Hopefully much less than they do now. Looking through the HD film section in HMV and you have ridiculous prices. Cheapest film there was 17 quid, average seemed to be 25. DVD films were 7-9 quid.
No way daddio.
'course it'll be cheaper online. But online sales are still what, 4% of total retail?
£25 is alright if it's a real good film with decent extras. Not just your average Hollywood blockbusters. Like:
-The Star Wars films (as long as Lucas doesn't do more stupid changes)
-The Lord of the Rings trilogy (I have three different DVD sets of this already)
-The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (might be a surprising choice, but some scenes have very impressive scenery that I would love to see in HD, for example the cemetary at the end)
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
If you spend any money on a next gen video at this stage you're a lemon. BluRay has the PS3 pushing it, HD-DVD has the porn industry behind it. WTF are you going to do if one you invested in dies? I mean you spent twice as much more than a DVD on these films.
Mr James my opinion exactly. And from what you have said HD is gonna win anyway haha.
Also the product lifecycles are getting shorter and shorter. VHS was around for ages, so was the NES and SNES, now the duration to the next big thing is getting shorter and shorter.
One of my trades, and hobbies is audio systems. I love high end analogue and any audio engineer worth their salt will tell you that nothing beats a high quality valve amplifier, say like a Leak TL12. White noise, Johnsons noise, Total Harmonic Distortion, Linearity are all superior on a valve amp. Transistors are inherently noisy devices...
What i'm basically saying is the next big digital thing is not always a smart move for economical reasons or in the world of Audio technological reasons.
Oh yea. A good valve amp from the 70's will easily surpass any digital receiver today.
But it's all over the industry. Vinyl has an incredible sound, CD loses the dynamics, MP3 even more so. Heck, the iTunes store (most popular internet music store) sells music at 128kbps! The industry is getting worse because people are spending more money on AV equipment without actually looking at quality. Public don't care. Public wants branding and advertising.
I still use vinyl, reel to reel tape (dont wont to wear my records out), and even semi pro quality cassette deck, triple head, Dolby S (Analogue) to get the emphasis right.
I have got a valve amp, and i build them as a hobby . Currently under work is a stereo ultra linear EL84 push pull output. Previous amp was a 6V6 Single Ended, Class A amp. I love class A amps to bits even if they are ~15% efficient if you are lucky!
I tested a freind of mine, a recording of Freebird on Cassette from a record, or the CD of the album.
He went for the Cassette sounding better haha .
Shame really i see freinds throwing out better sound systems than the ones they are buying . High bandwidth analogue will usually surpass any digital modulation scheme. Qoute a reknowned Comms Professor at my uni "If you think current digital TV is better than analogue you must be blind!". Its mainly becuase of cheapness, i.e. using less RF bandwidth.
Oh yea. A good valve amp from the 70's will easily surpass any digital receiver today. But it's all over the industry. Vinyl has an incredible sound, CD loses the dynamics, MP3 even more so. Heck, the iTunes store (most popular internet music store) sells music at 128kbps!
It's not the CD format that's the problem, the problem is that the audio dynamics are compressed to make them sound better on low-end setups.
Qoute a reknowned Comms Professor at my uni "If you think current digital TV is better than analogue you must be blind!". Its mainly becuase of cheapness, i.e. using less RF bandwidth.
At high enough bitrates, digital TV is better than analogue. Try this, set your resolution to a measly 640x480, then connect your computer to a tv using composite cable (s-video can be used too, but composite is closer to the quality of analog tv)
Now take a screenshot of your screen and paste in the image editing software of your choice. Save the file as a JPEG. Compare the saved JPEG to the TV screen. Which one looks better?
The problem is that the broadcasters wish to squeeze in as many tv channels as possible, which means that the channels are assigned less than sufficient bandwidth.
Edited by the Author.
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
I have an EyeTV that pushes the image resolution up to 576p 16:10 only using it because there is nothing else for a computer. The whole connection is digital which is nice. No matter how large the size of the monitor you don't get a picture anything near the terrible quality of LCD/Plasma with built in Freeview tuners.
