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DVD Hack Delays DVD Audio
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Dec 02, 1999 12:47 PM
from the you-gotta-be-kidding dept.
from the you-gotta-be-kidding dept.
An anonymous reader noted an article that is running over on CNN that is discussing the news that
DVD Audio will be delayed while manufacturers attempt to implement strong encryption to prevent the same thing from happening to DVD Audio that happened to DVD Video. They are still operating under a fundamentally flawed assumption: if we can decrypt it to watch it, someone will figure out a way to decrypt it to rip it. The delays hurt their profits as well as irritate their customers that want new products. Its quite frusterating.
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DVD Hack Delays DVD Audio
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Why DVD Audio? (Score:3)
What exactly -is- DVD Audio supposed to provide that a CD don't? 5.1 surround concert CDs? 10 hours of music? More expensive players?
just curious..
Re:Why DVD Audio? (Score:5)
-jwb
Urk (Score:5)
I think using the phrase "rip it" was probably a poor choice. My take on the whole DVD deal was that I just want to watch them under linux and not have to run a proprietary OS to do it. I don't want to have to buy 2 dvd players (one for the living room and one for the bedroom). Using phrases like "rip it" make you think of copyright violation via copying.
just a thought. not a flame.
FAQ: What is DVD-Audio (Score:5)
[1.12] What about DVD-Audio or Music DVD?
When DVD was released in 1996 there was no DVD-Audio format, although the audio capabilities of DVD-Video far surpassed CD. The DVD Forum sought additional input from the music industry before defining the DVD-Audio format. A draft standard was released by the DVD Forum's Working Group 4 (WG4) in January 1998, and version 0.9 was released in July. The final DVD-Audio 1.0 specification was approved in February 1999 and released in March. DVD-Audio products will show up in late 1999 at the earliest (Panasonic has announced DVD-Audio/DVD-Video players for October 1999). The delay is being caused by the slow process of selecting copy protection features (encryption and watermarking). A watermarking technology was supposed to have been chosen from the top two contenders: Aris Technologies and Blue Spike. (Aris press releases in late June touted itself as the winner but there has been no official announcement.) Proposals from Cognicity, IBM, and Solana were eliminated during testing, although Solana later merged with Aris.) The evaluation process is being done by major music companies in conjunction with the 4C Entity, comprising IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba. It's possible that the RIAA's Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) could push the introduction of DVD-Audio into 2000.
DVD-Audio is a separate format from DVD-Video. DVD-Audio discs can be designed to work in DVD-Video players, but its possible to make a DVD-Audio disc that won't play at all in a DVD-Video player, since the DVD-Audio specification includes new formats and features, with content stored in a separate "DVD-Audio zone" on the disc (the AUDIO_TS directory) that DVD-Video players never look at. New DVD-Audio players are needed, or new "universal players" that can play both DVD-Video and DVD-Audio discs.
Plea to producers: Universal players won't be available for some time, but you can make "universal discs" today. With a small amount of effort, all DVD-Audio discs can be made to work on all DVD players by including a Dolby Digital version of the audio in the DVD-Video zone.
Plea to DVD-Audio authoring system developers: Make your software do this by default or strongly recommend this option during authoring.
DVD-Audio (and universal) players will work with existing receivers. They output PCM and Dolby Digital, and some will support the optional DTS and DSD formats. However, most current receivers can't decode the high-definition PCM audio (see 3.6.1 for details), and even if they could it can't be carried on standard digital audio connections. DVD-Audio players with high-end digital-to-analog converters (DACs) can be hooked up to receivers with two-channel or 6-channel analog inputs, but some quality will be lost if the receiver converts back to digital for processing. Future receivers with improved digital connections such as IEEE 1394 (FireWire) will be required to use the full digital resolution of DVD-Audio.
The music industry has requested an "embedding signalling" or "digital watermark" copy protection feature. This uses signal processing technology to apply a digital signature and optional encryption keys to the audio in the form of supposedly inaudible noise so that new equipment will recognize copied audio and refuse to play it. Audiophiles claim this degrades the audio.
In the meantime, the DVD-Video standard includes surround sound audio and better-than-CD audio (see 3.6.2).
