Chandos Not Into Digital Streaming – They said: “The one main thing that has to happen in the digital format is a better business model for streaming. At present there is no money in it for classical artists and labels as the volume is so low. It may work well for pop music but not classical. Therefore until things change on this front we are not supporting streaming for anything other than our back-catalogue and deleted titles.” Many labels are turning to downloads as it saves a great deal of production cost, but obviously not all.
Sony’s Early PlayStation Could Save Your SACD Collection – That’s the title of an article in The Gramophone. It first speaks of SACD not taking the audio world by storm, as we well know, but it mentions the many classical labels and symphony orchestras supporting it and that it never really went away in Japan, at least in two-channel form. Then it goes into the re-emergence of DSD (a recording format for SACD release) as a format for downloads in the computer audio field. Several sites now offer DSD (and even double-DSD) downloads, and many high end components are coming out with DSD capability (though most of us are still happy with the hi-res quality of 96K/24-bit audio files).
It’s easy to download and play the DSD files offered by these sites if you have the proper equipment. If you have a large SACD collection, you may want to move them to hard disk storage to play thru a DSD-capable DAC. This would mean you don’t mind losing hi-res surround sound, and are something of a computer nerd, because the process is not simple by any means. It involves finding an earlier model of the Sony PlayStation 3 – before Sony Corporation in their wisdom dropped playback of SACDs, and you must use an earlier version of the PlayStation firmware on it. Then you have to find a repair maven who can fix the serious overheating most of those players had. For some audiophiles into SACD, it may be worth the efforts required.
Sony Has World’s First HDR UHD Video Projector – Sony’s under $10K VPL-VW520ES shows the unstoppable growth of high dynamic range technology. Their demonstration used footage from the TV series The Blacklist, which was not created in HDR, but was upconverted by the new projector just as most buyers of UHD sets today are upconverting standard HD sources to UHD (since there’s little actual UHD sources at the moment). According to on site reports, the natural color and contrast performance was out of sight.
