5.1 Surround Sound Music
At the end of May, Onkyo will start selling, first in Japan, and by the fall of this year worldwide. That's either a brave or foolhardy move. Step up all in. Steve Guttenberg Multichannel music formats -- starting with quadraphonic LPs and tapes in the early 1970s, DTS encoded surround CDs in the 1990s, and DVD Audio and SACD in the early 2000s -- have all suffered from a lack of consumer demand. Very, very few surround releases were initially recorded in surround; most rock and jazz titles are remixed from older stereo recordings. The Blu-ray format has now been around for six years, and you can count the number of new music-only 5.1 releases on your fingers (live-in-concert, surround-sound videos are much more common).
5.1 Surround Sound Music Discs
I really enjoyed Steven Wilson's recent 'Grace for Drowning' music-only surround Blu-ray; the man really has a knack for mixing 5.1 music, but I can't think of anyone else making great new surround recordings. So now we have the news that is preparing to launch a new high-resolution Dolby TrueHD download service on May 30. I wonder how e-onkyo music plans on getting a sizable catalog of 5.1-channel recordings.