D&M Holdings is the hi-fi collective that owns names like Denon, Marantz and Boston Acoustics. Their products by Denon and Boston Acoustics have been picked up by Circuit City. D&M Holdings is originally a Japanese corporation that formed with the merger of Denon and Marantz and has since picked up several audio / video technology firms. Most notably it owns Boston Acoustics, Replay TV (the hi-fi answer to TiVo) and Rio, makers of fine digital media players.

For every winner there must be a loser. D&M Holdings is making a major push into the retail mainstream with the release of Denon and Boston Acoustics to Circuit City. The shift to D&M Holding's products by Circuit City will displace products already on shelves by Harmon Kardon and Infinity. By September's end Circuit City will have dedicated home entertainment areas of their big boxes in about 500 stores.

As expected Circuit City says it's the result of their commitment to improved home entertainment offerings…excited to add Denon and Boston Acoustics … blah … blah … blah.

A notable quote from all this was that Paul Bente the President of Harman Consumer Group's speaker division says: Harman's parting with Circuit City was very much mutual… “Our take on the situation is that the year long plus R&D sabbatical Harman Kardon took while the industry exploded into HDMI and iPod functionality may have taken a toll on the manufacturer - driving down sales and causing Circuit City to look elsewhere for market leadership.“ - Audioholics.

That's interesting. Once upon a time a company like HK taking an R&D Sabbatical wasn't a bad thing. On the contrary, hi-fi manufacturers who made high-end gear will (and still do) take lots of time off from developing new products. New products lines every year is a sign of a market driven mass production. But that's the game Circuit City is playing. Swim their pools - you gotta' play by their rules.

Denon will be releasing a dedicated line of products to Circuit City stores. So, those of you looking at Denon products at hi-fi shops won't see the same gear at Circuit City. Yamaha apparently does this already with an HTR-line of receivers. In other words, get ready for budget Denon gear. Does this mean the once prestigious Denon line has sold out?

Clint from Audioholics asks: Is this a sign that Harmon Kardon is on their way to becoming the next Sansui?

In our last look at digital media we covered some of the oldest formats including the ever present MP3 and Apple's AAC. The AAC file is Apple's codec based on the audio/video compression used by MPEG or the Moving Picture Experts Group - version 4. Another style of codec that emerged to compete with Apples AAC was from - you guessed it Microsoft who went in a different direction than borrowing from the MPEG. Delving into the competition between WMA and AAC brings us smack into the middle of a market war and the highly volatile DRM issue.

WMA: Windows Media Audio was brought to you by those wild and crazy guys from Seattle. This is Microsoft's proprietary audio file format initially developed to compete with the MP3 but has wound up a competitor to Apple's AAC. In the digital music business right now iTunes is king and Microsoft would like nothing better to jump in and knock Apple of its perch. WMA is supported by Windows Media Player software that is used on Microsoft Windows operating system. But the technology has been licensed out to a wide range of devices like DVD players, MP3 and any other kind of portable media players you can imagine including cell phones. Apple's iPod does not support WMA - go figure!

WMA doesn't include DRM (digital rights management) which is a layer of software that prevents you from copying media files (like songs) from one device to another. However, WMA streamed through the latest version of the Advanced Systems Format (ASF) container does have a DRM called PlaysForSure, codenamed Janus also called DRM10. This is Microsoft's answer to Apple's DRM which is called FairPlay.

DRM: Digital Rights Management is a sad fact of digital media today. It's designed to protect the artists and record companies from endless duplicates of their intellectual property from being distributed freely. Two of the most common places you'll confront DRM in digital music is from in online digital music sales.

iTunes: Apple's iTunes is tops in the industry. One estimate puts its share of total internet music downloads at about 72%. Individual songs downloaded from iTunes cost .99 cents and each song you download is encoded with Apple's FairPlay DRM. There is a list of restrictions over the song that you download. What it all means is that even though you own the music you purchased from iTunes, there are rules. This has ticked off a lot of people and lends itself to the question, do you really own it? The answer according to the RIAA is no.

Subscription Services: To compete with iTunes a clever new business paradigm has emerged called subscriber music services. Using this scheme you agree to a monthly fee and during that time you have unlimited access to the services library of typically one million songs. These songs are encoded with Microsoft's DRM called PlaysForSure or DRM 10. You can play these songs back on Windows Media Player 10 or copy them to any portable device that is PlaysForSure compatible. More and more devices are jumping on board all the time, names like Archos and Creative make portable media players that will playback your subscribed music. Some of the first included Napster, Yahoo Music and MSN Music. Today there are many more one is even exclusive to a piece of hardware called the MusicGremlin.

