Chapter 4: Discs and Their Players

Most books and magazine articles about HT treat DVDs and DVD players in one place, and CDs and CD players in another. This is probably because CDs are much older and are mostly for audio, and DVDs are fairly new and mostly for video. But, in fact, both are used for audio and video. There are new disc types for high-performance audio (Super Audio CD) and compressed audio (MP3). And players that play more than one type of disc are more the rule than the exception.

So I’ll first discuss all the types of discs, and then move on to players. While the product categories “DVD player” and “CD player” still exist, it’s becoming less and less useful to think of them that way. Instead, I’ll just talk about players in terms of general features that apply to all disc types (e.g., changers). And, of course, when you choose a player, what types of discs it can play will be an important factor in what you choose.

When we get to DVDs and players for them, I’m going to use a bunch of terms that I introduced in Chap. 2, such as anamorphic, letterbox, pan-and-scan, progressive scan, and 480pV. You might want to review that chapter a bit before continuing.

About CDs

Almost everybody’s familiar with audio CDs, as you’d expect with 500 million players and 10 billion discs out there.

CD Formats

The format of a CD (“compact disc”) specifies how the data on it is organized, and the media type specifies how the CD is made.

There are three formats of CDs that are of interest to HT owners:

·      CD Audio: These are music CDs that you’re already familiar with and probably already have a collection of.

·      CD-ROM: These are data CDs that are used with almost all computers. (ROM stands for “read-only memory.”) They contain computer data files rather than an audio stream, although the files, which can contain anything, could contain audio. The most important audio files for HT systems are MP3 files, and many CD players can play them. Remember, however, that a CD-ROM disc that contains music (in whatever form) and a CD Audio disc are two completely different formats.

·      Video CD (VCD): These contain video and audio of roughly videotape quality. This format is very popular in Asia, but it’s almost unknown in North America. Note that VCDs are not CD-ROMs that contain video files, nor are they DVDs; they are a distinct CD format in their own right. An improvement over VCD is Super VCD (SVCD), which offers more advanced compression, resulting in better quality.

Ironically, even though Video CDs are not DVDs, no CD player can play them and most DVD players can. This is because CD players have no video output, nor do they have the electronics to decode the compressed video on the VCD.

Full-size CDs are 12 cm in diameter (a little under 5 inches) and can contain around 650 MB of data, recorded on one side only. That’s enough for about 74 min. of music in CD Audio format (technically known as PCM, for “pulse-code modulation”), or around 10 hours of MP3 music in CD-ROM format, assuming a typical MP3 file size. (More about MP3 later.) There are also smaller 8 cm CDs that can be used with some portable devices (e.g., digital cameras, portable MP3 players). Most players and computer drives can handle them as well.

CD Media Types

For all three CD formats (CD Audio, CD-ROM, VCD), there are three kinds of CD media:

·      Pressed: These are CDs that you buy, which are made in pressing plants.

·      CD-R: These are CDs that you write with your computer if you have a CD recorder installed. (Confusingly, such a recorder is called a CD-RW drive.) A CD-R can be written once only, so you can’t rewrite ones you’ve already written. You can play (read) them as many times as you want.

·      CD-RW: These are also written with a CD recorder, but you can erase them and rewrite them again. They cost more than CD-R media.

What Players Play What CDs

All CD and DVD players can play pressed CDs, but not all can play CD-Rs and CD-RWs, so you need to look specifically for this capability if it’s important to you. It will be important if you use your computer to write CD Audio discs (when copying a pressed CD, for example) or MP3 CD-ROMs.

Here’s a summary of what devices can play what formats and media types. In the table, the term “players” means CD, Super Audio CD, and DVD players unless specifically qualified (I’ll talk about Super Audio CD players shortly).

Note that’s it’s important to look for CD-R and CD-RW as separate capabilities; don’t assume that a player that handles one will also handle the other. Typically Video CD and MP3 capabilities are clearly marked on the front panel of the player, but CD-R and CD-RW capabilities are not—for those you have to look on the box or in the instruction book.

