The idea that CD audio was inherently flawed and could be better goes back to roughly the mid-1990s. In 1993, MTV’s “Week in Rock” aired a segment about how some musicians and pundits were arguing that the CD standard of 16-bit (number of bits per sample), 44.1 kHz (number of samples per second) digital audio wasn’t enough. with analog formats like vinyl records capturing the missing nuances. “Perhaps the best way to make digital sound more like a continuous thing is to have more samples per second,” concludes the narration of the piece. “The technology exists to do that now, but until such a system can be made compatible with current CDs, we’re unlikely to get it.”
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Around the same time, word of the upcoming HDCD format, with a 20-bit word length and higher sample rates, made it into publications like Billboard and the New York Times; it hit the market in 1995. Though numerous titles released on CD in the next few years had HDCD enhancements — hitting the 1,000 mark by 1999 — the hardware needed to hear the hi-res music never achieved mainstream popularity, even after decoder prices nosedived.
By mid-1999, reports surfaced of both the DVD Forum and a Sony/Philips partnership having plans for a hi-res audio format using the newer, higher-capacity DVDs, but it wasn’t clear if those projects were separate or overlapping. Months later, in March 1998, it was established that these would be separate, competing formats.
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