According to new data gathered from market research firm NPD Group, the vast majority of video consumers still prefer physical Blu-ray and DVD discs “more than all digital-video options combined.” The NPD Group surveyed roughly 10,000 US consumers over the age of 13 regarding their personal video habits from January to March of this year. more »

Call it “Delusional Thursday” if you like, but a recent study from The Leading Question, in conjunction with Music Ally, says UK teens don’t just like CDs better, they prefer them. In a world where the iPod has become more common than fire from a Sony laptop battery, we are floored by this study’s results.

2/3rds of UK teens prefer using CDs to share music. Digital downloads, cassette tapes, and 8-track tapes (presumably) make up the remaining 34% for these 14-18 year-olds. The study emphasizes the “try before you buy” aspect of streaming and digital music as a way the music industry can sell more records. 59% of those surveyed say they listen to music CDs every day.

Raise your hand if you remember the Spore SecuROM fiasco. The community backlash, and the resulting huge amount of pirated copies of the game that became available. You’d think that somebody would try to create a form of copy protection that both copyright holders and consumers can be okay with. Apparently the people at CD Digital Card didn’t get that message.

CD Digital Card is trying to bring 2 Geeks In A Lab’s Global Garde copy protection to mass market. Apparently the code is small (only about 250 to 500 KB), takes only five minutes to install, and is supposed to be invisible to consumers. According to the press release it’s currently hailed as “the holy grail of anti-piracy and copy protection.” In other words: the bane of those who simply want to access the content that they paid for, or those who want to pirate it.

Since it became an official standard in 1991, Moving Picture Experts Group -1 Audio Layer 3 (or MP3) has proven popular due to the fact that it is easily transferable, good quality and cheaper than hard copies. So far it has been unpopular with record companies as a result of the close links it has to piracy, but recently Atlantic Records said that over 50% of their revenue was coming from digital sales.

Anybody who is fed up with new formats of media and still has only vinyl switch off your monitor now. Boosted by their success in the High Definition DVD war with Blu-ray they have decided to expand the Blu franchise with Blu-spec CD.

Details are sketchy regarding the actual advantages due to a poorly translated Japanese press release, but what we do know is that it aims to overthrow the CD. Unsurprisingly, they are burned using the Blu Laser Diode (hence the Blu) and even more unsurprisingly they will cost around the $20-$35 mark. Obviously, we don’t know what you are paying for but the general consensus is that it will be significantly better sound quality.

There’s a strange twist to the Blu-spec CD — find out after the break.

Philips showcased their new home theatre device recently at IFA 2008. Granted, it kind of looks like a cross between a pet’s feeding dish, a humidifier, and a soccer ball…and one might think “what can this really do?”…but it’s getting some decent feedback. The CinemaOne is one of the smallest home theatre devices out there. more »

Cambridge Audio just announced today in Denver that they too will be joining the ever popular Blu-ray club by coming out with their version of Blu-ray technology, the 640BD, in Spring 2009. The player is meant to complement the Azur range of AV receivers, and from the spec sheet/release, it looks like it isn’t too shabbily put together.

The 640BD will have a full set of analog video outputs, full HDMI 1.3 output (which will include bitstream output of all the latest Dolby/DTS tracks), S/PDIF, Ethernet, Toslink and a set of separate, dedicated 7.1/stereo analog outputs. And no…they haven’t put a price tag on this baby yet.

As a man of twenty five I am comfortable saying that the most challenging, and truly self discovering journey of my life was the transference from CD to digital music. A process that took months of short activity spurts and endless accumulated hours of musical rediscovery from the very depths of my musical collection (talking about Morris Day & Time, and Hanson in one sitting). In the end, like Highlander, “there could be only one” device that is. My trusty iPod, filled with every song I have ever loved up until next new release Tuesday. All in all I tore through 572 CD’s, all colorful and slick, some with scratches, others with little dots indicating that they were not long for this world.

This new boombox by jWIN has all the requisite features of your standard boombox: CD player, tape deck, and AM/FM radio. There’s also a built-in microphone so you can make your own voice recordings, but where are you going to get the blank tapes in order to do that or to record off of the more »

Just in time for the conclusion of the DVD format wars with Blu-ray disc finally emerging as the new standard disc format, Plextor has decided to finally release its two new Blu-ray drives – the PX-B920SA and PX-B300SA. But to give customers the freedom to choose which format they would want to use when viewing high-definition video, Plextor has kept the HD DVD support.

The PX-B920SA being the high-end model of the two drives support fast Blu-Ray recording with a speed of 4X BD-R. That is equivalent to 18 MB/sec transfer rate. For single layer and double-layer media, the PX-B920SA runs on 2X BD-RE or 9 MB/sec transfer rate. For DVD purposes, the PX-B920SA runs at 16X on single-layer media and 4X on both double-layer and dual-layer media with 5X DVD-RAM. The PX-B920SA also support various models of DVD+RW, DVD-ROM, CD-RW and even CD-ROM. This drive also comes with Lightscribe for direct disc laser printing and some other software.