So far, the Apple camp dominates with iTunes but the Microsoft DRM10 / Windows Media Player camp are a distant second with the subscriber paradigm. The failure of subscriber music to overtake significant ground on iTunes is often cited as proof of a truism in today's digital media. People are willing to subscribe to their TV and movie programming, but they want to buy and own their music. 

But bear in mind that the subscriber music business is still relatively new and many just don't understand it yet. If you're a typical listener who likes popular music and use a mobile media device it should be a good fit. Would you rather pay $12 bucks to get 12 songs from iTunes, or pay $12 bucks for access to a million songs on Yahoo Music for one month? There is an alternative - a Russian music service known as www.AllofMP3.com, one of the webs best kept secrets. AllofMP3 blows away any of the others in price and quality. You can choose the bitrate of MP3 you desire and can even buy your media in lossless formats.

So, which online music service do you like?

Have you ever tried to make sense of all the different types of digital audio and video? Ever thought of creating a digital media library of your own but feel a little overwhelmed by all the formats? Welcome to the first installment of a series that looks at digital audio and what it all means to you. Who can deny the convenience of storing your entire library of music in something size of a cigarette pack? But some digital audio formats can backup CDs in audio quality that rivals (or duplicates) that of the original, while others are about as pleasant as cat piss under the couch. The first step in understanding digital media is to know your codecs.

Digital audio formats are actually codecs. Codec is a portmanteau word or a word originally made up of other words - like brunch. Codec comes from Code - Decode which is what's happening when someone rips (encodes) a CD into another digital format and then listens to it later (decode). Here's a quick outline of many of the most popular codecs.

• Real Audio: RealPlayer has been around a long time. You may have clicked an audio or video stream that prompted you to install the Real Player codec on your computer. It's used mainly for streaming media from a website or internet radio. It’s a low bandwidth encoding method so it won't sound very good, not a problem for a student wanting to hear a recording a famous speech by JFK. Its strength is that it can stream music through the web even under adverse conditions such as dial-up. But if you care about sound quality there are better codecs.
• WAV: Short for wave. This format was created by IBM and Microsoft years ago and has annoyed Windows users with bleeps and blurps ever since. It's not suitable for encoding digital music because WAV files are too large. WAV is sometimes worthwhile as a temporary step when transcoding. When you want to convert a digital audio file to another format but the codec won't recognize the format your digital music is in, you must first convert it to something your codec can see. WAV is so ubiquitous when using Windows that many codec tools will read it and can encode to it.
• AIFF: This is the Apple equivalent to a WAV file. It has the same disadvantage as WAV in that it produces very large files.
• MPEG: Pronounced M-Peg, an acronym for Moving Pictures Experts Group. The MPEG produced a family of codecs that ushered in the golden age of digital media compression we now enjoy. The groups' codecs are used on DVDs, digital radio, satellite and cable TV and through the internet. MPEG consists of a coalition of companies interested in high quality compressed audio visual media including: Dolby Labs, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Nokia and Sony.

 Mpeg Details

MPEG developed the first widely adopted lossy audio video compression, MPEG version 1. Lossy compression simply means that after the audio or video is encoded the result is a relatively small file with minimal loss of quality. When we're dealing with something like an MP3 (or AAC) the loss of fidelity is proportionate to the amount of compression applied and measured in bits per second, the more bits per second the more data in the file hence higher quality. Smaller files result in greater loss of fidelity and therein lay the rub in dealing with digital media.

A 128 kilobit per second (kbps) MP3 is a nominal amount of compression and average for what you'll find online at sources like iTunes. 128 bit MP3s fit nicely through the internet and has an audio quality that sounds acceptable through most earbuds played back through the average portable player. But to the discerning ear played back on a home theater audio system a 128 bit MP3 is the acoustic equivalent of unwrapping a Little Debbie snack cake at a fine dining establishment.