Sony and Philips have developed a competing Super Audio CD format. (See 3.6.1 for details.) SACD provides "legacy" discs that have two layers, one that plays in existing CD players, plus a high-density layer for DVD-Audio players. Ironically, initial price for these dual-layer discs will be higher than for a standard CD plus a standard DVD. Sony released version 0.9 of the SACD spec in April 1998, the final version is expected in April 1999. SACD technology will be available to existing Sony/Philips CD licensees at no additional cost.
Retard-O-vision (Score:3)
Currently, I can play CDROMs on my computer. With the data encrypted, the playback unit will have to have the key and decoder. For stereo equipment, it'll work like DVD video does, I assume. But will computer audio now be windows-only? Until it's cracked again?
Will the "completely new encoding system" raise the hackles of ITAR?
CSS2 must not have been much more secure than CSS, much egg for the faces of Intel, IBM and Toshiba.
Oh my, yes. (Score:3)
On a more serious note, I hear that after this year, all DVD players MUST have region locking enabled in hardware...but it's only a matter of time before someone breaks from the pack, like Plextor did with Digital Audio Extraction in CD-ROM drives. Even to the uneducated, apathetic layman, stuff like this makes no sense, and annoys them to the point where it may galvanize them into either breaking the "security" (bad enough from the industry's standpoint) -- or worse, educating themselves on the issues and becoming a real threat.
Big Government and Big Business don't want you thinking (or creating) for yourself. Just sit back, shut up and eat your gruel, citizen-unit.
Was cracking the video DVD done too early? (Score:4)
Is there a danger that companies will pull out of the video DVD market now they are frightened of ripping? Although the DVD market is strong here in America, I know that in Britain it is still taking off, and I could imagine big companies panicking and cutting out of the British Video DVD market until another 'secure' video scheme comes along.
Even though millions of dollars have been invested in DVD, I wouldn't be too surprised at seeing companies cutting their losses...
Any thoughts on this, or am I being too paranoid?
Waiting game (Score:3)
There are millions of brains and PC's out here waiting to beat the system that only a dozen of them engineer. Who do you think wins? Not Matsushita and certainly not the RIAA!
Audio Encryption Jeopardizes Medium's Growth (Score:3)
am I missing something? (Score:3)
The real problem (Score:3)
to be able to decrypt this on equipment that is
not under their control.
What is to stop a person from hacking a DVD drive
to allow reading (and eventually writting) to
the entire disk? (as I understand it they rely
on the DVD drive being able to read a special
track but there being no way to get the drive to
divulge that info)
Alternatly...the music HAS to exist in unencrypted
form for some span of time. So...if I hack their software I can make it do anything...including
hack it to output to a file.
Or better yet...create an Audio Driver that claims
to have the highest possible quality output
surround sound and whatever ooptions the software
might look for to determine what it needs to
output as....that just captures the output
The same could be done for DVD movies even.
Their entire idea is thus fundamentally flawed.
Encryption just stops John Q Moron who has lots
of money for buying readers and writters from
doing a direct copy.
Someone needs to hack a DVD, figure out the disk
format and all that shit...and publish enough
info that independant hardware manafacturers can
make DVD drives. Force the standard open!
Digital music and proprietary encodings (Score:3)
Nevertheless, the music industry will undoubtedly come up with some brain-dead scheme to attempt to prevent copying. In historical context, there is a high probability that this move will kill the format. Witness HDCD, whose encoding is a trace secret of the only company that makes the stream decoder. Almost nobody uses HDCD, and nobody really cares about that format anymore. DAT and MD were saddled with stupid copy-protection schemes that made their initial adoption slow. Luckily the enthusiast community was able to overcome these schemes and DAT and MD have found a niche in the hobbiest world.
In the perfect world, the digital encoding format of DVD-A would be an open, published specification like CD audio is. I expect that the outcome will be the opposite.
-jwb
This really heads back to Cap'n Crunch Draper... (Score:3)
By being programmable, it was inherently able to do the sorts of nefarious things that one would do with a "Blue Box" or any of the other Phone Freaking equipment.
At the time, Apple concluded that deploying a more freakworthy variation on what had just gotten Draper imprisoned would be a very bad idea.
That, of course, was a goodly dozen years ago. Time has passed, and the average computer with sound card contains 50 times as much DSP hardware as "scared off" Apple.
In effect, the modern PC can be programmed to be a phreaking monster.
