Now that Toshiba is dropping their HD-DVD fight, it seems Blu-ray will be declared the winner of the HD movie format, making Sony seem like geniuses by incorporating the very expensive tech in their PS3. Some say this war was irrelevant as streaming video is the real future. I do enjoy streaming Netflix with it’s near DVD quality video and very basic surround sound audio but it still does not compare to the actual DVDs you can pick up at any store or shipped to you with video or audio quality. One day, streaming HD will be in fact the way to deliver high quality audio and video, but that day is not here and will not be here for many years to come. Till then, enjoy the long waits as you watch your list of movies on Netflix get longer with Blu-ray discs.

Back in the day of Dolby Surround and Pro-logic, buying Monster Cables made sense. The better the shielding on those analog runs, the better the fidelity that pumped out from your speakers (at least I always thought so). When the world moved on to Dolby Digital and DTS, we held on to our cables and Monster as we moved to component hookups. Now with HDMI, Monster is no longer relevant. With both audio and video traveling on the same cable in pure digital form, there is no need for gold plated, quad-shielded, multi-threaded, or whatever else they can throw onto the line. As I stated before, Digital is not susceptible to the same type of interference as analog. Now it seems the reason why Monster is still around is the incentives for store owners to push the product due to the high profit margin. Take a look at this Consumerist report. Good luck Monster, your high pricing days are numbered.

As some of you know, I am an HD gear nut. I have a couple in my home with decent mid-range gear. But when you just want the highest possible resolution, you have to go to the NHK team and see what they have cooked up. I know this news is a bit old but the numbers are still staggering. I mean, check this out!

Super Hi-Vision - or Ultra High-Definition TV as it is sometimes known - carries some impressive statistics.

It has a screen resolution of 7680×4320 pixels, 16 times greater than current HD.

To watch the format NHK has a purpose-built 500 inch screen in its labs, along with the world’s only 22.2 multi-channel surround sound system, which the format also supports.

Kind of blows my 106″ screen and 7.1 sound out of the water. Besides the crazy resolution, what about those 22 channels of sound with two subs? Good God, at that point it would be so real, I am sure you would get sick or faint from vertigo. I WANT IT! Too bad it will not be a standard for another 20 years. Which is good for me I guess. It will give me some time to make room for the other 15.1 speakers. Hmm, if I get rid of the kitchen…

See, I am not the only one that is going to stay exclusively with OTA after February of 2009. It seems those Americans who watch only over the air tv will most likely stay that way after the digital cut over. The reason why I do this is for the quality. Dish and cable companies compresses the digital signal way too much and the artifacts are just annoying. Plus it is nice not to pay someone for tv service. What about HD movies? Hey that is what Blu-Ray from Netflix is for!

Enjoying uncompressed PCM audio and incredible image quality from Blu-Ray discs, I wonder how Apple, Microsoft and others can stream any HD movie and keep fidelity and image saturation up with such low bandwidth requirements. We just do not have the bandwidth from source to target to reproduce this type of experience. All this talk about HD-DVD or Blu-Ray being obsolete as streaming is the future are stating a truth that does not yet exist. It seems I am not the only one as there are others voicing the same concerns. Just like how people market lies about HDMI, it seems they are marketing resolution and not what is lost, like audio fidelity and color saturation. Come on now, if you invested thousands of dollars in HD gear for both audio and video, you expect the experience you get from software you play on that gear would match. I cannot wait for the day I can stream HD video and audio but my baseline is Blu-Ray. Anything less is just criminal.