the SILENCE of HISTORY - CD-ROM and DVD

"History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake."

--James Joyce

In late March, I made my first trip to Ireland in nine years for John Barker's DVD Summit 2 conference. To resituate myself a bit in the Ould Sod, I thought I'd re-read the grimmest book about life in Ireland I could think of, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While reminding me little of the Ireland of my own memory, Portrait struck me much more as a testament to memory itself. Having read many a book that struggled to forge a child's perspective in the smithy of an adult's mind, I was awestruck by how effortlessly and perceptively Joyce achieved it. It's in the smallest details, such as when young Stephen Dedalus hears the word "suck" at school and knows it's a bad word to say, but thinks as well that water going through the hole in a basin makes a sound that's not a word, just a sound: "suck ..."

It's easy to acknowledge a time in life when words and the sounds they resemble had to be consciously distinguished, and it takes a real understanding of such a different time to capture it so vividly. But it doesn't take a mind of Joyce's magnitude to remember what made CD technology so great in the first place, or what made it sell. Before the word "compact disc" meant much of anything to me, I remember the sound of it. I remember a friend's audiophile father upgrading directly from reel-to-reel tape to CD in his state-of-the-art stereo, and my friend popping in the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, cutting the lights, and instructing me thus: "Listen to the bass." And as if for the first time I heard it, one sonic revelation after another from an album I'd been listening to all my life.

But I knew I wouldn't own such a stereo system for years, if ever, and what ultimately sold me on CDs was the durability and the convenience of a fully indexed medium that let you jump instantly from track to track. And if the dramatic failures of multiple digital cassette incarnations are any indication, most consumers felt the same way. Sound was a selling point, but it was the ease with which they could manipulate the medium that sold them.

So here I was, left in a quandary as I spoke to several of my co-attendees at DVD Summit 2 to find them flush with optimism for DVD-Audio. Why do some Europeans seem so much more hopeful about this than Americans? Because the PAL video market is such a mess they're ready to pack up and move on?

"Where's the market?" I asked them. "What's the application?" The best answers I heard were "extended music videos," "more content," and "higher quality sound." All of which still leaves me guessing as to the justification for the optimism or even the spec itself as a mandate for new hardware purchases. I'm all for making top-notch sound a priority when determining bit rate allotments among various media assets, and as far as music videos go, that's all well within the capabilities of DVD-Video. As for more content, do we really want to hear more of Sting padding his already bloated offerings into diluted 74 minute CDs?

CD's short history has much to teach us on the ROM and writable sides as well. The most painfully exhaustive source I know for that history is the mid-'90s volumes of CD-ROM Professional. It's fascinating to leaf through issues from '94-'96 and see articles trying again and again to answer the same disturbing question: When, where, and how will CD-ROM finally break into the big time as a consumer market medium? It seems a bit of hubris to be sure for a magazine so-named to ask such a question that neither it nor anyone would ever satisfactorily answer. The reason? It never happened.

Which is not to say CD-ROM was a failure. Multimedia interactive CD-ROM was a great idea whose time never came. Time will tell if DVD-Video, a viable set-top alternative to DVD-ROM such as CD-ROM never had shows that the real interactivity market is TV-connected and PC-free. Where CD-ROM did succeed was in becoming a ubiquitous, reliable distribution medium with an unparalleled installed base for two reasons: its incomparable viability as a vehicle for application software and for the all-purpose handiness of CD-R. Though they arrived several years apart, in a sense, CD-ROM and CD-R invented each other. CD-R succeeded because CD-ROM was well-established on every desktop by the time it had become functional and affordable and CD-ROM in turn gained enormously in value because it could play all those conveniently tossed-off CD-Rs.

And with DVD-R for now fixed in the high-end check-disc domain, it's up to the DVD-RAM and +RW camps to extend beyond their individual technology partnerships and work with every DVD-ROM vendor to make drives read-compatible with both formats at the cheapest possible cost. No consumer is going to question whether an off-the-shelf DVD-ROM kit (or much less one installed in a Gateway or Dell) is "one of those RAM or +RW readers" before buying the product, but they'll sure be glad it is if someone shoves a RAM or +RW disc in their face. Unless cross-compatibility is a universal fact of DVD-ROM life, neither format will ever enjoy anything remotely resembling CD-R's cachet. And with incremental writing and sub-sub-$5,000 pricing just over the horizon for compatibility-steeped DVD-R, somebody just might beat them to the punch.

But regardless of who comes out on top, until a writable option of CD-R's mass-friendliness joins hand-in-hand with DVD, yet another lesson of history will be lost to those who didn't pay enough attention to their own past to hear it. And soon there won't even be a format war to keep the future in question. There'll just be a never-hatched DVD-ROM market quietly trickling down the drain, with only a few scoop-hungry journalists remaining to hear the faint sound, "suck ..."

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