All current computer CD read-only drives and CD recorders can read all three media types, so you needn’t worry about your computer’s drive. What formats your computer can handle depends on what software you have installed, not on the hardware.

MP3 and WMA

MP3 is a popular audio compression scheme that can drastically shrink the size of data files compared to uncompressed audio. For example, a 3 minute song in its uncompressed form, such as on a CD Audio disc, would fill a 26 MB file, but the same song in MP3 form might take only 3 MB, which is about a 9:1 reduction. This is why MP3 is the most popular way to exchange music over the Internet.

The penalty for this extreme compression is that the quality of the MP3 sound isn’t as good as the original. How good it is depends on the amount of compression, which you can control when you create the MP3 file. Typical compression choices that you find in the computer software packages for making MP3 files are 64 kbps (“FM radio” quality), 96 kbps (“near CD quality”), and 128 kbps (“CD” quality). There’s a loss of quality even at 128 kbps, however, although you probably wouldn’t notice in a portable music player.

CD-ROMs are only one of the places you can put MP3 files. More commonly, people want to download them directly to the memory in portable devices so they can take the music with them.

MP3 is not really a primary music format for HT systems, because of its reduced quality and because space, which is MP3’s chief advantage, isn’t usually an issue. But, nonetheless, you may find it handy to be able to play MP3 CD-ROMs on your HT system, and the necessary feature for your player often comes for free.

The MP3 decoding is done entirely in the player, so any receiver will do, or none at all if you want to use headphones connected directly to the player. This is unlike the case with Dolby Digital and Dolby Surround/Pro Logic, where the decoding is usually done in the receiver.

There’s lots more to say about MP3, especially if you want to create your own MP3 files. See Chap. 9 for some additional information sources.

WMA (“Windows Media Audio”) is a Microsoft compression scheme that’s newer and better than MP3 in the sense that files of the same audio quality take up only about half the space. There’s less support for WMA than MP3 in players, although WMA is coming on strong. It’s already pretty widely available in portable CD players. DVD/CD players that play WMA CDs and even WMA DVDs (250 hours on a single DVD!) are starting to come onto the market, too.

In summary: If you’re mainly interested in downloading music from the Internet, you’ll find that nearly all of it is MP3. But if you’re compressing music for your own use, consider WMA.

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High-Performance Audio

Super Audio CDs (SACDs)

Super Audio CDs can record music at much greater fidelity than can CD Audio discs, but you need a special SACD player to play them. Fortunately, that player will also play regular CDs. There are also players that can play CDs, SACDs, and DVDs.

SACDs aren’t a CD format, but a different technology, just as DVD is a different technology. However, there are hybrid SACDs which have an outer CD layer and can play in an ordinary CD (or DVD) player, although what plays isn’t the SACD stream, but rather a supplemental CD stream. Or, to say it another way, a hybrid SACD is a combined SACD and CD on the same disc.

Whether you should get an SACD player and start buying SACDs instead of CDs is up to you. If you sometimes just sit and attentively listen to CDs, rather than play them as background music, and if you can afford it, the improvement may indeed be worthwhile.

Currently, because of industry copy-protection concerns, SACD players produce only analog output via phono jacks which you connect to corresponding audio input jacks on your receiver. The players also have digital output jacks (phono, optical, or both), but that’s only for when they’re playing CDs.

There are also multichannel (e.g., 5.1) SACD players and SACD discs. The multichannel output isn’t Dolby Digital, as it is from DVD players, so it doesn’t come through the digital jack, but rather through 6 analog phono jacks. (Also, there’s the copy-protection reason for not having digital output.) These are for front left/center/right, surround left/right, and subwoofer. Most older a/v receivers don’t have 6 channels (or even 5 channels) of analog input, but only two, for stereo sources. You’ll need either a receiver that does have the 6 analog inputs, or a separate multi-channel pre-amplifier and amplifier.

If you’re set up only for two-channel SACD playback, a multichannel SACD will play OK in two channels, without losing any of the music.

Before you invest in an SACD player, read the section on bass management in Chap. 3.

DVD-Audio

We’ll talk about DVDs in detail later in this chapter, but it makes more sense to talk about DVD-Audio right now, since it’s a competitor to SACD.

