Audio News for June 23, 2006

by | Jun 23, 2006 | Audio News | 0 comments

Chinese DVD HD Video = 4 Formats! – We thought the two different formats of Blu-ray and HD-DVD were more than we needed in the U.S., but the Chinese market has four! The EVD format came out in 2004 from Changhong Electric. Its player sells for he equivalent of $120 in China. One EVD disc only holds a maximum of 50 minutes of 1080i HD programming, so Hollywood would not be interested. And there are three others you don’t even want to know about. But we have enough problems here with our two formats: The first Toshiba players are pretty bad, very few discs have been released, neither format includes 1080p output although the discs are 1080p, none of the players play SACD or DVD-A, and none of the discs so far offer an option of one of the new lossless multichannel audio codecs.

Blu-ray Launch – Sony released the first batch of seven Blu-ray titles this week. They include The Fifth Element, The House of Flying Daggers, Hitch, and The Terminator. The first player – from Samsung – goes on sale this coming week. About 15,000 copies of each title have been shipped to big retailers such as Best Buy, Circuit City and Amazon.com – who will also be carrying the players. The disks have so far 25GB storage and some may not carry all the extras found on the standard DVD version. The Blu-ray camp is looking toward having a 50GB disc available towards the end of summer. The HD-DVD launch was about two months ago.

Concord, Telarc & Heads Up Labels Garner Eight Awards –  Five industry awards from the Jazz Journalists Association and three from JazzWeek were scored by the Concord labels this past week =
Concord Music Group: Jazz Record Label of the Year
Sonny Rollins: Musician of the Year
Dianne Reeves: Female Jazz Singer of the Year
Sonny Rollins: Tenor Saxophonist of the Year
Joey DeFrancesco: Organist/Keyboardist of the Year

JazzWeek Awards
Concord Music Group: Major Label of the Year
Jaco Pastorius Big Band “The Word Is Out!” (Heads Up): Record of the Year
Vikki Rzepka of Telarc: Record Co. Promotional Rep of the Year

Panasonic Shows World’s Largest Plasma Display – The largest hi-def plasma television was demonstrated at the New York Stock Exchange recently. At 103 inches diagonal, it delivers more than two million pixels (1920 x 1080p) and is equivalent in size to four 50-inch panels. A Panasonic rep offered that since plasma is a self-illuminating device, it offers superior dynamic contrast, true-to-life color reproduction, quick response time with fast-moving images, and a wider viewing angle. The company is the industry leader in plasma manufacturing and sales.

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