photo credit: markhoekstra

How sad it is that the biggest news to come from the Zune front in the past few months is anything but positive: Word is out that Gamestop has stopped selling Zunes.

Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long, not because the Zune 2 is a worthless player (despite what some other news reports seem to love implying), but because it was a dumb idea to sell the Zune 2 in a freaking video game store in the first place. I’m sure some genius marketing drone figured it was a good spot because 1) Gamestop fit the target Zune demographic, 2) they could easily market it as a companion product with the Xbox 360, and 3) they didn’t have any iPod competition. The rest of us saw the futility in that move from the very beginning.

I can only assume that the Gamestop deal wasn’t a large part of Microsoft’s Zune strategy, if only because it would be truly dumb if it was. And let’s not forget the fact that the Zune is still readily available in major stores.

But come to think of it, I haven’t heard much regarding the Zune 2 ever since Microsoft launched Zune Originals program, a service which lets you customize your Zune 2 with artwork by famous hipster types. While it’s certainly cooler than the bland metallic backside of the iPod, it’s certainly not a feature that will convert the iPod faithful or lure away first-time customers to the portable music player scene.

The Zune Store is finally beginning to shape up by adding some television content, but it’s still playing a desperate game of catchup with Apple’s iTunes Store. While MS has always had the $14.99 monthly music subscription model to lord over Apple, it’s simply a matter of time before Steve Jobs decides to implement something similar.

So I suppose the question to ask now is clear: What the heck is Microsoft doing with the Zune?

It’s clear to me that the device still has loads of untapped potential. Microsoft could easily add a rudimentary web portal utilizing the device’s Wi-Fi connection, and it could eventually be used to stream music and video. Honestly, the portal should have been a part of the Zune from the first generation of the device, but they couldn’t even see fit to include Wi-Fi syncing back then.

A Zune portal could easily allow users to stream and purchase music right from the device. Think the Amazon Kindle, but for music. Other devices, such as the MusicGremlin and the Sansa Connect, are already doing just this, so it’s simply inexcusable that Microsoft couldn’t manage the same by now.

The Zune Wi-Fi connection could also be used to update your podcasts directly on the player whenever you come across a friendly Wi-Fi connection. This is something I’ve been waiting for patiently ever since portable music players started adopting Wi-Fi, and it’s yet another feature that makes too much sense for Microsoft to implement.

Despite my many complaints about the product’s handling though, I still want a Zune 2. Being a Windows user and iTunes hater, it’s simply the best choice for me right now. It would also be a logical upgrade from my Toshiba Gigabeat S60, a device which was basically the proto-Zune. The current Zune software is an upgraded version of the Gigabeat software, and it’s honestly one of the best portable player interfaces I’ve ever used.

I’ll willingly buy a Zune 80, but until Microsoft starts to tap into the latent potential of the product, I’ll always consider it yet another half-handed MS attempt at being adequate rather than innovative.

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Gamestop Dropping Zune, What Exactly is Microsoft’s Zune Strategy Now?

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All this talk about the HD DVD and Blu-ray format war being over has reminded me of a similar situation involving two other competing media formats. Not many people realize that the current format war was not the first “high-definition” war between Toshiba and Sony. The battle for high-definition audio supremacy has actually been going on for some time now, long before we ever caught word of these new-fangled HD video formats.

Toshiba’s DVD-Audio format, along with Sony’s Super Audio CD, both fought to be the evolutionary high-definition standard from the now ubiquitous CD. Sporting support for higher resolution audio quality, surround sound, and a wealth of features that would make any audiophile woozy, they were both fitting contenders for the next great audio format.

But don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of them.

The Contenders

First up is DVD-Audio (DVD-A), a standard that’s obviously connected to the DVD video discs we all know and love. Launched in 2000, DVD-A was developed by the DVD Forum, a group which includes Toshiba, Philips, Pioneer, and surprisingly enough, Sony. The discs hold up to 8.5GB of data, just like your average DVD. The format supports a bit depth of 24-bit, 5.1 audio tracks encoded up to 96kHz, and 2-channel stereo tracks up to 192kHz.

In comparison, CD Audio resolution is 16-bit at a sample rate of 44.1kHz. Even if you have no idea what the numbers mean, just trust that those higher numbers make DVD-A a significant leap beyond CDs.

