Don Pearce wrote in message news:49900568.397070406@localhost...
On Mon, 09 Feb 2009 10:25:37 +0000, Roger Thorpe

wrote:

Without starting a debate about whether HD audio is really needed, would
anyone here like to attempt a prediction of the likely sound carrier of
the future?

With something 188 million iPods sold and then all of the competitive
hardware of a similar nature, it would seem that there is a small trend
towards portable digital music players. ;-)

Furthermore, there are claims that the sales of connectivity and
amplification equipment that allow portable players to act as fixed-location
players has exceeded that of all other component audio components (including
speakers) for the past year or more.

I'm not very good at this myself (I said that CDs would never catch on)

I purchased among the very first CD players that were sold in my city.

and backed the SACD horse a few years ago.

I have a *universal* player (SACD,DVD, CD, DVD-A)

I can see that Dolby True HD
and DTS HD are likely candidates for physical media, however the
copy-proof characteristics of SACD were what I thought would make it a
winner for the publishers.

Analog recording is now so good so cheap that as a practical matter, nothing
that can be converted to a line level analog signal is copy-proof.

Is there any activity in a different, secure blu-ray format?

I'm under the impression that Dolby True HD and DTS HD (which are container
file formats, and not just one data format) will be how Blu Ray does audio,
other than the legacy formats. There is interest in *universal* Blu Ray
players.

However, Blu Ray is a physical media distribution format, which makes it
very limited. Downloads of audio and now video are a major trend. It
appears to me that audio without video is a concept that is fading, slowly.

CD already has a definition way beyond that of the human auditory
system, which is why attempts at higher definition have not caught on.

Exactly. DVD-A and SACD were solutions looking for a problem.

Quite the contrary in fact, most recent changes in the delivery of
music have been heading towards lower definition.

There are many conflicting trends. As media and transmission costs come
down, extreme amounts of data compression as a trend seems to be fading
away. The other night I was listening on a web site that offered "limited
resolution teaser downloads of entire songs". I don't know what their format
was, but I was tempted to do an analog capture locally and do just *one*
download.