• MP3: The MP3 was derived from the first version of its codec Mpeg1. MP3 is by far the most popular format of digitally encoded music. The .mp3 file is the most widely used digital audio format on the internet. Nearly all portable digital media players can playback an MP3 as it's the first real breakthrough in lossy audio encoding, MP3 is also known as MPEG-1, layer 3.
• AAC: Advanced Audio Coding is the audio core of the Mpeg-4. This is a more advanced audio codec than the MP3 which is derived from Mpeg-1 and its most commonly used by Apple in its iPod which can read AAC files. As a more advanced codec you'll get slightly higher fidelity at a slightly lower bit rate.

Next we'll delve into more Digital Audio codecs and explore of great interest to audiophiles there are a few that are lossless.

This is the weekend that most of North America is united in sitting outside on lawn chairs drinking cold beverages and maybe catching some fireworks (well, not literally catching but - you know what I mean). The US celebrates its hard fought independence from the UK through the spilling of blood and tea into the Boston harbor. Canada meanwhile celebrates having to do neither while still receiving a certain amount of legal autonomy from the crown. Okay, Canadian history is far less interesting.

It's going to be late next week before the HomeTheaterFocus blog gets another update. I'll be at a cottage deep in the woods of northern Ontario with no running water or electricity. There will be no sounds of hi-fi or home theater where I'm going, only the sounds of crickets, bullfrogs and if I'm lucky a chorus-line of wolves calling from the distance. Periods of deprivation are an opportunity to temper ones appreciation of fine audio reproduction.

Have a great weekend!

Wayde

I think the BD and HD DVD format war can be retired as a topic of lightweight discussion, at least by me. It's become a very politically charged matter.

I submitted an editorial piece to Audioholics the other day, posted by Clint. It got a lot of attention from readers wanting my blood for everything from not telling the "whole" story (IE leaving out some technical details in my rundown of factors to consider if deciding between the two) to not actually making a decision about which one to buy. The website itself also got blasted for supposedly taking an anti-hi-def stance. That's a bewildering accusation.

The editorial itself was written to point up a few things that I didn't think were so well publicized. I didn't think it would be too much of stretch to recount that a majority of the reviews have said the early HD DVD movies have a better picture quality and that the BD movies might be suffering at the hands of Mpeg2 compression. I guess that's not a unanimous opinion and that I'm spreading a misconception.

The message of the editorial was that the smart money is on waiting to see what happens in the market. Neither player is worth your hard earned money at this point. I stand behind that claim. I would be remiss if I didn't include that I harbor ill feelings toward both Sony and Toshiba for making what should be a natural progression of technology into a format war. Although it has been an interesting topic and it certainly gets people riled up to talk and post about it.

Want to see some venom flowing back and forth? Check out the HD DVD / Blu-ray boards on AVSforum. I don't think we'll see the situation degenerate to that level at the HomeTheaterShack 

I'm disappointed that we the minority of hi-fi, home theater and audio/video fans out there are at each other's throats over something as indifferent toward us as Sony and Toshiba's market place fisticuffs. There are sports fans and political pundits less single-minded in their views than some of the side-takers in this format war.

The format war was designed to take advantage of us, the early adopters and A/V fans who read blogs and forum posts about our hobby. It's because we understand the difference between 480i and 1080P that we're also inevitably the ones who will have any opinion at all. Most of the average Joe consumers are still trying to master HD over air broadcasts and progressive scan DVD video.

I think we need to relax. Too many people feel personally involved in one format or the other like a rabid football dad who thinks his kid is one shift away from a scholarship. Even if you've bought a disk player, enjoy it! If the format you chose "loses the war"; who cares? Enjoy the movies you have, it won't stop working for them. It's an old rule in computers, you buy hardware for the software that's currently available, "future proofing" is a fools game. Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt were built be future proof. Consumer electronics technology is transient, designed to last until manufacturers can no longer milk it for profit.

Matt Lee says the Cell Processor architecture doesn't appear to be designed with gaming in mind and says: "Some aspects of the SPEs, such as the lack of branch prediction, make them particularly unsuited to running most game code, which contains a lot of branches."

Matt believes the PS3's Cell Processor was designed more for serialized streaming math code, more common in video codecs and audio processing. He adds that significant differences between PS3's Cell and Xbox360's CPU cores handling of graphics memory means porting a game from the Xbox360 to the PS3 will be extremely difficult for developers. Xbox360 has more flexible processing power and can be allocated where needed most. All the memory can be accessed equally by all of the Xbox 360's CPU cores. Sony's Cell architecture is designed asymmetrically and that will probably lead to unbalanced allocations of processing power.