Super Audio CD (SACD), on the other hand, comes from Sony and Philips, the two companies behind the audio CD. It appeared in 1999, also uses a standard DVD disc as its vehicle, and is available in stereo and surround sound configurations. SACD is stored in a format called Direct Stream Digital (DSD). Unfortunately, I think it may be nearly impossible to break down the technical specifications of DSD because the only explanations I can find sound like this:

DSD is 1-bit, has a sampling rate of 2.8224 MHz, and makes use of noise shaping quantization techniques in order to push 1-bit quantization noise up to inaudible ultrasonic frequencies. This gives the format a greater dynamic range and wider frequency response than the CD.

Source: Wikipedia

Given that sci-fi sounding explanation, I’m fairly certain it sounds significantly better than standard CDs.

Fans of these formats, myself included, praise them for their record-like warmth and incredible resolution and dynamic range. If you ever get a chance to demo one of these formats in an ideal listening environment, do so. It will instantly make sense of all the technical nonsense in this section.

Backwards Compatibility

Both formats take their earlier siblings into account and offer some level of backwards compatibility. Many DVD-A discs offer Dolby Digital and DTS tracks which are playable in standard DVD players. “Hybrid” SACDs, the most popular kind, include a CD audio track on one layer of the disc, while the high resolution SACD audio content sits on another.

I guess that sort of makes up for both formats being horribly incompatible with one another. Sort of.

DualDisc, another audio disc format, aimed to introduce the benefits of higher resolution audio to consumers gradually by offering a standard CD on one side of the disc with DVD content on another. The DVD content was never standardized, which led to confusion when marketing the discs. It could include documentaries and music videos, or, it could include a DVD-A version of the album. Interestingly enough, Sony is one of the labels putting out DualDisc albums, although they make sure not to step on the toes of SACD by never including full resolution DVD-A content on their DVD sides.

You Call This a War?

Is a war fought if nobody cares? That’s what we would have to ask ourselves when considering the epic battle between DVD-A and SACD. Released at a time when most people hadn’t yet realized the full surround sound audio potential of DVDs, these formats were the answer to a problem nobody noticed.

Consumers were more than satisfied with CDs, few had the speaker and audio receiver setup to utilize these formats to their full potential, and the formats were simply too expensive and confusing. A few years after their launch, the iPod was released and the face of music changed forever. The music-going public clamored for lower-quality portable music instead of “clunky” optical discs.

Subsequently, neither format truly took off. The format war is now at a stalemate as combo DVD-A/SACD players are becoming more common. The Creative Audigy 2 sound cards supported playback of DVD-A discs, and recent versions of Power DVD on PCs support it as well. There is currently no way to play SACDs on any sort of computer.

Sony also included SACD support in the Playstation 3, although it was removed from the recent 40GB version for cost-cutting reasons. PS3 owners take note: At this time, you can only listen to SACDs if you’re using an HDMI connection to your receiver.

Parallels with the HD DVD/Blu-ray war

In reading this article, I’m sure you’ve recognized some parallels between the DVD-A/SACD fiasco and the format war we’re facing today. Some similarities I’ve noticed include:

• Forcing of next-generation formats on an unwilling public
• Formats required many consumers to buy much more equipment than just the DVD-A/SACD players
• Lower-quality digital media formats (iTunes store, online video streaming) steal much of the thunder from the higher quality formats
• Hybrid-discs are released to ease adoption of the new format
• Draconian DRM worries make the formats more restrictive to consumers
• Combo-players bring the war to a stalemate and the formats co-exist happily ever after

I’ll dig into these and other similarities in a future post, but for now, I think it’s enough that we recognize they exist. It’s probably not that unusual that there are so many similarities, after all, we should probably expect this sort of technological samsara by now. After a point, the cycles of death and rebirth that our technological formats face will become all the more predictable.

Where to Go From Here

Obviously, neither DVD-A or SACD have been wildly successful, but I wouldn’t write them off just yet. Remember that the audio CD was originally launched in 1980 and it took about a decade for it to truly take off. When it comes to traditional audio formats, it can simply take a while for the public to accept it.

Now that more consumers are considering surround sound in their home theaters, they’re also unwittingly optimizing their setups for DVD-A and SACD. If these formats can cement themselves in more players, publicize their benefits, and make the discs cheaper and more readily available, consumer adoption is sure to follow.

Let’s just hope they accomplish this before a high-definition successor to MP3 appears.

Update 1:

Just an update for anyone interested in hearing me discuss this further: My friends and I will be covering this format war and its parallels to the HD DVD/Blu-ray mess on the second episode of our podcast, The Watchers. Check it out early next week if you’re interested in this post, or just film and television in general. I promise you’ll be entertained!

