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From the car next to you at the stoplight to the rattle of your neighbor's dishes on movie night, bass is everywhere.

Each step in the evolution of the optical disc has been astounding. With its 750-megabyte storage capacity, the Compact Disc revolutionized the way music was recorded and played back. The DVD's 4.7 gigabyte capacity—twice that for a dual-layered disc—made possible the archiving of high-quality feature films on a durable, affordable medium. DVD is the first format that made building a film library a reality for ordinary movie fans. It's not a vast overstatement to say that DVD revived the film industry, creating unanticipated revenue streams.

Digital Theater Systems Inc. (DTS) is in with <A HREF="http://www.blu-raydisc.com">Blu-ray</A> and <A HREF="http://www.dvdforum.org">HD-DVD</A>.

We have heard the soundtrack of the High Definition future on DVD, and it's compatible with the jillion¹ or so digital surround sound receivers currently delighting home theater owners around the globe - or so says Dolby Laboratories and DTS. In separate recent announcements, each company proudly touted the fact that their audio technologies have been selected as a mandatory part of both the High-Definition Digital Versatile Disc (HD DVD) and the Blu-ray Disc high-definition video disc formats. The two rival disc formats are locked in a good-versus-evil, battle-to-the-death struggle to convince studios, manufacturers, consumers, and anyone else who will listen that their format makes the most sense (and cents) for the future of packaged optical media. Although most people immediately think video when they hear about High Definition on disc, the announcement of mandatory audio standards is an excellent reminder to all concerned that audio quality is just as important as video clarity.