Into the Blu

The Blu-ray disc format is more than just high-definition video – music producers are eyeing it as a music format too, both for audio-only and for music video. Dan Daley writes

John Legend, Rush, the Pretenders. They all have a bit of blue going on. Not the emotional kind of blue but the digital kind: they and other music artists are migrating their material to the Blu-ray disc format, either as music video or in rarer instances audio-only.

In the process, they are helping give high-definition, audiophile sound another shot at traction in a business that seems to have only online in its future plans. Blu-ray became heir to DVD two years ago as the next generation of home video media when it trounced HD DVD for the title after a long and bitter format war. But music producers quickly noticed Blu-ray’s possibilities as a music format too. The most basic iteration of the format holds 25GB of information – nearly three times that of a DVD-9 disc and light years more than the mere 700MB of the Compact Disc. Blu-ray intrinsically supports the leading audio lossless formats Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio codecs, and it has a screaming-fast 54-bit maximum transfer rate.

But perhaps best of all, Blu-ray comes with a large and rapidly expanding user base – something previous attempts to take high-resolution audio formats like SACD and DVD-Audio mainstream didn’t have. Blu-ray’s market share was up 76 per cent in 2009, putting it in 17 per cent of households in the

US alone, and generating US$1.5 billion in hardware and disc sales. In fact, Blu-ray is actually off to a better start than DVD was entering its third year of existence.

Many audio professionals seem to be convinced. Robert Margouleff, who won a Grammy in 1974 for his pioneering synthesizer and engineering work on Stevie Wonder’s classic Innervisions LP and who has been an ardent advocate of multichannel, high-resolution music for decades, calls Blu-ray ‘the new standard for high-def audio’. He says the format’s support of 7.1 sound – which adds two side-wall speakers to the left-center-right front array and two surround speakers in the rear found in most home theater systems – will make music an even more immersive experience. ‘When sound is panned from front to rear, there’s a gap in between these sets of speakers,’ he explains. ‘Blu-ray’s 7.1 configuration solves that.’

Specialty labels are taking up the cause. Norway-based classical label 2L issues high-resolution 5.1 surround music recordings they call their Pure Audio series. ‘The musical advantage of Blu-ray is the high resolution audio, and the convenience for the [listener is that] one player will handle music, films, DVDs and traditional CDs,’ says Morten Lyndberg, surround producer and CEO of 2L, which has released six music titles on Blu-ray so far. Working with Germany-based MSM Studios for mastering and authoring, 2L uses the esoteric Digital eXtreme Definition (DXD) recording format, and ‘extreme’ perfectly describes the 352.8kHz sampling rate that DXD uses, more than three times the sampling rate of the 96kHz sampling rate of typical high-resolution recordings. The recordings are then down-converted to 192kHz for transfer to Blu-ray. Thanks to the massive amount of digital real estate on Blu-ray, 2L’s recordings also hold a 96kHz stereo (2.0) version of the content.

In the US, two-time Grammy winner Bill Schnee is in discussions with a leading independent record label to launch a Blu-ray based imprint. Mr Schnee believes Blu-ray’s potential is significant thanks to the growing base of multi-channel home theatre sound systems that create a pathway for multichannel music into consumers’ homes. He also emphasises that music on Blu-ray isn’t limited to specially recorded material, noting that conventional stereo recordings, as long as they’re of high sonic quality to start with, translate well when mastered at 192kHz and remixed. ‘The kind of resolution and immersion you can achieve on Blu-ray lets the listener get a very real sense of what the artists intended you to hear,’ says Mr Schnee, who with Grammy-winning mastering engineer Doug Sax created the standard-setting Direct-to-Disc LP recordings for Sheffield Lab Records four decades ago. ‘This is a whole other level where music can go.’

There are other ventures around the world. For instance, MediaInVision Creative Group, which lists offices in London and Los Angles, has a record label, Surround Records, that is using Blu-ray as the release format. It also offers audio encoding and mastering services for Blu-ray music production to independent recording artists.

But despite the fact that the US is the world’s single largest music market, it appears that most of the concrete progress in Blu-ray music discs is being made elsewhere. Says 2L’s Mr Lindberg: ‘I’m a great fan of the American approach to music making, but unfortunately the US has turned into a high cost/low price market. That is probably the reason why new formats and technology currently is more advanced in Europe and Asia.’

Using a Blu-ray player as a stand-alone audio deck would present some operational challenges. However, that’s being addressed by the Audio Engineering Society (AES) via a new standards project: AES-X188 – ‘Screenless navigation for high-resolution audio on Blu-ray Discs’. The project aims to specify a method for authoring an audio-only Blu-ray Disc to enable playback from screen-less consumer systems, providing basic command and track selection using the remote control of a standard Blu-ray Disc player. The AES’s own words reinforce the pro audio community’s growing enthusiasm for Blu-ray’s music potential: ‘High-resolution audio, presented as uncompressed LPCM, has been waiting for a suitable transport format for some time. The Blu-ray disc format offers such a transport and supports the necessary linear and lossless codecs as part of its basic specification. While Blu-ray players can be found in home theatre and games environments, there are issues that need to be addressed before they can be introduced into a hi-fi environment that does not have a screen to present visual menus for audio stream setup and track selection.’

One area where music and Blu-ray have already been intersecting with success is concert home videos. ‘We’ve been shooting and recording in HD for several years, and Blu-ray represents the perfect format for music fans to experience live concert recordings,’ says Pierre Lamoureux, co-director and producer at FoGo Labs in Montreal, which has done Blu-ray productions for Rush and the Pretenders.

The need for high-definition video content and 5.1 audio limits the number of titles appropriate for Blu-ray, as does demographics – Mike Carden, president of North American operations for Eagle Rock Entertainment, the largest independent distributor of music video, says the titles that do best in the format are ‘classics’ like ZZ Top, Queen and Jeff Beck. But he also expects that all music video will migrate to Blu-ray eventually, both because of the visual and sonic fidelity and because Blu-ray’s capacity allows fans to get content they couldn’t via downloads. ‘You can download 5.1 sound and high-definition video but it takes a long time,’ he says. ‘With Blu-ray, you have it all and there’s plenty of room for bonus content,’ such as the entire second concert that Eagle Rock includes with the Blu-ray disc of Jeff Beck’s Live at Ronnie Scott’s.

However, music productions on Blu-ray face the same licensing hurdles that independent film producers do with the format. While the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA) that manages the copy-protection patents for the AACS technology holders has created a separate tier for independent users – a one-time fee of US$3,000 for the Content Provider License to work with certified Blu-ray replicators (replicators cannot accept an order from anyone without this license and associated number), and US$1,300 in service fees – that still represents a sizable amount of money for music productions, and significantly higher than licensing fees for DVD, which has helped standard-definition music video gain market share even as CD sales continue to decline.

Finally, can music on Blu-ray compete in a download world? HD music proponents are trying and they seem to think Blu-ray could be the solution. Acknowledging that listeners today want portability, 2L’s Pure Audio technology offers their mShuttle feature: using a Profile 2.0 Blu-ray player that’s capable of Internet connectivity, tracks from the disc can be transferred via a wireless network to a PC for conversion to MP3, CD-quality 44.1kHz .wav files or 192kHz FLAC (free lossless audio coding) files. Mr Schnee believes that the demand for higher-quality sound is there, it just needs to be brought out, observing, ‘to make this work, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just rediscover it.’