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The designers and sellers of DVD-Audio products have a lot to learn from the story of the compact disc. Everyone's losing sleep over copy protection during this Napster-crazy year, but other issues need attention as well.
As an unabashed audiophile, I've become quite sensitive to the quality of audio mastering on CDs. Most people I know-none of whom are audiophiles-can't be bothered with such subtleties, and tell me they honestly can't hear much difference at all between a CD mastered in 1984 and the same album remastered on a disc reissued in 2000. "It's all digital," they say. "It's zeros and ones. They all sound the same." That's why, they add, it's pointless to buy those twice-as-expensive 24-karat-gold-plated CDs from companies like DCC Compact Classics and the nowdefunct Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs. "There's no difference."
Hogwash. While it's true that the words "digitally remastered" have become virtually meaningless from overuse, the mastering step is perhaps the most crucial in the development of a CD, or DVD-Audio disc. And, in truth, great strides have been made in CD mastering since the first discs appeared on the market in the early and mid-1980s, which have led to the second (and, in some cases, even third or fourth or more) CD release of many albums. And anyone who truly listens to an A-B comparison of an original 1980s-era CD release and a more recent remaster will, I guarantee, hear some significant differences.
An example? Let's take Elton...