Ears On

As tired as I am of hyping HD DVD and, um, that other one, the Toshiba-championed format will take a huge step forward on May 9 with Warner's first dual-format title. Rumor Has It will have high-def HD DVD on one side and standard-def DVD-Video on the other. What's great about it is that you can start building your HD DVD library now without having to spring for first-generation hardware, which is both feature-light and probably destined for price drops before year-end. The backward-compatibility move is reminiscent of hybrid SACD, which includes high-res audio on one layer and standard CD audio on the other. That helped SACD trump DVD-Audio, and the horrible DualDisc hasn't done much to help DVD-A to catch up. Of course, the format war undermined both of those formats, and HD DVD and Blu-ray seem headed in the same downward direction. But I must add: Only one of my systems is SACD-compatible, so I play both layers of my dozens of SACDs quite often. So there!