[caleb]

Forgive me if this has been a topic before as I am quite new to this forum.

Has Bryston every planned on making a source for their other superb equipment?

By this is am referring to a GREAT SOUNDING DVD player.

I am sure that with the Expertise at Bryston they could put together a "world's best?

[James Tanner]

Hi,

Yes we have looked at a CD Player and a DVD but given the constant changes (DVD-HD - BLU-RAY) are staying away for now.

james

[thomaspf]

Staying away is probably a good thing. There is no market for disc based players even in the medium term.

The battle between HD-DVD and Blue Ray is the last physical format battle we will experience. After that it will be all file formats.

In fact I am not even sure that either Blue-Ray or HD-DVD do matter at this point. Most content owners have long started looking at the Internet and your hard drive as a more efficient way of distributing content.

Digital-to-Analog converison on the other hand will be cruicially important and building better connectivity to all those hard drives in the form of USB, 1394, and HDMI would be a nice development.  USB and 1394 both support a master clock mode which regulates the data stream coming from the sources.


Once you have these digital interfaces on your converters and you do the dejittering right any universal player or for that matter a computer will sound exactly the same.


Cheers

    Thomas

[James Tanner]

Hi Thomas,

Yes I have had the same thoughts about the source eventually being a hard drive.
Do you think people will still buy CD and DVD's and record them or deal with the compressed music off the internet?

james

[_andy_]

Staying away is probably a good thing. There is no market for disc based players even in the medium term.

The battle between HD-DVD and Blue Ray is the last physical format battle we will experience. After that it will be all file formats.

In fact I am not even sure that either Blue-Ray or HD-DVD do matter at this point. Most content owners have long started looking at the Internet and your hard drive as a more efficient way of distributing content.

Digital-to-Analog converison on the other hand wi ...

...well as far as the next generation of disc media, be it Blu-Ray or HD-dvd (i bet the former will be the dominant one) at least as far as Hi Def movies go, there will be a strong market for it. Even with current broadband, a 'de-res'ed' dvd say down from 9Gig to 4.5Gig will take a good 6-8 hrs to d/l.....& how many people have broadband right now? (i really don't know, i wouild think it's far from the majority even in Canada/US)
HD movies might be in 20-25Gig range.....w/o me knowing how much these could be 'compressed for download'...you would still probably be looking at 17-20Gig per movie.
That's a days worth of steady d/l on an average adsl line. So now we want everyone to have vdsl pipes to make d/l of hd-movie file size 'convenient'. Not any time soon.
I'll bet my money that HD-on-a-disc of some sort has a good run.

[mv038856]

Do you think people will still buy CD and DVD's and record them or deal with the compressed music off the internet?

I believe that harddiscs won't replace removable media in the foreseeable future. The race of men does like to collect things. Looking at my 500+ DVD-Collection I deem it impossible to store 500 or more movies in an acceptable HD quality on a hard disc. Considering that I had some harddisk crashes, I would prefer to have at least a backup on a removable media anyway. So why don't have it on removable media in the first place?

Another factor is the one of haptics (BTW, a not unimportant argument pro Bryston equipment   ). Taking the DVD box from the shelf, having a look on the cover (or a special edition tin box), flipping through a nicely made booklet and placing the disc it into the player...

I do admit that CD and DVD are not in the same league as the vinyl stuff if it comes to haptics and the ceremony of playing them. But they are at least a hundred times better than navigating through a harddisk tree to find a movie file.

Another factor is that almost all PCs and harddisk equipment hasn't been made to sound good, but to offer lots of MHz and GBytes at low prices. Not a good basis for high quality equipment. Just for fun I burned some MP3s on a CD. Playing the CD sounds way better than playing the MP3s directly from the PC using a Soundblaster PCMCIA Audigys digital out connecting through an M-Audio CO3 to the AES/EBU input of my SP-1 PRO.

Ok, those are my two pennies.  

Cheers!


Markus
aka mv038856

[thomaspf]

Lots of arguments about movies here. Building a good video player is a completely different business. Let's looks at the audio side of things. CD at 16/44.1 still rules and it is loosing to Itunes right now. That is the fastest growing segment in the music market peroid.

There are already online music stores that distribute uncompressed music online. I have all my music on hard drive for a couple of years now. It is not very realisitic to assume that people will want to run around searching through their stack of CDs if you can have a 1000 disc collection lossless on a single drive which you can play anywhere in the house.  Look what Tivo did to VHS recorders. I stopped using my CD player around 3 years ago. There is absolutely no quality difference to a CDP from a properly set-up PC with digital out to a DAC. The key term her is properly which is not exactly easy today.

On the high end DVD-A and SACD are barely staying alive and are hampered by complicated digital link connectivity and copy protection that prevent this technology from getting broadly acdepted. I hope that eventually you can import these into your digital media library at home at which point people will probably start buying the hidef versions.


I believe the key for Bryston is the digital to analog conversion and amplifier part of the playback chain. Given the uncertainties about which digital interconnect is going to dominate and what DRM standards will prevail I would probably go for some form of modular input cards.

I'd assume coax toslink S/PDIF comes as standard but in addition I might offer

- AES/EBU like on the pro version
- HDMI probably target the version that support Dolby plus and DTS+
 and has DVD-A and SACD support
- USB2 this has become quite an interesting and cheap option. Again support for async option is required for low jitter.
- Ethernet with support for DLNA and whatever future standards emerge there.
- 1394 audio including the async extensions from the 1394ta. Include 5c without support for SACD and DVD-A

Software updates will be required for a while till this all settles down. If a modular system is to much hassle I would settle for HDMI with really good dejittering and an Ethernet option. Lips sync with Ethernet is an interesting challenge but I have seen some nice systems in development that deal with this problem.

Cheers

   Thomas

[brystonbrad]

I believe that harddiscs won't replace removable media in the foreseeable future. The race of men does like to collect things. Looking at my 500+ DVD-Collection I deem it impossible to store 500 or more movies in an acceptable HD quality on a hard disc. Considering that I had some harddisk crashes, I would prefer to have at least a backup on a removable media anyway. So why don't have it on removable media in the first place?

Another factor is the one of haptics (BTW, a not unimportant argument pro Bryst ...

I agree completely.

[thomaspf]

I forgot one interface

A USB port at the front that allows you to connect an Ipod or any Plays4sure compatible media player with MTP.

Cheers

   Thomas