Audio Video News

While the retail industry scales back on CD shelf space, Sony has announced a new type of CD. Dubbed "Blu-spec CD," this is still a Red Book CD, but the difference is in the manufacturing process.

In an attempt to reduce CD jitter, these new discs are burned with Blu-ray's laser diodes to create a more accurate disc that will provide better quality playback from standard CD players.

This is not the Profile 3.0 Blu-ray disc that's an audio-only format — this is still 44.1kHz CD.

Here are a few titles of the projected 60 classical and jazz releases that will be launched on December 24th:

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, Kathleen Battle: Ave Maria, Miles Davis: Kind of Blue, The Byrds: Mr. Tambourine Man.

The discs will range in price from $24 to $42. The release, roughly translated from Japanese is linked below. These new discs should be interesting, but you can bet that if you convert them to MP3, any improvement will be gone, forever. —Leslie Shapiro

AV Watch/Impress