Song remains the same but record labels expect baby boomers to dig latest format

A generation of baby-boomers who grew up with the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac are being urged to buy the music all over again with the launch of a new format promising the clearest sound yet.

The Eagles' Hotel California and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours are among 60 albums to be released this autumn by Warner Vision on a new DVD audio format, which boasts even better quality than CDs.

Anyone with a DVD player and a home cinema system (with five speakers around the room) will find the music dramatically richer and clearer.

But the new discs are also part of a wider anti-piracy plan by the record companies over the next 10 years to get rid of CDs completely, industry insiders say.

While the music business has seen global sales slump – because, it claims, CD and online copying is destroying markets – the new DVD-A format offers a way to wipe out piracy in the future, because the discs cannot be "ripped" like standard CDs.

It may also create another 1990s-style boom by persuading people to buy their CDs in the new format, just as baby boomers "re-bought" CDs of albums that they already owned on vinyl.

Only one problem stands in the way: the record companies are divided between two incompatible formats.

DVD-A is backed by Warner, one of the biggest labels. The competing "Super Audio CD" (SACD) format, which requires a special player to get its higher sound quality, is backed by Sony, which has signed up Universal.

But both "21st-century formats" will initially feature 20th-century music that would have been familiar at the Queen's silver jubilee, let alone her golden jubilee.

Hotel California was released in 1976; Rumours in 1977. Other titles include Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies (1973) and the Doors' LA Woman (1971), as well as offerings by Foreigner, the Grateful Dead and Joni Mitchell.

"We see them as landmark albums," said Simon Heller, general manager for Warner Video in the UK. "The sort of people who are buying the DVD systems that can play these are aged 35 to 44, male, and so we've started our catalogue with these albums."

He said offering the same old albums in a new format was not exploiting the buyers. "If you've got an album that you've liked and have wanted forever, then you may value it enough to want it in this format. But at the end of the day, people have a choice," he said.

There will not even be a price difference: DVD-A albums should cost the same as CDs. Mr Heller would not say whether he thinks the format is intended to supplant CDs.

But David Walstra, director of the SACD business team at Sony Europe, said: "Both DVD-A and SACD have encryption – the SACD has watermarking as well. They are anti-piracy tools, and that's the reason why Universal, for example, has signed up to issue SACDs."

It is, Mr Walstra says, impossible to create a digital copy of an SACD album. DVD-A is also virtually impossible to turn into an MP3. In any case, the copies would lose the DVDs' extra sound quality.

"It would be a two-stage process," Mr Walstra said. "First you would issue SACDs that play with higher quality on SACD players, but could play on standard CD players as well: this is done because you can have two 'layers', one which the CD player can see, another which only the SACD player can see because it has more detail.

"Consumers would need to accept it. Then eventually you would move to a single SACD layer." The changeover, he said, would take five to 10 years.

But that relies on enough people buying the new discs – and also on the market deciding between the formats. Not only are Sony, Universal and Warner at loggerheads, BMG is undecided, and EMI has issued discs on both formats.

SOUND BITES 125 YEARS OF RECORDING

1877: Thomas Edison accidentally invents the phonograph while trying to record telegraph signals.

1893: Emile Berliner of Washington DC patents the gramophone, which uses seven-inch, single-sided discs rotating at 78rpm. Each side plays up to six minutes.

1948: CBS Records introduces the 33rpm album. Each side plays 22 minutes.

1963: Philips introduces the compact cassette, able to play up to 60 minutes per side.

1982: Sony and Philips reveal the CD. Engineers believe the sound quality it offers will never require updating.

1997: The first software MP3 player appears. MP3 compresses digitised sound by throwing away frequencies the ear will not notice. Internet users adore it.

2002: Warner Vision introduces the DVD-Audio format, which cannot be pirated.