Originally Posted By: anjora
bluray is also far from perfect, still disc size of 50GB(dual layer) is big for being a 5 year old technology, if there up to 10TB optical comes it will take a while for harddrives to catch up, the problem will be to keep the cost down. fibre optics has enough bandwidth for blu-ray quality streaming.

many people today today haven't heard a good mastered lossless album and therefore don't know what they are missing. i switched to flac using $20 logitech speakrs and the difference was so big i didn't beleave my ears until i did some blind testing and converted the song myself, after that i startet to listend to music for real, this was with poor mastered music.

still there will always be claims like "you can't hear difference between flac and good mp3". maby it's the same thing for movies. ofcourse you will enjoy it much more with quality setup, the bottleneck here is the source just as with mp3 files.

i actually think model 978 will be released within 3 mounts. it is good news for people who want a affordable unit with audyssey xt32 and good dacs.


Of course Blu-ray isn't perfect; nothing ever is in this world of ours. Blu-ray uses MPEG 4 for compression instead of MPEG 2 that was used for DVD. MPEG 2 is regarded as providing better PQ but isn't as compressible as MPEG 4. Because of the increase in resolution to 1080P together with the sufficient quality and higher compression ratios obtained through MPEG 4, it was chosen not only for Blu-ray but also for the now defunct HD-DVD.

Fiber optics should have enough bandwidth to allow 1080P video at the same quality as Blu-ray. But fiber optics is very expensive to deploy, specially in large countries like the US and Canada. It becomes cheaper and feasible for large metropolitan areas with high population densities but in small rural areas, the high cost makes it much less appealing. You must also consider the networking infrastructure needed to support the high bandwidth attainable by the fiber optics, i.e. the large routers. All this together makes it quite expensive.

I'm glad that you can discern the SQ difference between FLAC and MP3 in such a modest setup. Most people nowadays unfortunately don't care, choosing the convenience of storing thousands of terrible sounding MP3s in little storage space over the sound quality of FLAC or uncompressed audio.

I hope your shipping prediction for the 978 comes before mine (November 14).