music, too, reckons UniversalĪudiophiles, on the other hand, have had a different experience.
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