Wile there is the DVD format war between DVD plus and DVD minus, on the audio front there are also two competing formats; DVD audio and the Super Audio CD (SACD). While both format till now are mostly populair with audiophiles, with SACD being the most populair, it has not yet been really populair on the mass market.
The mass market is of course the most intresting to companies and now Cirrus Logic has released a chip for DVD Audio that should bring down the price of DVD Audio players, but likely also for SACD as Cirrus Logic has said it will probably also support the SACD format in future designs of this chip.
To get the mass-market ball rolling, one of the largest suppliers of digital audio chips, Cirrus Logic, announced last week that it is releasing a new series of chips that will enable low-cost DVD-A machines in the $100 range to hit dealer shelves in mid-2003. Cirrus' Terry Ritchie says the CS98200 chips will include a built-in hard-disk-drive interface for audio server functionality and sport eight channels of PCM at 24-bit bit depth and 192kHz output rate. The CS98200 chips will also support the Verance watermarking system, and include two channels of I²S input at 24-bits/96kHz for possible recording uses. |
In addition, Ritchie reports that his company is in licensing talks with Sony and Philips to include SACD decoding in the next generation of inexpensive chips. Ritchie indicates that a universal SACD/DVD-A low-cost Cirrus chip may appear sometime in 2003 or early 2004, enabling manufacturers to create universal players at much lower price points than the current $1000 offerings. Ritchie adds that it is too soon to tell how low the prices will go for the next generation universal players.
DVD Audio and SACD are the format that eventually should replace the CD. Both formats feature better sound quality and both have their pros and cons. But it seems that the SACD, developed by Philips and Sony is on the winning side. More information can be found here.
Source: Stereophile.com