Back to DVDs... If they deploy software on PCs that allows reading DVDs, and do not use some form of tamper-resistant hardware-based strong crypto, then the general purpose hardware along with general purpose software represents a potent force to completely crack anything the music folk try to use to prevent unlicensed dissemination of music.
Furthermore, even with strong crypto, of the DVD happens to be readable by a DVD drive, then copies can be made, even if the music can't be played on one's PC.
It is evident that the industry moguls are entirely clueless in this...
Gee... (Score:3)
The music industry can blow me. I can always find higher quality music from garage bands who don't have a problem distributing their stuff on the net in MP3 format. I'll do my business with companies that support open protocols and don't try to violate my rights in their greedy scramble for more money. Don't let them ease us in to a pay-per-view world.
The Failure of DVD Audio (Score:4)
This isn't meant to start a flame war, but I think, despite the technical merits of it, DVD Audio is not a comercially viable technology. Perhaps the future of commercial audio recordings is in some encrypted mp3 standard.
Frog in the well (Score:3)
"Another frog in the well croaks indignantly against in protest against construction workers who are unearthing the century-old useless well. Joining a whole crowd of other frogs in the well, insisting that the construction workers respect their rights to the well, and the water therein. But some day, the bulldozer will smash through the old well walls, and concrete poured in as they finish the basement of a new high-rise to be."
Not another pathetic attempt to put the genie back into the bottle. When will people get out of their well and realize that the Information Age cannot be shoe-horned into traditional industrial models? Copy-protection is an old, obsolete concept that just doesn't fit in the modern context of the Internet and the Information Age. This new era is about sharing information, not hiding it. It's about making things available to people, and opening up choices by allowing fair competition to your trade. It's a new set of rules that sells services instead of hogging commidities. Trying to fight this will only shoot themselves in the foot, real hard.
And here we have yet another obviously traditional, "orthodox" company talking about "increasing encryption key size", while not realizing that the weak link is the fact that information is actually being displayed through the DVD player -- hence it's copiable. They're clinging on to old principles that are quickly becoming obsolete. Pathetic.
People who intend to survive in the new millenium better break out of their old mentality, and learn to play by the new rules. And they better learn this before the concrete is poured into their well. Time for them to get out of the well and look for higher, better things.
"Stagnation breeds failure and miserable defeat."
(BTW please excuse my melodramatic intro :-) )
I think the solution is simple (Score:3)
;)
-Dean
Yeah, THIS is going to work. (Score:3)
First of all, I don't see independant labels (the ones who produce the most important music anyway) moving to multi-million dollar studios to record something, and I don't see any real value in the added quality. Not so much that I'd want to fsck myself for it. Count me out.
Re:Why DVD Audio? (Score:3)
Most likely they'll encode all those extra channels. Blech! When I listen to MUSIC, I only want 2 channels. Heh, I guess I'm a purist.
In essense better audio quality.
Note I use digital recording as part of my job, but just _prefer_ analog.
Gotta go to work, or I'd give a more in depth explaination.
dvd-audio encryption is ethically misguided (Score:3)
this is one of the biggest frustrations imaginable...
1) the physical media is already difficult to manufacture, but those with deep pockets will have the means to create bootleg copies--this does nothing to really slow down major pirates, and much to confound consumers.
2) burning dvd-ram copies for sale is long and tedious, and will not have a big impact (how many music and software companies going broke due to the popularity cd-rw drives?).
3) a good engineering student could hack together a compact disc player, but even with a suite of standard components, would have difficulty building a bare-bones dvd player... when dvd media becomes obsolete, some audio may be effectively lost due to the encryption.
4) what happens when audio legally purchased on dvd-audio becomes public domain? no one seems to be concerned about all these encryption schemes which potentially lock away information *forever*.
sincerely, kuma
Re:Urk (Score:3)
Using phrases like "rip it" make you think of copyright violation via copying.
That fact that phrases like "rip it" immediately conjure up images of "copyright violation via copying" shows just how effectively the RIAA propaganda machine has been doing its job. I regularly rip my legally purchased audio CDs in order to make my own audio CD music mixes for the car, etc. This is perfectly legal--but I'm sure the RIAA will try to find a way to make it appear illegal or, at least, immoral.
