As the century comes to an end, we are facing many new opportunities for pre-recorded music carriers. Since its introduction in 1982, the compact disc has been the dominant format while cassettes and LPs have gradually faded into extinction and Mini-Disc and the Digital Compact Cassettes never penetrated mainstream households.

I have been a long time fan of improving the sound quality of our consumer music formats so I am much more excited about the introduction of the Super Audio CD or DVD Audio than I am about downloading compressed tracks in Liquid Audio or converting them to MP3 files.

For many years, I have been experimenting with 20 and 24-bit conversion and recording equipment in an effort to realize the best sound possible from the standard 44.1 kHz 16-bit compact disc. While we have and will continue to witness improved sound reproduction through improved professional recording tools, we will forever be faced with the limitations inherent to PCM digital technology. I have heard many examples of how higher sampling frequencies and longer word lengths can improve the quality of sound. The 96kHz 24-Bit DVD Audio format which is has been presented by the WG4 consortium led by Warner and Toshiba surely demonstrates improved sound quality, but I do not feel the improvement is drastic enough to warrant new hardware and software. Further more DVD audio discs will not play on any of the current CD players.

For a little more than a year, I have been experimenting with a prototype 2-track Direct Stream Digital recording system developed by Sony. These experiments have let to the release of four album projects released on the DMP label. DSD is a completely different recording format that samples a 1-bit word at 2.8224 MHz (64 times the 16-bit compact disc). The result is a sound demonstrating all of the warmth and inviting qualities of analog with the expanded dynamic range and accuracy of digital equipment. To me, DSD sounds as close to the live musical source as anything I have heard. Sony and Philips are banking on DSD being the record platform for their new Super Audio CD proposal. Once again, consumers will need new hardware to playback full DSD recordings but these dual layered discs will also play on any of the existing 650 million CD players that exist in consumers households today.

I think it is safe to say that we will witness some sort of a format war between the Super Audio CD and DVD Audio, which is unfortunate. If the electronic giants could combine the best qualities of both formats, consumers would be presented with what could be a very exciting step forward in pre-recorded music carriers.