Matt sees the PS3 Cell Processors operating with a limit of 256MB graphics textures at any given time. He says you'll never see more due to the system memory banks and split graphics. Matt believes Sony customers will endure compromised graphics quality in PS3 games due to this split in graphics memory. Xbox 360 boasts 512MB of unified memory that is valuable to both games developers and graphic artists.

Because of the design of the PS3 Cell, Matt Lee has verified that the processor could have been designed for other uses as well as gaming. Being a market leader in almost all consumer electronics, Sony could use the Cell in other places such as audio or video signal processing chips. Matt Lee's observations about the Cell Processor are actually confirmed by Sony that says the Cell will be appropriate to be used in all types of consumer electronics. Does this represent trouble for the PS3 knowing its Cell Processor was built to be a jack of all trades but master of none?

Now that both formats have their first devices on the table let's see where the format war stands by comparing both feature sets. We'll include Capacity, Interactive Features, Content Protection and everyone's favorite - Managed Copy as our categories. We won't include movie selection because neither has the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings Trilogies.

Capacity

HD DVD: 15 Gigabytes single layer.

Blu-ray: 25 Gigabytes single layer.

Winner: Blu-ray, but not by much. Many people see Blu-ray as the superior choice because of the relatively tiny numeric advantage. But put it into perspective with the capacity of a future storage medium. A possible successor to the new disk media has already been developed, it's called Holographic Versatile Disk developed by InPhase and to being manufactured by Maxell and Hitachi. To give you an idea how unimpressive the storage difference between HD DVD and Blu-ray are: A single HVD will be a 1.6 Terabyte rewritable storage medium.

Interactive features

HD DVD: iHD interactive standards were created by Microsoft in conjunction with Disney and the DVD Forum. iHD will be support interactivity with your Windows PC when Windows Vista is rolled out. It's not exactly clear how or even if it's going to be used in practice.

Blu-ray: The BD-Java standard is a special version of Sun Microsystem's Java. Again, who knows what it'll do exactly but potential for these are vast. But in terms of a straight movie player, do we really want to interact with our Blockbuster rental? Are studios liable to add the expense of interactive features to movies?

Winner: HD DVD in a slight edge here just because more people use Windows. The standard is directly supported by Microsoft so it's likely to have a major inroad to compatibility with Vista. But realy. How much of this interactivity are we really going to see when either medium arrives? When DVD first came out we heard about all the interactive euphoria then too. To us jaded DVD veterans we have little use for animated menu systems when we just want to watch a movie. Many of the promised DVD features are not much more than an annoyance. Studios aren't likely to spend extra money developing substantial interactive features and if they did; would we the unwashed movie watching public be buying?

Content Protection

HD DVD: Will use the AACS (Advanced Access Copyright System) DRM (Digital Rights Management) scheme. This is going to be the complete solution for copy protecting all digital high definition entertainment. Welcome, to the new, real world.

Everyone will get used to AACS, it'll be integrated into any future connection standard (such as HDMI or DisplayPort) computer operating system, video card or anything that wants to transmit, store or playback any entertainment content created by the major studios.

Blu-ray: Will also use AACS. However Blu-ray gets extra points with the studios for being a good little format by making it even harder for hackers. Two added layers of content protection are BD+ and ROM Mark. Forget Blu-ray's greater storage capacity, this is why more movies going to BD than HD DVD.

Managed Copy

HD DVD: First to impose Mandatory Managed Copy (MMC). MMC is one of those tricks of AACS that will fully control any copies you make across your network. HD DVD was the first to support this feature which will allow you to move your HD DVD movie to your home server and other computers or a mobile device. MMC could incorporate a pay-per-copy system or it could arrive on the streets in a system that allows you to buy a "premium" version of a movie with unlimited copies through MMC or the "just one" copy version. How MMC will be used is up to the studio releasing the disk.

Blu-ray: Wasn't going to support MMC until HP drew a line in the sand and demanded both MMC and iHD for its continued support of the Blu-ray standard. That Blu-ray initially didn't support MMC is what gave BD a major push by the recording studios who don't want any part of copying their intellectual property. But with a majority of the studios behind Blu-ray, the Blu-ray specification relented and gave HP MMC. It's still a pay-per-copy system, it's unclear exactly how it will be implemented but it's up to the studio and the disk exactly how MMC will be applied.