Re:..but only 20 of the 24 bits are actually used (Score:3)
-jwb
Engineers just create new formats (Score:3)
Ripping is not always illegal (Score:5)
The recording industry would like us to believe (falsely) that any form of copying is illegal. Their entire encryption efforts are based around this false assumption. Rob is entirely right to say that ripping should be technologically allowed. Please don't perpetuate the myth that copying without permission is automatically illegal.
my machines serve me... (Score:5)
If you think back ten years, technology was about companies. A new system or format would come out, and we would all praise the creators for giving us new technology (ok, not everyone, but people who like new technology). We didn't ask for input into the design, and didn't complain very vocally when they were designed for the good of the companies rather than the consumer. The people creating these formats are still stuck in that age where they, a small number of large companies, controlled the means by which we also used them.
But those days are over. I simply will not invite a machine into my house unless it serves my agenda, and my agenda alone. I don't want a black box that keeps secrets from me, spies on me, controls my freedom, or generally tells me what I can and can't do. I believe that this attitude is the only way we can keep the integrity over our machines in the techno future, and I believe it will spread.
Regarding the specifics of making these disks hard to crack, they really only have a few options. They could put more keys on each disk, so that they can quickly stop printing one key once it is known to be cracked (damage control, but it means people will have to keep updating their players). And they can use stronger crypto (if they can get by the regulations which seems very difficult), but that only means makes the known plaintext attack that the CSS crackers used to attain all the other keys when they had one implausible, they would still have get first one.
I'm interested in hearing for people with better insight then myself into this sort of programming, if it is plausible to write a program where the key cannot be retrieved from the memory when the encryption is going on? After all, GPG complains about insecure memory everytime I run it, but that is from other users: this is worse, since it will be me trying to scan the memory for the key. Can it really decrypt things right under my nose without showing what transformations are being applied when analyzed carefully?
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Re:Why DVD Audio? (Score:5)
When a CD is recorded today, the recording process has to ensure that no frequency above 22.05kHz is recorded, else there will be nasty alising problems. This is acheived using a "brick wall" filter, which is a very high order low-pass filter whose -3dB point is at 22.05 kHz. Therefore all information above 22.05kHz is lost, and this is the information that helps the listener locate the sound. With a 96kHz sampling rate, this filter could be moved all the way up to 45.5kHz, well out of any useful range. Better still, it could be moved to 30kHz with a lower order, thereby introducing les noise into the audible range.
I do tend to agree with your point about getting good speakers. But once you get all the good equipment, you start to really hate the CD audio format.
-jwb
Hack vs Crack, Extract vs rip (Score:3)
It just doesn't get the conversation off on the right foot when you say "I want to be able to rip copyrighted material under Linux."
----
Making copies is not necessarily illegal (Score:4)
You might want to listen to the music on a Rio or some other device, or you might want to make a backup copy in case your physical media becomes damaged. You might also want to keep a few copies in different places so you don't have to lug your music collection around with you. It's also fun to manipulate your music on a PC to see what it sounds like backwards and stuff like that.
There's nothing inherently wrong with "ripping" a CD, and the music industry shouldn't be so caught up in trying to control distribution to the point where their efforts are at odds with technological progress.
Copying music and then distributing it without permission is against the law, except in very limited circumstances where you can claim fair use (a la Negativland). But there is no reason that simply copying it, without distributing it, is wrong.
Don't let coporations control more of your life than they already do.
-OT (who is not a lawyer and knows these statements are not 100% accurate
What? Me worry? (Score:3)
Way back when CD Audio came out. It was cool. However, you could no more make a CD than you could to press your own album. If you wanted to copy it you used crappy analog audio tape and did it that way.
Then along come the CD-ROM drives and the CD-writeables. And minidisc and DAT. And the recording industry comes up with SCMS which is so easy to crack it is not even funny. Actually there is not even anything to crack - you change two bits on the bit stream and everything is cool.
Next we had MP3 show up. The recording industry again comes up with all these protection methods. None of them lasted. That Microsoft thing lasted what, a day?
DVD is really no different here. It fell and fell fast once MoRE figured it out. Someone else will figure out DVD-Audio. And someone else is gonna figure out whatever other formats show up. They do it for the Playstation by putting in modchips, and I remember a long long time ago in my Atari 800 days there being an addon for the floppy drive to let it write bad tracks so backup copies could be made of the commercial software.
