For those burned by either DVD-Audio, SACD or HD DVD (or, heaven forbid, any combination of the three), you're probably taking a rather defensive approach to Blu-ray audio. Now that said format is the sole king of high-definition media (in the physical realm, anyway), it's just a matter of time before firms start pushing out full-fledged audio discs while trumpeting the incredulous sound quality. After all, with 50GB of space, you can fit an awful lot of high-resolution audio on there. We've already seen the first BD record released and we already know that Neil Young's entire archive will soon be loosed on the format, but are the puzzle pieces aligned for Blu-ray audio to take off? From our standpoint, we're still hesitant to say yes. With CD players still dominating dashboards and BD drives still a long ways from being commonplace in computers, BD audio is apt to remain a niche good for years to come. Even still, do you think it has what it takes to overcome?

Fans of high-def audio rejoice: The first Blu-ray recording has been released. Fans of anything other than Divertimento, hold your horses: The first release is from Thondheimsolistene, an orchestra from Norway. "Divertimeni", as it is called, will be released by the 2L label in full HD audio glory along with a SACD track for those not on the Blu-ray bandwagon just yet. Formats include 2.0 LPCM, 5.1 LPCM, 5.1 DTS HD Master Audio, 5.1 Dolby True HD, 5.1 Dolby Digital at 48KHz, and it has been confirmed to work just fine on the PS3.

[Via MiC]

With HD DVD and Blu-ray also came the ultimate audio options in a time when convenience trumps quality in most of the audio world. While SACD and DVD-Audio are all but a bust, audiophiles can turn to HD DVD and Blu-ray for the ultimate audio experience. But even if you aren't an audiophile, it's still worth it to many to take advantage of the master quality audio available on the HD discs that you've already paid for. Unfortunately, it isn't as easy as it used to be, and after realzing how much confusion there was surrounding these next-gen codecs, we decided to try to help clear up the confusion. So if you want to know how to take advantage of everything on the discs you already own, but don't know why Toslink doesn't cut it anymore (and what's so special about about HDMI 1.3), then read on, will ya?

There seems to be some confusion about the next generation HD movie discs and audio CODECs. Unlike the video CODECs used on both formats, the new audio CODECs are lossless which simply means without loss, or identical to the original. The three lossless CODECs supported by both formats are LPCM, Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD MA. At this point the question should be, if they are lossless than what is the difference? The difference for the most part is the number of bits. Both Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD use far less bits than LPCM, this leaves more space on the disc for other features. Of course audio is always more complicated than just CODECs, there is also the sample rate to consider and one of the benefits of LPCM is that is supports a higher sample rate than TrueHD or DTS HD, but considering that that sample rate is higher than most studio masters, that benefit is pretty much useless. So how many bits are we talking about here, actually alot. The same 2 hour movie with a 16/24, 5.1 sound track requires 4.14 GB with LPCM vs 1.26 GB for either TrueHD or DTS HD.