Hard rock gets no love in Blu-ray, SACD, etc.

[McCrutchy]

This is something that I've bemoaned for years. My favorite type of music is probably hard rock and heavy metal, generally with an old-school bent, like AC/DC, Guns N Roses, Iron Maiden, Kiss, Metallica, Scorpions, etc.

One of the things that has kept me from enjoying and supporting high resolution audio is the bizarre lack of hard rock releases over the many years we have had high-resolution audio media.

These acts are all deemed good enough to have concerts on Blu-ray, but with a few notable exceptions, their studio albums are not available on Blu-ray audio or SACD or even DVD-Audio.

To be clear, I don't consider acts like Neil Young, Tom Petty, or even Rush (all great artists, with Blu-ray audio releases I own) to be "hard" rock, even though the latter may qualify in some instances.

Certainly, a few hard rock titles are available as downloads or HDTracks (like some Aerosmith), but most are not, and I have very limited interest in these formats, anyway.

For example, here were the AC/DC SACDs when their catalogue was remastered by Columbia/Sony in 2003?

Where were the SACDs, or further DVD-Audio releases from Metallica after the Black Album?

And excluding the one Audio Fidelity disc, where are the rest of the Scorpions studio albums?

Where are any number of contemporary "hard" rock artists over the past decade?

Even last year, for example, where is the HFPA Blu-ray of, say, Black Sabbath's 13, an album which was handled by Universal Music?

I don't even need the music in multichannel. Stereo is fine, as long as it's lossless, not "brickwalled" by dynamic range compression, and on physical media. I want an album to own.

I once read an argument that because hard rock is meant to be loud, that no one would want to own it in lossless quality, and that such quality does not matter with this kind of music. I think this is nonsense.

I hope we can get some more hard rock releases on high resolution physical media soon.