When even disco sounds good

By CHARLES ARTHUR

A generation of baby-boomers who grew up with the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac are being urged to buy the music all over again with the launch of a new format promising the clearest sound yet.

The Eagles' Hotel California and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours are among 60 albums to be released this spring by Warner Vision on a new DVD audio format, which boasts even better quality than CDs.

Anyone with a DVD player and a home cinema sound system will find the music dramatically richer and clearer.

But the new discs are also part of a wider anti-piracy plan by the record companies over the next 10 years to get rid of CDs completely, industry insiders say.

While the music business has seen global sales slump because, it claims, CD and online copying is destroying markets the new DVD-A format offers a way to wipe out piracy in the future, because the discs cannot be "ripped" like standard CDs.

It may also create another 1990s-style boom by persuading people to buy their CDs in the new format, just as baby boomers "re-bought" CDs of albums they already owned on vinyl.

Only one problem stands in the way: the record companies are divided between two incompatible formats.

DVD-A is backed by Warner, one of the biggest labels. The competing "Super Audio CD" (SACD) format, which requires a special player to get its higher sound quality, is backed by Sony, which has signed up Universal.

But both "21st-century formats" will initially feature 20th-century music from the 1970s.

Hotel California was released in 1976; Rumours in 1977. Other titles include Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies (1973) and the Doors' LA Woman (1971), as well as offerings by Foreigner, the Grateful Dead and Joni Mitchell.

"We see them as landmark al-bums," said Simon Heller, general manager for Warner Video in Britain.

"The sort of people who are buying the DVD systems that can play these are aged 35 to 44, male, and so we've started our catalogue with these albums."

But David Walstra, director of the SACD business team
at Sony Europe, said: "Both DVD-A and SACD have encryption — the SACD has watermarking as well. They are anti-piracy tools, and that's the reason why Universal, for example, has signed up to issue SACDs."

It is, Walstra says, impossible to create a digital copy of an SACD album.

DVD-A is also virtually impossible to turn into an MP3. In any case, the copies would lose the DVDs' extra sound quality.

Not only are Sony, Universal and Warner at loggerheads,
BMG is undecided, and EMI is releasing discs on both formats.

- INDEPENDENT