I was listening to some R.E.M. on the way into work today and thought of their DVD-As, which are really good. Then I reflected on the Blu-Ray movie I watched last night, Harry Potter 5, which was not as good as I had hoped. Anyway, my brain did its usual mashup and I wondered if the Blu-Ray consortium has their eye on eventually replacing CDs as well as DVDs.

Since the Dolby corporation says that a movie in TrueHD has content identical to the studio masters, will we get content of this quality on purely audio discs as well? Would it be in the form of a Blu-ray disc in TrueHD, or some other codec? Or are we already getting content of this quality on DVD-As and/or SACDs?

Since SACD and DVD-A have never really caught on with the public, though, I'm left wondering what will eventually replace the CD. Will it even be a disc, or will it be a download, since mp3s are already replacing CDs in many people's collections? Of course, high-resolution audio would require much more storage space and download speeds than an mp3 at 128k - are we there yet in our technical capacities?

Anybody know anything about the future of high-def audio? I know we have no crystal balls, but it is fun to speculate, and you guys are always in the know more than I. Whaddaya know?

DolbyTrueHD and DTS HD:Master are capable of the same as SACD and DVD-a (24bits/192Khz). I have not seen any movies yet that went beyond 48Khz (which is already pretty good if not sufficient, at least for movies), but they are technically capable of the typical 96/88.2Khz for DVD-a and SACD.

Choice of format is also cost of production. If the cost of making a BD becomes the same as that of an SACD, then it might come to that. I suspect the backward compatibility of HybridSACD will remain an important aspect for studios. Remember that Sony is also behind SACD!

I think it will be status quo for a while on highres audio. FLAC and Vorbis-OGG (both capable of highres multichan) are increasingly supported by media players and might lead studios to try and sell electronic highres audio content.