Winner: Neither. That's right, neither side wins here because neither Toshiba's HD-A1 nor Samsung's BD-P1000 will support Managed Copy in any form. Your prize for being an early adopter is a device stripped of the full feature set of the format you've chosen. AACS, the content protection DRM (digital rights management) scheme hadn't completed the standard in to time for it to be included in the early players. Instead the first round of next gen disk players will an Interim AACS developed specifically for the early devices.

Richard Doherty, spokesperson of the AACS Licensing Association says: "We expected the first early players to be basic players and we didn't want to slow down the roll out of those devices."

New "holographic surround sound" technology is used in the YSP-1000 to create a single box replacement for a five channel speaker system. One rectangular speaker positioned under your TV is supposed to beam sound around the room to create five channel sound comparable to five separate speakers. That's right, just one speaker in front to replace five speakers positioned throughout your room. If it works it's the ultimate in spousal approval for a surround sound speaker system. I know what the skeptics among you are thinking. If you're like me, you're thinking "holographic, schmolographic"! The product description seems so ambitious that it can't possibly work as advertised. Sure, you might get tinny ambient sound effects. But can such an effect really reproduce the intended effects of a Dolby Digital soundtrack?

When I finally got a demo of the product I was impressed. As expected it's a system with limitations. But the YSP-1000 presents multi-channel sound, separation and directional effects that will make you think there is indeed a speaker hidden behind the couch.

I got a chance to listen to it in a demonstration room at Natural Sound in Kitchener. I sat on a couch in a small enclosed square room while we engaged the system's Automated System Calibration. Just plug and position the included microphone and like many like higher end receivers today the speaker system calibrates itself using a series of test tones. The moment I heard the first alien sounds coming from places I knew there were no speakers I was impressed. But a few test tones are a long way from real multi-channel sound.

The wide rectangular speaker box is compact and fits comfortably under a 42" in widescreen display for which the YSP-1000 is optimized. Inside the unit, covered by a silver grille, are 40 tiny drivers powered by digital amps. The drivers produce sound beams that reflect off surfaces in your room. But can beams of sound really produce localized full range acoustics outside the confines of a speaker? Yamaha promises the YSP-1000 can deliver Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Pro Logic II and DTS Neo: 6.

We popped a demo disk into the DVD player that gave us outdoor sound effects. I heard crickets chirping in generalized 'reflections' around the room. It was an ambient effect similar to what Dolby Pro Logic could do. As immersive as it was I thought that's it, this pony has just demonstrated its trick. Then we heard the sounds of bullfrogs. A single frog croaking in one corner of the room was a more localized sound compared to the ambient crickets. I could actually point to where I heard the frog, but it was also a sound that required some frequency response. I started warming to this system when we popped in a copy of Master and Commander in DTS for one of my favorite acoustic demos, the naval battle in the opening scene.

A sub is required to give the YSP-1000 5.1 otherwise it's only five speakers that are too light on bass for home theater. The details in the buildup to the naval battle at the beginning of Master and Commander provided suitable tension. The wind sweeping across the deck made me forget I was in a small square room. The subsequent cannon fire sounded like a real 5.1 system. The acoustic effects were not wanting for proper sonic imaging in its reproduction of the DTS soundtrack. In terms of producing left / right and front / rear movements including footsteps running around the ship were reproduced as if it were from a well positioned speaker system. It was difficult to believe all this only came from a single rectangular bar up front. 

The sound quality was similar to what you can get from a less expensive satellite speaker system. The sound beams were surprisingly good at producing wide range sound but they won't provide the kind of detailed sound at a dynamic range you might expect of larger speakers. If you need to fill a mid to large sized room with sound this isn't the way to go. The YSP-1000 needs a symmetrically shaped smaller room to work its magic. It needs walls behind and beside the listening audience to reflect onto. The Room Acoustic Optimizer and Automated System Calibration is surprisingly good at finding objects to bounce sound. There is even a Target Beam Mode that allows you to center the sweet spot on unusual places in the room. But if you don't require the convenience of the sound projection there is no benefit to using a system like this as a substituted for five separate speakers placed around the room. That you can get a complete 5.1 speaker system that will sound better than the YSP-1000 for much less money should come as no surprise. MSRP on the system is about $1700 US dollars but you can find it on the streets for less.

Special thanks to Natural Sound in Kitchener ON for providing the demo of this remarkable new technology.