How this Site Works
The home page has a left navigation bar + a grid of 30 "tiles." The upper left tile has "What's Up" and recent news. The 29 remaining tiles are divided into two sections. The top section has our most recent full reviews with screenshots. Then there is a “traffic cop tile” that separates the top section from the bottom section. The bottom section has stories on latest new titles with basic information and preliminary comments only. In each section, the latest stories are at the top. Eventually, all the tiles in both sections get older and drop off the homepage into the “pit.” Once a story is drops off the homepage, it's still in the archives. To reach these older stories, you use the Alphalist or Search.
Features Listed in the Navigation Bar
Titles Index/Alphalist. This is our most valuable feature. Go there first to get an overview of the hundreds of works now available. Each item in the list has key info and a link to a detailed story. For example, from the Alphalist, you can see that we now have many versions of Romeo and Juliet as a play, a ballet, and an opera.
There's a lot of information packed into the Alphalist. There's special information at the bottom of the Alphalist with tips how to use it. Best tip: Every computer browser has a find tool. Turn on find as soon as you call for the Alphalist. Type in a few letters and you will usually be able to move around the Alphalist fast!
Search. If you don't quickly get what you are seeking, especially short items (like encores) that may not be on the Alphalist, use the Search tool. For example, enter "spangled" in Search, and you will learn that we have a Blu-ray with The Star Spangled Banner when it was played by the New York Philharmonic in North Korea! Squarespace search used to be fast. But now it is a bit slow. (There have been times when it would falsely say something like “Your search did not match any documents.” But if you wait a few moments, then you might get results.) Search also gags on many words with accent marks used in languages other than English. A recently search could find Röschmann, but it didn’t work with Janáček. So try to search using words or parts of words without accent marks. Squarespace has ambitions of going worldwide with their website tools. Dealing with all those spelling characters worldwide is a huge challenge.
Excluded Titles. A lot of fine-arts impostors are being published on Blu-ray discs. We exclude them as a valuable service to you.
For a title to be reported here, the video must be good enough to benefit from HD TV and we like for there to be real surround sound. We have to make exceptions. For example, we have a story on a Blu-ray showing black and white symphony films made long ago by Karajan with 35mm cameras and mono sound. We made this exception because Karajan was among the first to experiment with fine-art video. We also will not exclude what appears to be a worthy dance title just because it only has stereo sound. Many modern dance pieces are performed to recorded music. So the stereo music in your HT probably sounds as good as it did to the live audience.
We exclude 19 broad categories of shows like movie music, operettas, soloists reading sheet music, and documentaries, etc. We want to focus on only the best.
Finally, we have excluded hundreds of titles as legacy material, usually with bad technical specs. You can’t trust the recording industry to tell you the truth. It’s shocking what miserable stuff the big houses will try to foist off on you by republishing it in a Blu-ray keepcase. We get rid of the weeds in the garden for you. You can use the find tool in your browser to check if we have excluded something that doesn’t benefit from HDVD quality.
Don't get ripped off---check our Excluded List before you buy!
Special Stories. Here we have longer stories of general importance that don't fit well in the journal format. Our most popular special stories are the Best Ballet and Dance Blu-rays and Best Operas Blu-rays. Are you going to watch Die Zauberflöte? It might help you to refer to our outline of Zauberflöte that gives you the complete story as conveyed by the music and the (often-cut) spoken parts.
What is HDVD? This explains how we have tired to "future-proof" the name of our website.
Titles by Category. This lists all the categories of stories we have tagged. It tells you, for example, how many operas have been published that meet our standards. Click on a category and you get all the stories we have tagged for that category (roughly in reverse date order).
Titles by Publisher. Click on a publisher and you get all the stories we have covered from that house.
Grade Explanations. We have an unusual grading scheme. We try to indicate quality with our grades. But we also know how much honest opinions can differ about particular fine-art titles. So we try hard to give you enough information to form an opinion different than ours. Each grade at the end of the basic story has a link to an explanation of our grading.
