One of the tremendous advances in home entertainment in recent years has been the advent of rewritable media. Rewritable media is not only cost-effective, it’s reusable and thus effective for temporary storage of music or video that you want to share or enjoy only temporarily. Rewriteable media is an offshoot of the computer world. The main formats are CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW and Panasonic’s less popular format, DVD RAM. Consumer electronics companies are answering the call to make their CD and DVD players compatible with rewritable media from a playback point of view. They are also making devices, such as home theater DVD burners, that use rewritable media without the need for a computer.
More and more users are integrating their MP3 and media players into their home stereo or home theater systems, for convenient, high-quality audio playback. Hooking up an MP3 player to high quality audio components can be a great option. The first component to look at is a pre-amplifier. A pre-amplifier is basically a control amplifier and a machine providing tone controls. Pre-amplifiers can also counteract some of the harshness of digital sound—for example, a classic tube pre-amplifier may soften the sometimes-harsh sound of digital music files. A tube amp teamed with a DVD / CD player that plays rewritable media is thus an excellent option.
Rewriteable media must be able to handle many audio formats. Dolby Surround was introduced by Dolby labs it is an acoustic algorithm that added an extra speaker behind the audience. Unlike more current technology, it’s not a separate channel but is derived from a stereo signal. Dolby Pro-Logic was an incremental improvement on Surround. That added a center channel for film dialogue. Dialogue in films is always in the center of the screen regardless of where the actors are placed because otherwise the audio cuts would be too jarring for viewers, as our hearing is wired very different from our visual cortex. Pro Logic was still a matrix developed for a stereo signal. Dolby Digital 5.1 was the first format to have separate (discrete) channels beyond the two stereo channels.
Your rewriteable media should also be compatible with DTS formats. DTS is a company that formed as an alternative to Dolby Labs. DTS soundtracks can now be found on many popular DVDs and are included as an option for many popular MP3 and media players. DTS have a higher sampling rate than Dolby Digital, which results in a palpably better audio quality when all things are equal, and slightly more emphasis on sound effects. DTS is the favorite home theater format of audiophiles.
Ideally, rewritable media must be compatible with both high-resolution audio formats, DVD Audio and Sony’s SACD. Sony have established SACD as a contender and started a format war. They are the only corporation on Earth that can do that; they own half the music on earth and can manufacture players too. Sony started a format war simply by only allowing their vast music catalogue to be released on SACD, never on DVD Audio.
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