DVD-Audio is not the Dolby Digital part of DVD-Video, but rather a new audio format that’s encoded on DVD media. Like SACD, DVD-Audio provides greatly improved sound compared to CDs.

Unlike SACD, DVD-Audio players are fairly inexpensive because the underlying technology is DVD, and DVD players are inexpensive. In fact, lots of DVD players can play DVD-Audio discs, whereas SACD players are a class of equipment of their own. (SACD-player prices are dropping fast, however.)

As of Spring 2002 there were fewer DVD-Audio titles compared to SACD, but that’s because SACD came first. It’s likely that DVD-Audio will catch up fast. Still, the number of SACD or DVD-Audio titles is a tiny fraction of the number of CD titles.

Most SACDs (as of Spring 2002) are for stereo only, but most DVD-Audio is multi-channel. So, the comments at the end of the previous section about connecting multi-channel analog inputs to your receiver apply here, too. So does the comment about bass management.

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About DVDs

DVDs were introduced by the electronics industry in the early 1990s to solve two problems with video tapes and VCRs: poor video resolution and the ease of copying them.

As I explained in Chap. 2, videotape has a horizontal resolution of 240H lines (400H for Super VHS), and DVDs have 500H, a vast improvement. The sound is much better, too.

Copying is a plus for the consumer, and not a problem to be fixed, but the industry doesn’t see it that way. (There’s more on DVD copy protection later in this chapter.)

Although DVDs look like CDs and are the same size, the data on them is coded quite differently. You can’t see it with your naked eye, but each side can have two layers instead of the one that CDs have. Also, unlike a CD, a DVD can use both sides (although most don’t), for a maximum of 4 layers, each of which can hold around 2 hours of video (around 4 gigabytes of data). The actual amount depends on how many audio tracks there are and how much the audio and video is compressed.

Since all DVD players can automatically access both layers on a side (by changing the focus of the laser) but none can automatically access both sides, you’ll find that two-sided DVDs are generally used only when there are two different versions of the movie, such as widescreen and standard, but not if the movie is simply too long to fit on one side. Two (or more) DVDs are used instead, so you can put both discs in a player that takes multiple DVDs and see the whole movie without leaving your seat. Otherwise, you’d have to get up to manually flip the disc over.

DVD Formats

There are various DVD formats, just as there are various CD formats, but only two are relevant to HT: DVD-Video (for movies), and DVD-Audio, which I already discussed. Other formats are used for computer data, not for HT. You can certainly put MP3 files on a data DVD, but there aren’t any players for such DVDs right now.

So-called “superbit” DVDs aren’t a distinct format, but simply a tradeoff that skips the bonus material that DVDs often provide, such as director’s commentary and “making-of” documentaries, so that the whole disc can be used for just the movie. There’s then less compression and higher quality.

DVD Media Types

This is really confusing, so bear with me.

As with CDs, the DVDs you buy are pressed. You can’t record on them, and all DVD players will play them. (If that’s all you want to know, because you aren’t planning to record onto DVDs, then you may want to skip the rest of this section.)

Most recordable DVD drives are on computers, but there are also some standalone player/recorders. (The copy-protection mechanism that prevents you from recording a DVD with a VCR applies here to, so you can’t just pop in a DVD you rented and make a recording. More on this later.)

There are 6 kinds of recordable (writable) DVDs: DVD-RAM, DVD-R for General, DVD-R for Authoring, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD+R.

DVD-RAM is for computer data, not for HT. You can record DVD-Video on any of the other types, but DVD-R for Authoring is intended for industrial use, so you can skip that one, too, and I’ll now call DVD-R for General just plain DVD-R.

Like a CD-R, you can write on a DVD-R or a DVD+R only once, but you can write and re-write DVD-RW and DVD+RW as many times as you like. The difference between the “-” and “+” versions is that they use two different recording and erasing systems. There’s competition between the two actively going on as this is written (Spring 2002), but DVD-R and DVD-RW are the ones officially blessed by the DVD Forum, which makes the official rules. In fact, they’ve come up with a new designation for players, called DVD-MULTI,  which means that DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, DVD-ROM (for computer data), DVD-RAM, DVD-R, and DVD-RW are all handled. DVD+R and DVD+RW are not included.