Digital aint too hot. It's just able to store more in the bandwidth which means more money for big companies.
Oh, and there was an article recently that showed modern music (especially that of Lilly Allen and Oasis etc) remove audio dynamics in the post-processing AND up the amplification. New tech is shit. But folk seem happy paying for it.
After decoding the player has to interleave between horrible quantized steps of audio levels, which basically means "fill in the blanks" between these steps. Although the frequency content is roughly ok, data on the real shape of the audio signal will always get lost in a digital system regardless of the data rate, and ADC/DAC levels.
Imagine if i missed out a word every 10 words in a book, sometimes the brain can fill in the blanks, and sometimes it will get it wrong. This the CD system.
An analogue system will reproduce the signal much more accurate (providing it has the bandwidth) at the expense of noise. Noise can be controlled pretty well, and in comparison to digital, the DAC's produce their fair share of noise anyway!, i.e. Practical Digital implementations do produce noise too. People will say CD is a better system as it has a flat frequency response over a bigger range, just omitting the fact it makes a hash of qauntizing and rebuilding the signal shape.
That diagram is for a mere 10KHz signal drum beats, especially symbols give rise to sybilance/ringing sound, which can be heard even better in MP3's. DVD audio is better, but its still an approximation to signal shape at high frequencies.
digital TV
Oh and digital TV wise, digital can look better than current Analogue if it was uncoded/lossless compression (impossible lol), which it will never be, its too costly on spectrum.
Also remember analogue colour has been out a long time. A higher bandwidth analogue system, with more scan lines would still look better. High quality large bandwidth analogue will almost always win.
Unfortunately its costly. A typical PAL (i.e. UK) tv transmission takes approximately 7.5 MHz of bandwidth. Imagine if your phone line had this bandwidth, what data rate could you achieve?
For a rough guess lets use the Shannon hartley Equation, saying 35 dB
C = Blog(base 2)(1 + s/n), C = 7.5 x 10^6 log(1+10^(35/10))
C = 89.69 M Bits / second.
And the current systems have huge spectral efficiency...
Hmm i wonder how much compressed video would squeeze into one channel? Plus the governments all want to sell most of this spectra for billions, its purely cheapness.
After decoding the player has to interleave between horrible quantized steps of audio levels, which basically means "fill in the blanks" between these steps. Although the frequency content is roughly ok, data on the real shape of the audio signal will always get lost in a digital system regardless of the data rate, and ADC/DAC levels.
Yes, but the more important question is - is the difference audible? In theory analogue is better, but not always in practice.
Oh and digital TV wise, digital can look better than current Analogue if it was uncoded/lossless compression (impossible lol), which it will never be, its too costly on spectrum.
Also remember analogue colour has been out a long time. A higher bandwidth analogue system, with more scan lines would still look better. High quality large bandwidth analogue will almost always win.
Do you think analogue tv looks better than a good DVD? Not? Well guess what, DVD is compressed! And the bitrate never goes pasts 10 mbps, and most often stays in the range of 3-5 mbps. A digital tv transmitter (with the same bandwidth of an analog pal channel) holds about 20 mbps, twice the maximum of a DVD.
Digital tv is more bandwidth effeciant than analog tv. However the broadcasters have chosen quantity over quality. So instead of 4 above analog quality channels per transmitters, there's 6-8 lower quality channels. However, dynamic multiplexing distributes the bandwidth depending on how much each channel needs, so it's still not too bad. How do you think analog tv would look at 1 mhz per channel?
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
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Edited by the Author.
. Currently under work is a stereo ultra linear EL84 push pull output. Previous amp was a 6V6 Single Ended, Class A amp. I love class A amps to bits even if they are ~15% efficient if you are lucky!
. High bandwidth analogue will usually surpass any digital modulation scheme. Qoute a reknowned Comms Professor at my uni "If you think current digital TV is better than analogue you must be blind!". Its mainly becuase of cheapness, i.e. using less RF bandwidth.
only using it because there is nothing else for a computer. The whole connection is digital which is nice. No matter how large the size of the monitor you don't get a picture anything near the terrible quality of LCD/Plasma with built in Freeview tuners.