Audio Blu-ray: Niche product or format of the future?

Berlin - The Blu-ray audio format promises music with brilliant sound. The catch: The offerings are limited, the discs are expensive, HiFi buyers are skeptical and the music industry is keeping its distance. And most consumers don't have the slightest idea what it's all about.

Wouldn't it be great to have the technology behind the Blu-ray disc harnessed for home playback of music at outstanding acoustic quality? Many people may be surprised to learn that there's already a format for this: 'Pure Audio,' as it's known, has been around for a while but is little known. Its primary advocates to date have been special label classical albums. After all, the discs rarely cost less than 20 dollars.

The fundamental benefit for consumers is the low threshold for getting started. If you've already got a Blu-ray player and a home stereo system, then you're good to go. This is precisely what gives the proponents of the format hope. 'The music industry doesn't have to do anything but jump onto a train that's already rolling,' says Stefan Bock, managing director at msm-studios in Munich, which helped develop Pure Audio.

And Bock promises that you don't have to have a high-end stereo costing several thousand dollars to benefit from the strengths of the format. 'You'll notice the difference even on a low-end or mid-line stereo,' Bock says. The worst thing would to be to feed poor quality into poor hardware as well.

The recognition that music consumers aren't receiving the best possible sound quality has been around for years. It's a paradoxical situation: artists and record companies spend millions tickling out the absolutely best sound quality in the studio.

And then those premium-quality recordings are scaled back to the CD format, now almost 30 years old. And in fact they are compressed even more massively to fit into the MP3 format for playback on mobile phones or digital music players.

Better sound quality comes by storing the music in greater detail. For CDs, data is split into 16-bit blocks and read out at a scan rate of 44.1 kHz. For Pure Audio it's 24 bits and 192 kHz. This involves huge volumes of data that only Blu-ray discs can possibly hold, Bock says.

The major benefit of Pure Audio is that the format can be used on TVs like CDs - with the screen switched off and using the remote control. To appeal to MP3 fans, the company is also pushing a process called mShuttle that allows the discs to be burned onto computer in compressed form, even if the computer lacks a Blu-ray drive.

Other providers are trying to produce better sound without Blu-Ray. Harman International, which makes professional studio equipment, and consumer brands like harman/kardon and JBL are pursuing a compression approach.

Special markings are appended to the data flow when the music is recorded to denote places where strong compression would have a particularly negative effect. When the music is played back later, the software 'unfolds' the music at the markings. The device must have the Harman technology integrated for the process to work, though.

Another option is high-resolution downloads. The Norwegian label 2L, for example, is offering 'lossless' formats like FLAC alongside Pure Audio discs.

The unspoken question here is whether the majority of music fans truly care much about better sound. It's not a coincidence that a growing share of music is being sold in compressed form over the internet, not to mention the millions of pirated copies that apparently satisfy many.

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