Some little namby-pamby encryption scheme will not stand the test of time. No way, no how. Copy protection is a total joke. So quit worrying.
hardware can be cracked to y'know :-) (Score:3)
www.codefreedvd.com [codefreedvd.com] is a British firm that'll happily sell you that DVD player you've been drooling over, but with the ability to play imported DVDs and to get rid of the signal degradation that MacroVision causes.
It's all a game. hack, counterhack.
Phase problems with higher frequencies... (Score:3)
For example, if we are sampling at 48khz, then the highest frequency wave that we can represent is 44khz. However, this assumes that the peaks of the waves are aligned with the sample points. If they are not then the phase is either going to get shifted up to 90 degrees in either direction to be able to represent the waves, or they will be anti-aliased into the wrong amplitude (if they even come out as a wave at all). Even by the time we get down to 11 khz, we still only have a phase resolution of +- 45 degrees. As a lot of the sense of position and space is defined by the phase coherence of a sound (especially in room accoustics) then this 'smudging' of the sound at higher frequencies could be a real problem.
The second problem is what happens when your frequency isn't a nice divisor of your cutoff frequency. If we go back to our 48 khz sampling rate: we have a 22 khz ceiling (/2) and then the next 'clean' frequency is 16 khz (/3). What happens with the frequencies in between? most likely, you are going to get a beat frequency introduced as amplitude modulation of the signal as it moves on and off the sample clock rate. As you move down the frequencies (/4, /5, /6) then the problems become less pronounced and it is possible to represent more of the wave-forms as a cleanly phase coherent signal.
I therefore think that it is quite possible that although the theoretical maximum frequency is well up into the super-sonic range, the effect of doubling the sampling frequency will provide a much more natural coherent sound than you would initially assume.
Re:Audio Encryption Jeopardizes Medium's Growth (Score:3)
Maybe YOU dont want it. But there's a lot of people who do. It's a shame they're going to encrypt it though.
-Rich
DAT anyone? (Score:3)
This reminds me of the stuff when DAT came out. DAT was a failure because of all the arguing over copy-protection (as well as being non-random access, but that was less of an issue than having copy-protection schemes voted on by the US Congress).
DVD-Audio has no place in high-end audio either. People who spend thousands for professional gear tend to stick to standard formats (I've noticed a migration to
So, if the high-end audiophiles do not have a use for this technology, and Joe Average has to buy fairly expensive equipment, from people who assume he is a thief bent on stealing their music, to listen to discs that sound pretty much the same to an untrained ear, then there isn't much real mass market here.
The only place I see a place is selling to audio buffs who have to have the best of everything to listen to their CD's, and have to have 24/96 no matter what. However, these people are fairly rare, and probably would resent having to get yet another piece of gear to stick in their rack.
Eliminating Fair Use (Score:4)
The RIAA does not like the concept of a customer making copies of legal material for their own personal use. The ability to buy a CD then make a tape (or now, burn a copy or burn your own CD mix) for your car irks them. This has gone to court and "fair use" was upheld. Since then, RIAA representatives have made comments that imply their dislike of "fair use" is strong today.
Enter technology.
Take a good look at SDMI. Embeded within the specifications is the groundwork to eliminate that pesky "fair use" copying. Technology will enable the industry to eliminate what the courts would not.
I would expect a simular thought process to rear its ugly head within the DVD arena.
How does encryption help? (Score:4)
I'm trying to understand encryption in the audio world. They encrypt this disk, I can't play it except on autherised players. What is to prevent me, owner of two autherized players and the equipment to burn a DVD (This doesn't exits AFAIK, but it will soon) from making a copy of it? Oh sure, I can't play it in linux (if it is good encryption), but I can now make a couple digital copies of the encrypted disk.
24/96 sounds kinda useless at present. (Score:3)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Listen to yourselves... (Score:3)
From my vantage point, I think that the huge majority of CD-Rs which contain CD-Audio are pirated CD's, not mix CDs or archival CD's... Some of those probably would have been paid for had CD-R's not been so easily accessible.
DVD Audio has the potential to add value to audio, with better sound quality, possibly more music per disk, and other gimmicks. For that, the industry should be allowed to protect their investment. That being all the money they've shoveled out and fronted to artists, studio's, etc, without knowing how well a particular act is going to sell.
