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Judge a Man by His Wallet

SACD lost -- dual disc (which is CD on one side and DVD-A on the other) won. Sony didn't show SACD at the last CES show; with many new albums being put out on dual disc, the subset of people still buying physical albums are getting DVD-A versions now.

To be fair, dual-disc is not DVD-A or CD. It's a compromise.

Since people who don't care about audio quality are happy to buy or copy online versions, audio quality becomes more important for physical media. Since most people have DVD players, DVD-A will win. (Sony/Philips did not make SACD easily available, and Sony was too intransigent to also include support DVD-A in its players.)

As for SACD and DVD-A, they are still rare and most mixes are horrid. Most 5.1 remixes sound like someone took a painting you loved, tore it into several pieces, and flung it across the room. They sound wrong.

There are a few multichannel DVDs (like the Blue Man Group) that are meant to be multichannel and sound great, but I avoid most surround remixes. But high resolution stereo transfers are pure bliss. I'll happily buy DVD high resolution stereo discs of the few albums I really love.

One annoying thing with both formats is they are crippled -- there is no adopted standard for digital transfer of the signal. So you're dependent on either having your source and preamp/receiver be from the same manufacturer (allowing for a proprietary link) or using analog out. You're stuck with the quality of the digital to analog conversion in your source. If you want to do bass management or additional processing in your preamp, the signal goes through a digital to analog conversion, analog to digital conversion, and then digital to analog conversion. Yuck. It hurts the quality.

If the hardware side of the business didn't allow the content side of the to cripple its products, the content side would sell more product.

I believe Firewire was chosen as the dvd standard interconnect some 2 years ago. All the dvd manufacturers are busy meeting that standard. See the Audio Revolution article.

A friend and I went to one of the first ever screenings of the back-to-back Star Wars trilogy that was used to open a new ten theater complex in Braintree Massachusetts in the early 90's. This was years before the terrible "Special Editions" and before the rehyping of the sequels. The crowd was actually quite cool, though a few were dressed up. It was truly great to see the original films in all their glory.

The theaters were all THX, which was still a big deal at the time, and they had a guy from Lucasfilm there telling us about the impressive sound systems. He claimed that one of the reasons it was called THX sound was because it was invented by Thomas Holman... it was dubbed "Thomas Holman's Experiment" when they were developing it, and Lucas really liked that it lined up with the "THX" from his first feature his movie.

Anyways, a bit of trivia.

Cheers.

Come on, seriously, audiophiles don't deal with this. They spend their money on quality speakers such as Martin Logan's and Super Audio CDs.

Dolby Digital EX encodes a back surround channel in recordings by distributing in among the two rear surround signals in a Dolby Digital 5.1/5.0 mix. Thus, if the user has the correct equipment, the commonalities between those two signals are reproduced on a speaker set behind the listener.

However, if a normal Dolby Digital recording is played back on such a system in Dolby Digital EX mode, it may sound disorienting. If you use two speakers, offset from the center rear, each reproducing the same signal, it's less so.

The obvious next step was to figure out a way to send a discrete signal to each of the rear surrounds.

There are other experimental designs, which add speakers at various elevations, a second independent LFE channel and so on. The 1950s road show "standard" used 5 front channels and one rear channel. Naturally some of these setups may be wholly incompatible with others.

On the day when Wesley Willis's death is all over the news. If there was ever an artist who proved that singing on key is not necessary, it was Wesley Willis.

Due to the SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) circuitry that is a requirement on consumer-based CD-Recorders, a duplicate cannot be made of a copy that is digital. The CDR 2 will automatically switch to an analog deck-to-deck dub when it detects that the source is a digital copy. However, if you can make only one copy at a time, and you need multiple copies from a particular CD, there seems no logical reason why you shouldn't make all copies from the original.

If that doesn't make it sound like an ideal machine for those who like to keep their copying options open, it will even simplify the copying of material encoded with the Serial Copyright Management System -- for example first-generation CD/R-CD/RW copies. Load one of these and copying system just switches from its default digital operation to copying in the analogue domain, running the output from the playback deck through the DAC and then back through the ADC in the CD-R/RW section.

I also found an interesting discussion of DVD-V and it's use for audio. It can master at 24-bit/96KHz using desktop pc hardware which is the apparent limit of the human ear and nearly the limit at which thermal noise caps the precision of the electronics (see the above link). Could this be an "open" alternative to these audiophile formats?

At this point, almost every DVD-A capable player outputs analog only. Unless you consider a down-converted 44.1/48kHz 16-bit stereo PCM bitstream to be DVD-Audio. There are a couple of decks that output a proprietary bitstream that can only be decoded in a receiver from the same company.
Fortunately, a standard has been finalized by the DVD Forum. It uses Firewire (aka IEEE 1394) to transmit full-resolution and sample rate data to the decoder of your choice. Here is a decent write-up on the new standard.
My advice? Hold off on any new purchases until we start to see a good selection of products that support the new standard. And for the love of god, don't buy one of the proprietary products.

You need to do some reading about Macrovision's latest abomination. It aims to do just that.

There will, of course, be people who crack these protections. But the important thing is the the vast majority of lusers won't know it -- all they'll know is that it won't rip (or even play) when they put it in their CD-ROM drive. So they'll stop putting audio CDs in their CD-ROM drives.

Bingo: the herds have shifted.

According to this article, recording engineer Tony Faulkner was able to spot the watermark 75% of the time on his first chance at hearing it. What does that tell you? That this stupid watermark is going to be something you will hear on every DVD-A disc you buy! Doesn't that suck?! Well, the recording companies don't care ... they just want to stop those Napster punks from stealing their content -- quality be damned!

A little while ago. On a similar budget I did a lot of looking around for a good solid amp and the best speakers for the money that I could find. One other constraint is that my wife does not like big ugly speakers (beauty is in the eye of the beholder I guess :-).

I wanted a fairly future-resistant unit, and also wanted some good features. After hitting some of the online reviews sites, and just a buttload of research, I went with a technics amp (this was some time ago, so I think the model will have been updated, but technics do a range of class A amps with 6 channel direct input), and further for the speakers (the most important part) I selected the Mirage AVS 500 set.

The mirage AVS 500s (or the Energy Take 5's which are basically the same speaker) are just better sounding than the other speakers I heard with the same kind of form factor. They have a lovely neutral sound and good imaging. They can also bury 100 Watts each so you will have a tough time hurting them. There was little to choose between the Energy take 5's and the mirages, but in the end I went with the mirage because I liked the high frequency response better (a bit less in your face than the Energy's)

I suggest looking into the reviews sites out there and trying to match up what you want with products that generally review well. For example, ETown.com might be worth a look. The link is to the Energy take 5's, not the mirage in this case, but they are very very similar. Another review of the Energy's is here

Hope that all helps

gargle wrote:
No. Higher sampling frequencies allow you to get away with fewer number of bits per sample, and this usually simplifies the electronics. e.g. With delta sigma modulation, the signal is sampled with 1 bit per sample at a very high sampling rate.

This is what Sharp's new 1-bit digital amplifier does (coincidentally, a piece of equipment that would be necessary to hear the quality of the subject of this /. article).

Most folks here probably haven't heard of 1-bit amplifiers, but almost everyone reading this will own one in 10 years.