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The Forgotten Format War: Toshiba’s "DVD-Audio" vs Sony’s "Super Audio CD"

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Of course their anti-DRM stance has ensured that they wouldn’t be able to offer some tracks from the big music labels (although this is changing slowly). But thus far their selection has been more than adequate for my needs. I have a fairly eclectic taste in music, just check out my Last.FM page to see for yourself, and I’ve been able to find most of what I’ve wanted on their site without much fuss.

So they have high-quality DRM-free MP3s along with a fairly wide selection–I technically shouldn’t have anything to complain about right? I thought as much myself, until I realized a crucial problem with their billing plans.

Although they’ve given up on their “all you can eat” pricing scheme from previous years , they’ve settled on some reasonable monthly and annual subscription ranges. I’ve chosen their low-end scheme since I wanted to test the service for a few months before committing serious funds to the site. Said low-end plan is $10 per month for 30 tracks.

I was quite happy with this plan until a month passed by when I hadn’t purchased anything from eMusic. Fully expecting to have an extra 30 credits waiting for me when I logged in the month afterwards, I was surprised to find that my credits still sat at 30. A quick glance at my credit statements showed that I did in fact pay for the previous month’s service, but apparently eMusic resets your download credits every month regardless of how much you’ve actually used.

Now all of this information is readily available so I don’t feel hoodwinked at all. I’ve accepted the fact that I’ve lost that month’s worth of credits. My question is simply this: Why?

It’s not as if eMusic will lose anything if they roll over extra credits every month instead of resetting them. (Sure their bandwidth costs may jump a bit, but any major online media outlet should be prepared for that.) If I pay for a month’s worth of credits I don’t see why any remaining credits should disappear. It’s not as if they’re offering a physical product or anything that justifies a monthly expiration date. All they’re doing is arbitrarily granting me access to download files based on how much I pay. So why can’t they just as easily roll over unused credits?

It just seems odd to me that customers can so easily pay for a service that they never actually receive.

I can’t really think of any other subscription-based services online that function similarly. The only other similarity that comes to mind are cell phone plans, and it’s not as if roll-over minutes are anything new there. Without rollover, eMusic will always be fatally flawed to me. It’s a shame too, because there’s just so much to like.

I’ve sent eMusic an inquiry regarding their lack of rollover, but I don’t exactly expect a response. My other big surprise upon discovering this is how easily eMusic users have accepted these terms of service. I’m not sure exactly why this is the case, but I welcome any reader thoughts on the subject.

Update: I should mention that an eMusic rep contacted me soon after posting this article with an apology and credited my account with 50 downloads for the lost month and trouble. I still maintain my love for eMusic, especially after a move like that, but I still hope they come around with some sort of roll over plan. As I mentioned in the comments below, they could just as well limit it to only roll over 2-3 months worth of credit. It’s still better than the situation right now.

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Why Doesn’t Emusic Carry Over Unused Tracks Every Month?

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What is there to say? These students obviously can’t deal with the fact that they were caught red-handed, and they’re now playing ignorant as a way to distance themselves from their responsibility. Given the litigious frenzy of the RIAA these past few years, I think it would be extremely unlikely that these college-aged students were completely unaware of the legality of their actions.

From comments I gather around my campus, which is just down the street from UMASS, students are more interested in knowing how to download safely. This leads me to believe that many students are well aware of what they’re doing, they just don’t want to get caught. These i2Hub users probably deluded themselves into thinking they were completely safe by sharing on Internet 2, which is a seperate network from the general internet and pretty much inaccessible for people outside of academia. In their shock at actually being targeted by the RIAA, they decided to go after the creator of i2Hub instead of accepting that they were at fault. Somehow, I find this scenario far more likely than plain ignorance.

Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. I still don’t agree at all with the RIAA’s sue-happy campaign, I’m just more annoyed that these students are trying to blame someone else by playing dumb instead of owning up. There were times when sharing data used to be completely safe, but those days are gone. I’m not a stranger to the world of file-sharing, neither are most of the people I know, but it is certainly a more dangerous game now than it used to be. Until the MPAA and the RIAA stop their blindly ineffective lawsuit campaign, anyone using P2P will just have to be careful; you’re still technically at fault, even if the lawsuit is unfair.