It's their risk, so it should be their profit. Since DVD exists already, they don't need to go and invent a new form of media in order to add value to the music. But that opens up them up to piracy. So... like any busines, they're trying to cover their butts. If they come out with a format that's "unbreakable" to consumers, but easily crackable by
----------
On a second subject, maybe you all could do something about this by not supporting the industry. Ever thought of that? Don't like it? Don't buy it!!! It's just that easy.
Go a step further and think for yourself and don't even buy music from the major labels, rather than listen to whatever they shovel your way this week...
Do SOMETHING more to show your disatisfaction than ramble about how some mean old industry doesn't want anyone to copy their products....
Re:Phase problems with higher frequencies... (Score:3)
Re: ethically misguided (Score:5)
Now you'd more likely hear,
With ethics, "there is no try", but with copy protection it's a simple matter of "do or do not". So the idea that I can't do it because it's wrong is replaced by I can't do it because it's hard, and when the inevitable crack shows up and makes it easy, the can't part disappears, and no one remembers to ask the question that kept most of us from stealing beforehand.
A naive analysis, perhaps. But I can't help but wonder.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
I'd like to clarify a few things (Score:3)
Dynamic range is the ratio of the largest signal to the smallest discernable signal in the output for a DAC, or in the input for an ADC. There are many things that can limit the smallest signal a DAC or ADC can resolve and bit depth is just one of them. Of course, the dynamic range of digitized data can NEVER be greater than the maximum for the bit depth being used, but it could easily be less.
For those of you unfamiliar with signal processing, the important measure is the Effective Number Of Bits (ENOB). This is a measure of the number of bits of information that a DAC or ADC can present in one sample. You could have a million-ka-jillion bit DAC, but the dynamic range will be limited by the analog performance of the DAC so you may have something like 12.6 ENOB. You see this a lot with "CD quality" audio; most low-end CD players and sound cards offer around 14 bit performance with 16 bit samples, but most people can't tell.
Now, it is VERY difficult to get 144 dB of dynamic range, and even harder to achieve that level of linearity (measured by total harmonic distortion, THD). 144 dB is a ratio of 20,000,000:1. It is EXTREMELY difficult to build circuits that have this level of performance. I'm not even sure if and sampled data systems have achieved 24 bit performance. I do know that the low-noise amplifiers used in the experiments to detect the background radiation of space cost tens of millions of dollars and IIRC involved extreme cooling to reduce the thermal noise.
My point is that the current limit for production level devices is 120 dB, or 20 ENOB. This is A LOT. Think about this, when describing sound levels (dBspl = dB sound pressure level) 0 dBspl is defined as the smallest sound detectable by human ears. The threshold for permanently damaging your hearing is around 90 dBspl, the threshold for pain is around 110 - 120 dBspl, and the sound level a few mwters behind a jet engine (747 IIRC) is around 140 dBspl.
We can use these numbers to get an intuitive feel for the dynamic range of various bit depths.
ENOB Weakest sound Loudest Sound
16 minimum hearable onset of hearing loss
20 minimum hearable onset of pain
24 minimum hearable jet engine
So, actual 24 bit audio would be able to range from the minimum hearable sound for human ears to the volume of a jet engine. 20 bits is still more than enough, and if CDs are recorded properly, they can come very close to 16 effective bits and this is good enough that most people couldn't tell the difference between 16 bit or any better data. However, if you have the storage space, why not guarantee that the quantization noise from the bit depth of the data is not the limiting factor?
This all depends on the listening environment as well. There aren't any speakers that can accurately reproduce 16 bit data. In addition, most people listen to muisic either in their cars, with fans from computers running, ar any number of background noises going on. The fact that MP3s are so popular despite the fact that the have worse quality than CDs shows that a lot of people don't know or don't care about the difference in quality. That said, I consider myself an audiophile and welcome any improvement in the recording quality so long as it is not used as a means for greedy studios to empty my pockets.
Well, that was quite a rant, but I wanted to clear up a few things that I have seen a lot of people on Slashdot showing some confusion about in this and previous articles. Normally, I don't have enough expertise on the topic to post thoughtfully, so I'll take the chances I get.
Matt