Quote Originally Posted by E-Stat
New album release.

I have long observed that Blu Ray music offerings have been limited to live "concert" recordings which I find are usually inferior to studio based releases in both audio and performance quality. The only consolation was added audience noise. Petty's release appears to be a change from the status quo in that this is an audio only studio based multi-channel album. It will be interesting to find how many other artists follow this trend. I would be happy to embrace the format for audio purposes if there was a reasonable quorum of artists who released their content this way.

rw
Neil Young also put all of his archives into a Blu-ray set. He had already issued several titles on DVD-A and open 96/24 PCM tracks on regular DVDs. His embrace of Blu-ray had to do with the multimedia possibilities. He wanted a format that would allow the listener to explore production notes, pictures, and other content while listening in high res.

From the description in that link, the Tom Petty album indeed looks very promising. Petty's previous project with his original band Mudcrutch was recorded live in studio with minimal post production, and it sounded great. It was a vibrant, energetic-sounding recording. More like an in-house jam session (which it actually was, given that they recorded the album at Petty's house) than an antiseptic studio assemblage. The music itself was better than any of the more recent stuff he'd done with the Heartbreakers. If this is a continuation of the musical direction that Petty took with Mudcrutch, then it's definitely worth a look.

That Mudcrutch album was actually released on an LP version that included a "full range" CD that was supposedly taken from a different master than the regular CD release, with the dynamic range compression removed. Blu-ray would be a direct transcription of the original master, so we might have a winner here.