WSJ.com – Students Want File-Sharing Site To Pay for RIAA Settlements

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Students Suing i2Hub for RIAA Settlements

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So the question has to be asked, what went wrong? It wasn’t for lack of a decent product, both the Rio Karma and Carbon have serious advantages over their iPod counterparts. Although Rio was stupid not to release a successor to their excellently reviewed Karma last season, the release of the Carbon almost made up for that loss. The big problem with Rio, and this is true for any company that tries to take on Apple, was in their marketing. Simply put, there really wasn’t any.

While Rio may have been the first company to release a mass-market MP3 player, it was Apple that made the whole digital audio player thing trendy, and it was Apple that conquered the world with their oh-so-hip marketing. Remember, this is the company that made people drool for a screenless flash MP3 player. Who else can do that?! Rio just failed to compete on the same scale as Apple, and they relied too much on the techy userbase instead of appealing to the generic end-user. Sure you could buy a Carbon at Best Buy, but where were the commercials and magazine ads telling you why you should? Maybe someone can eventually resurrect the Rio brand and do the name justice. Until then, the Rio fan base will most likely move to the Cowon players. They have a good portion of the market in Korea, so it doesn’t matter as much to them if they aren’t as popular in America.

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RIP Rio

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So Tom’s Hardware reviewed the new Creative sound card recently, the X-Fi, and they seem to be pleased overall. This is a pretty big move for Creative, who have been relying on the Audigy architecture in their cards for the past 5 years or so. There have been significant upgrades to the Audigy lineup with the Audigy 2 and 2 ZS (which they refer to as the Audigy 3), but even the latest Audigy cards are essentially running on a 5 year old architecture. Creative has a stranglehold over the surround-sound gaming market, but they weren’t as successful with pleasing more musically inclined audiphiles. It seems like they intend to change that this time around.

This new card is significant because it seems like they’ve decided to make the best card for all audio users, gamers, music creators, and the audiophiles. The X-fi offers several modes of use which allows the user to more efficiently take advantage of the cards capabilities. This should make life easier for users who have taken to running several sound cards for different purposes. I’m excited for this new technology, but I still don’t see a significant reason to upgrade from my Audigy 2 ZS. It is a nice change of pace for Creative though; they’ve proven that they can be innovative once again–

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Creative X-Fi, Audigy No More

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Basically I want a player that:

1. Has atleast a 20-40GB drive.
2. Supports ogg, musepack support would be nice but that’s just a pipedream.
3. Has good audio quality, at least 95db snr, gapless playback also helps.
4. Has an intuitive menu system.
5. Is aesthetically pleasing.
6. Can be used as a portable hard drive.

Right now only iRiver, iAudio, and Rio offer players that fit this criteria. Both the iRiver and iAudio players are still somewhat expensive, whereas the Rio player, the Karma, is surprisingly affordable. You can find it for around $190 shipped today, there was even a recent deal that brought that price down to $150 shipped (!). It fits all of my requirements except the last one (and arguably the second to last as well), but the problem now is that it’ was released in 2002. Rio hasn’t updated the player since 2003, and they recently announced that they’re discontinuing it. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does point to the certain possibility that it will be replaced by a newer player.

After doing some research, it seems that many believe the Rio Chroma (prototype image to the right) is the spiritual successor to the Karma. It will supposedly offer a color display (not a priority), and some sort of wireless support (either bluetooth or wifi), along with a bigger hard drive and all the features of the Karma. The new design is also noticeably reminiscent of the recent Rio Carbon. All signs point to this being the one player to fulfill all of my requirements, along with some features I never even considered. But then again by the time this thing is released I may actually be able to afford an iRiver or iAudio player…

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The Rio Chroma: My Dream Digital Audio Player

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At first I was interested in HDD players because I wanted to have the ability to carry around my entire music collection (~40GB), and also have a place to serve as a backup. Now with the smaller players, I’ll still have to choose just like I do with my trust 128MB iRiver (180T). Given, I’ll probably be rearranging the contents of the player much less than before, but now I just can’t convince myself to get one of these smaller players as easily as I could before for the larger ones.

I think I’ll just sit on the sidelines and see where things go. I’m very interested in the iRiver H10 right now, but I hear it has a ton of problems plus it lacks ogg support, so I guess I’ll just pass on that. I’m not sure if music players have much room to improve, they can only get so much smaller given the size of the microdrives they use. Improvements will most likely be seen in UI, increased codec support (I would kill for musepack support), or a plugin based system for handling other formats. There’s also the option of a Pocket PC for around $350, but that’s a topic for another day.

For anyone interested in a decent player there’s a good deal just posted today at Bens Bargains.

JR.com: RIO Carbon 5 GB @ J&R for $150

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HDD MP3 Players: Round 1

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