zonepress
12-30-2007, 11:51 PM
Πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα συνέντευξη στο Stereophile:
http://stereophile.com/interviews/1207hey
Ανθολογώ:
Jason Victor Serinus: In Alexandra Seno's Newsday International article of July 30, 2007, you're quoted as saying, "We could live very comfortably if from tomorrow we never sold another CD."
Klaus Heymann: What I was trying to say is that our revenue from other sources is now big enough to let us not only survive but lead a healthy, profitable existence. Of course, we don't want to lose the physical sales, which are still the daily bread and butter. But if it all went away, and we had to live solely on download revenue from our streaming library, licensing, ring tones, and all the other stuff, we'd still be extremely profitable—maybe more profitable than we are now.
JVS: Maybe more profitable? Are you losing money on CDs?
KH: Basically, on most new recordings, especially with orchestral material that's in copyright, we nowadays don't recoup our investment. We record to broaden our catalog and make more stuff available.
...
We are ready to post lossless. Our first batch of 200 to 300 titles that we think can most benefit from lossless format is ready to go.
Have you tried our ClassicsOnline.com site? We'll have 300 titles available in FLAC lossless before the end of March 2008. FLAC is smaller than WAV—about 50%. However, the more complex the audio, the less compression there is.
...
... the cost of making the WAV file of a Mahler symphony available is probably greater than the cost of manufacturing an actual CD. There are benefits of selling a WAV file over a physical CD—we don't have to carry inventory, we get paid right away, there are no returns—but it's not good business.
FLAC lossless is another issue. You can probably make pretty good money selling those files for less than a physical CD, which is what we want to do. So there will be lossless files available from ClassicsOnline.com and other sites. We're even ready to go to WAV files as well, but we haven't figured out how to make money from them.
...
We record all choral and orchestral releases in surround. This means we create 40 to 60 new surround recordings a year, which we save for the day when we have a really good medium for them. I think SACD was never meant to be a surround medium; it was designed as an upmarket stereo medium, with surround capability added as an afterthought. Technically, DVD-A is a much superior format because of the amount of data it can carry. You also have longer playing times.
Unfortunately, DVD-Audio never took off, and SACD is dying. Even though smaller companies still sell SACDs, they're hybrids. People buy hybrid SACDs because that's the only format available to them, and they mainly play the normal CD-quality stereo layer. We actually have the market data.
For two or three years, we released all our big-budget productions in all three formats: CD, DVD-A, and SACD. When we sold DVD-A and SACD at a higher price, people only bought the CD. If people today had to pay a premium for SACD, they wouldn't buy it. That's why we're currently trying to recoup our manufacturing costs by selling all our remaining SACD and DVD-A titles for the same low price as our regular CDs.
JVS: HD DVD and Blu-ray can support higher-resolution data.
KH: And that's what we're going for. We're waiting until HD DVD and/or Blu-ray have good market penetration, then we'll release all our surround recordings in that format. You can have AC-3, discrete surround, encoded surround, stereo, and video all on the same carrier, manufactured at a price no greater than the price of manufacturing either SACD or DVD-A.
http://stereophile.com/interviews/1207hey
Ανθολογώ:
Jason Victor Serinus: In Alexandra Seno's Newsday International article of July 30, 2007, you're quoted as saying, "We could live very comfortably if from tomorrow we never sold another CD."
Klaus Heymann: What I was trying to say is that our revenue from other sources is now big enough to let us not only survive but lead a healthy, profitable existence. Of course, we don't want to lose the physical sales, which are still the daily bread and butter. But if it all went away, and we had to live solely on download revenue from our streaming library, licensing, ring tones, and all the other stuff, we'd still be extremely profitable—maybe more profitable than we are now.
JVS: Maybe more profitable? Are you losing money on CDs?
KH: Basically, on most new recordings, especially with orchestral material that's in copyright, we nowadays don't recoup our investment. We record to broaden our catalog and make more stuff available.
...
We are ready to post lossless. Our first batch of 200 to 300 titles that we think can most benefit from lossless format is ready to go.
Have you tried our ClassicsOnline.com site? We'll have 300 titles available in FLAC lossless before the end of March 2008. FLAC is smaller than WAV—about 50%. However, the more complex the audio, the less compression there is.
...
... the cost of making the WAV file of a Mahler symphony available is probably greater than the cost of manufacturing an actual CD. There are benefits of selling a WAV file over a physical CD—we don't have to carry inventory, we get paid right away, there are no returns—but it's not good business.
FLAC lossless is another issue. You can probably make pretty good money selling those files for less than a physical CD, which is what we want to do. So there will be lossless files available from ClassicsOnline.com and other sites. We're even ready to go to WAV files as well, but we haven't figured out how to make money from them.
...
We record all choral and orchestral releases in surround. This means we create 40 to 60 new surround recordings a year, which we save for the day when we have a really good medium for them. I think SACD was never meant to be a surround medium; it was designed as an upmarket stereo medium, with surround capability added as an afterthought. Technically, DVD-A is a much superior format because of the amount of data it can carry. You also have longer playing times.
Unfortunately, DVD-Audio never took off, and SACD is dying. Even though smaller companies still sell SACDs, they're hybrids. People buy hybrid SACDs because that's the only format available to them, and they mainly play the normal CD-quality stereo layer. We actually have the market data.
For two or three years, we released all our big-budget productions in all three formats: CD, DVD-A, and SACD. When we sold DVD-A and SACD at a higher price, people only bought the CD. If people today had to pay a premium for SACD, they wouldn't buy it. That's why we're currently trying to recoup our manufacturing costs by selling all our remaining SACD and DVD-A titles for the same low price as our regular CDs.
JVS: HD DVD and Blu-ray can support higher-resolution data.
KH: And that's what we're going for. We're waiting until HD DVD and/or Blu-ray have good market penetration, then we'll release all our surround recordings in that format. You can have AC-3, discrete surround, encoded surround, stereo, and video all on the same carrier, manufactured at a price no greater than the price of manufacturing either SACD or DVD-A.