If you do have a home-recorded DVD, it will probably play on your HT DVD player, but there’s no guarantee. If it matters to you, make sure you take whatever media types you care about to the store when you go shopping so you can test them.

How to Read the Back of a DVD Package

When you’re buying or renting a DVD, these are the things you probably will want to know about it:

·      Whether it’s in the original format (e.g., 2.35:1) or whether it’s been cropped to fit a 4:3 TV screen.

·      Whether the sound is 5.1, stereo, mono, or whatever.

·      If widescreen, whether it’s anamorphic.

·      What special features are included.

Most of this information is on the back of the DVD package, but some areas are a little confusing:

·      Most DVDs use Dolby Digital (see Chap. 3 for what this is) for their sound, but that doesn’t mean you get surround sound. The soundtrack could be mono, stereo, 4-channel surround, 5.1 surround, or even 6.1. If it’s 5.1, which is usually the case for recent movies, it will say 5.1. If it’s not, it will usually say what it is.

·      The word “anamorphic” may appear, or you might see the phrases “enhanced for widescreen” or “enhanced for 16:9,” which mean the same thing. If you don’t see any of these notations, it’s probably not anamorphic. It still may be widescreen, however, just letterboxed within a 4:3 image. (See Chap. 2 for a full explanation of this.)

·      If it says “standard” or “full screen” format, that’s 4:3, and it may or may not be the original format. For example, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was shot by him in 4:3 and then cropped for theatrical release because people expect to see widescreen movies in a theater. The 4:3 DVD is the way Kubrick intended the film to be seen. Usually the DVD package will say somewhere if it’s in the director’s original format or whether it’s been modified.

·      Sometimes there are both standard and widescreen version of the film on the DVD, one on each side. The side that says “standard” is the widescreen side, and the side that says “widescreen” is the standard side. No kidding! But, it makes sense, because when you put the disc in the player, the label you can see is the one that’s going to be played.

·      Sometimes there are two separate packages for a DVD, standard and widescreen, but the store stocks only one. Rental places like Blockbuster usually rent only the standard version if there’s a choice. So if widescreen matters to you, check before settling for the standard version. (What’s the point of spending $5000 on your HT and then watching a pan-and-scan movie?)

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Beyond DVDs

While DVD technology is still fairly new, there is one huge problem: They don’t have the capacity for HD video. Sure, a DVD picture looks great on an HDTV with a line-doubler, but it’s not true HD (720pV or 1080iV). There’s pressure on the hardware industry to do something, because all those high-definition TVs were brought to market for HDTV broadcasts, and, as we’ll see in the next Chapter, HDTV is rolling out very slowly. While we’re all waiting, a great solution would be high-definition discs of some sort. (D-VHS, described in Chap. 6, is another solution, but discs are more convenient and much cheaper to manufacture than tapes.)

As of Spring 2002, almost all the important players have joined to define a new disc type (not a type of DVD) called Blu-ray Disc, named for the blue-violet-laser technology on which it’s based. These discs can hold more than 5 times as much as a DVD, enough for 2 hours of HD video. It looks like the first players and discs will probably be available sometime in 2004. (Blu-ray probably won’t be the eventual name. Maybe something like “HD-DVD.”)

Fortunately, the new disc players will transmit the picture to the TV digitally. (Recall that even component video cables are analog.) Unfortunately, very few TVs today, even HDTVs, have the necessary digital input (“DVI HDCP”), and so owners of them will probably have to get a new TV if they want to watch HD discs with a digital connection to the TV. (DVI was discussed a bit back in Chap. 2.)

About Disc Players

What Kinds of Discs the Player Plays

Progressive Scan

Disc Changers

Player Inputs and Outputs

Setting the DVD Player for Anamorphic DVDs

A Separate CD Player?

What Happened to Laserdiscs?

A Shopping Strategy

©2001, 2002 Marc J. Rochkind. All rights reserved. Send comments about this site to site@htexplained.com.