Mission Statements. We have 3 mission statements, one of which we plagiarized from Gramophone magazine, to which we cheerfully subscribe.
Our Process
We start with a basic story on every HDVD that doesn't get excluded. This happens as soon as we have reasonably helpful and accurate information about a new title. We list the title on the Alphalist right away. Then we decide what we can buy. We usually order from a vendor (paying the same price as any other customer). When we get a disc, we read the package and keepcase booklet and edit the facts in our story for completeness and accuracy. For titles we decide not to buy, we research the detailed facts in other ways. Most vendor will eventually post pictures of the keepcase which will give accurate information. Publishers have websites with information, of course, but these resources are too often plagued with careless errors. We often report what other reviewers have said about title, especially when we figure we will not have time to do a review ourselves.
Finally, we try to write a detailed review for as many titles as possible. Various trusted friends, called "wonks", have helped us with reviews and grades. Writing reviews takes more time that you might expect. We are always way behind on this. In late 2012 we started using screenshots. If we update an older title by adding screenshots, we often move the whole revised story to the top of the home page to bring it to your attention again.
This site is not a collection of links to other stuff. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive guide to fine-arts HDVDs right here. We do link to amazon and Presto Classical to make it easy for you to support the website by buying titles from them. And on rare occasions we link to an unusually valuable outside URL. If you come across a broken link, please let us know.
We are not just trying to report on what's out there. We hope, through constructive criticism, to influence the standards followed by the industry for the production of fine-arts titles.
High quality in every aspect of producing videos is important. Almost all fine-arts Blu-rays coming out today have excellent picture resolution and quality. In the early days, we thought the industry would move to recording sound with 96kHz/24 bit technology. This did not happen. So we quit worrying about sound specs. We are happy with the sound we are getting with our Blu-rays, which is usually somewhat better than CD sound.
Probably the most aggressive thing we are doing as constructive criticism is to complain often about "DVDitis." This is a disease that mostly infects Blu-ray recordings of symphony music but can also show up in other categories. The publisher does what he has always done: he makes a record that will look as good as possible as a DVD. Then as an extra profit center, he publishes the exact same record in Blu-ray format. Since the resolution is better in Blu-ray, it's truthful to say that it a better product. But this is misleading. The Blu-ray would be much better yet if the performance had been shot from the beginning to take full advantage of HDVD capabilities. When we see DVDitis, we usually reduce the grade. To learn more about this, see our long article about DVDitis.
As you can tell from reading about the definition of "HDVD," we expect distribution of fine-arts material over the Internet to one day be important. But now you will not see much “download” or “streaming” mentioned on the Alphalist. At the moment we know of no Internet-based technology that provides the quality, flexibility, convenience, and permanent availability we enjoy with the Blu-ray disc. During 2018 and early in 2019, we saw the number of new Blu-rays gradually drop. But since then Blu-ray seems to be coming back. In early 2022, an industry insider told me that Blu-ray sales still lag slightly behind DVD sales in the fine-arts category. But predictions that that the Internet would soon wipe out the optical disc have turned out to be wrong. We still view the Blu-ray as the gold standard for those interested in fine-arts video.
This website is a part-time effort of two people with some help from time to time from a few wonks. At this point, if would probably take 2 or 3 people working full time several years to flesh out each basic review with a detailed story and keep the website current. So the website now is an attempt to create a prototype of what should be done to do justice to the field of fine-art HDVDs.
For our current prototype of a good review, see our story on the dance title The Metamorphosis. This review has all the elements we would like to provide in every story for our consumer audience. But the prototype goes further than that. It also has complete credits for everybody who worked on the title that we can identify from the disc package and from reading the credits on the disc. Consumer fans are not interested in complete credits. We provide this in our prototype because we think this would be of interest to professionals working in the business of making fine-arts videos. By providing this information, we suggest the website could also become the "newspaper of record" for folks working in the field of fine-art videography.
This page updated March 26, 2022.