This marginalization of artists has not always been the case in the evolution of audio technology. One recalls the important, but suspiciously oft-cited, example of Les Paul and his promotion of eight-track master recorders, and the audiophile contributions to classical recordings by some great conductors -- Leopold Stokowski, Herbert von Karajan and Erich Leinsdorf come quickly to mind. Not to mention the importance that producers like Walt Disney placed on improving sound reproduction for film for purely artistic reasons. But recent trends have headed elsewhere. And to many, the darkest moment in audio technology was the introduction of the digital Compact Disc, mostly for reasons of compromised sound.

Audio may, however, be about to embark in a new direction, built upon a new technology called DVD. This so-called Digital Versatile Disc is a higher-density permutation of the CD, and it promises to be the first true digital multimedia format, able to satisfy the demands of the video entertainment producers to replace the VHS videocassette, the computer and video-game community’s need for a much-higher-capacity CD-ROM, and the (by comparison much smaller) audio community’s interest in tagging along for a number of reasons.

The specification of an audio standard for DVD is a subject of great frustration for audio professionals, market-battered men and women who are spending a great deal of time and megabytes of e-mail in discussions that seem to meander from the arcane to the pointless. I think it’s time that those of us who make our living on the creative side of audio come to some sort of an agreement amongst ourselves as to what this new format could offer us all, and then concentrate on getting the attention of standards-writers. Will we be able to agree on anything? Maybe -- maybe not. But if we can agree what not to agree on, I submit that a flexible specification is the obvious next step.