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Super Audio CDs Rolling Your Way
donutello writes "Slate is running an article about the Rolling Stones Remastered series discs having two layers: CD and SACD. The article contains some interesting information about how Sony is sneakily distributing SACD players without the buyers noticing it. This FAQ provides some information about SACDs. Don't expect to be able to play or reproduce these on your computer anytime soon. The SACD format contains a physical watermark on the disc. SACD players will only play discs with valid watermarks. Music watermarks had two opponents: The audiophiles who didn't like their music distorted and people who didn't like the watermarks preventing copying of the music. With the physical watermarks, they have found a way to appease the former while still stopping the latter thus causing a break in the ranks of the opposition."
... for a new better cd format
sorry but cd's work jsut fine and i dont see this catching on as a replacement for old cd's
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Have these been approved my the Compact Disc forum? Has fair use gone out the window?
Recent Yamaha CDRW drives can do watermarks on CDs, wonder if this is the same thing.
Flamebait is ASKING for a fuckin response. A troll is just stupid.
Companies like Sony are spending all their time trying to make music "safe from piracy" that their hasn't been any useful upgrades to the CDR technology, other then 40X CD-Burners where is the next step? Blue-Laser? High-density CDR's?
The excellent comic strip, Mac Hall, started a series of comics about this complete bullshit on monday. And I was just about to buy a new discman too..... What brands are "safe" to buy?
While this seems like a pretty good idea, the labels seem to have forgotten... As long as the music can be listened to, it can be copied.
It doesnt take much to run a line out to a computer and record the input to whatever format suits your fancy. Sure, not as easy, and not *as* good sound, but it sure isnt bad, and it isnt hard either.
Whoops. There goes their vaunted Copy Protection. And Im probably in violation of the DMCA, too.
Until DePSP is published?
If sacd becomes widespread, undoubtedly they'll make sacd-rom. When that happens, either they won't play, or they'll play right on to "pirates'" harddrives.
/. crew will find a way around it, or cry bloody murder (or both), a la CSS. If they don't make sacdrom, *I'll* cry bloody murder, because the only optical reader I have is connected to my 2nd IDE channel (and besides, audio-out --> line-in fixes that issue no problem)
If they make drivers that prevent that, then the
What happened to Audio DVD's. This looks like a DVD backword compatible with CD.
WhatMeWorry?
cd's have been intentionally made shitty to avoid the copying of perfect quality. I fucking hate the greedy people in this country. No wonder it's going to hell in a handbasket.
Greed != Good (or Greed Good for you ASP types)
Celine be damned, the software that comes with the new Sony PCs, and their mp3 'solution' on the the minidisk player. ect, ect. Whatever. I haven't been buying Sony's overpriced crap-tronics, or their over-hyped and under-talented CDs and I won't be in the future.
The giant will never fall unless *everyone* throws stones.
Is the watermark system going to affect how people produce music? Say for example, the SACD format becomes adopted as the standard audio format. If I own a small record label, how am I supposed to distribute my bands' music? Will I have to pay some arbitrary royalty fee to someone like Sony just so people can listen to music? Will such fees and required equipment make the barrier to entry for the recording business significantly higher? This kind of thing affects many more people than just your average slashdotter with an mp3 habbit.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
HAHA haha HAHA
Unless there won't be any SACD-ROMs (because, um, nobody gives a fuck about a new music format copying is inevitable. Idiot submitter.
Because they make DVD players and PS2s, so I'm sure no one here will be bothered by Sony's actions.
Were Microsoft doing this type of underhanded business.....man, we wouldn't hear the end of it.
I just despise the hypocrisy of
a) the slashdot crew, who continue to lionize certain companies because of their products, while on the other hand they purport to be highly idealized young men who are fighting against the business practices, often led by these very same companies, which conspire to deprive all of us.
and
b) the slashdot readers who are often as bad as the slashdot crew.
Guys, you can't attack Microsoft and then go shovel Sony equipment in your homes because they look nice. You either take a stand all the way or shut the hell up.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
What about the Orange Book standard for CD's. Are they stamping a "Compact Disc" logo on it? 'cause they sure as hell are compliant if that's the case. Maybe someone should let Philips know... they might be interested in Sony's misadventures.
Party?!? What kind of party is this? Where's the damn keg?
Virtus Junxit Mors Non Separabit
Stop fair use! Innovate!.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Someone has tested the quality of CD layer on two-layer media, and noticed that it was noticeably worse than a single layer CD. Much higher error rate.
My undestanding of SACD is that it does not have a watermark but rather some encoding scheme which prevents it from being decoded. This is DVD-A which has a watermark.
Both formats may be marginally better than CD (there are mix opinions on this matter). Seems like that the properly mastered CD sounds just fine. Rolling Stones recordings certainly need new remastering, incidently I got rid of my CD Rolling Stones because coudln't stand the sound ('brittle highs'), but once again, that was not a CD limitation per se, but very bad mastering. Even so, I'm not going to jump into the SACD bandwagon because both SACD and DVD-A are mostly a gimmick and its real purpose is to introduce a built-in copy protection you can't defeat.
I don't see what the problem is - this is a hybrid format playable just like regular discs. The disc just contains a second layer with higher-resolution audio. As an audiophile I think this is a good thing, especially since you'll still be able to rip your low-quality mp3 files from low-quality CD.
-1 Retard
The Stones rule!
so what happens when a scratch somehow obscures the watermark? on a regular cd you'd end up having a song or two skip/not play....on these I'm assuming it won't even read the disk
Phillips collaborated with Sony on this. They share the licensing rights.
They will stamp both CD and SACD on the Rolling Stones CDs, since they play on both types of players. IF the format catches on, expect future releases to work on on SACD.
If you don't like this (I don't), there is a simple recourse: stop buying their music.
There are enough old CDs and other sources of music to last me a long time...
Mod chip for the player. I know pre-modded DVD players are quite a good selling product. 1st gen will probably be solder, but 2nd and 3rd will be plug and play or flash rom upload.
this point has been brought up 20,000 times so i'll try not to rant too much... if you can play it, and listen to it, you can record it.
sure you can't go digital to digital, but a couple good 24/96 digital to analog converters will make your copy sound nearly exact (if not completely exact)... if *1* person has the technology to copy the sound professionally (with no loss) into a digital medium, then everyone might as well have it, because the second that 1 person distributes the file, it is out there for everyone. (this includes they guy that works at the cd press shop and has access to the masters)
YOU CAN'T COPY-PROTECT MUSIC.
YOU CAN'T COPY-PROTECT VIDEO.
YOU CAN'T COPY-PROTECT CowboyNeal
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Whether or not some company adds "feature X" to a CD player is not a problem, even if we don't want that feature. There will always be a market for the uncrippled players, so the uncrippled formats will survive.
As someone posted, if you can hear the music, you can copy the music anyway, so it's not even as if the distribution format of desirable content can control the market heavily.
The only possible problems here are legislation-enforced freedom from choice, or else the sneaky proliferation of devices with these cripple features. What is essential is enforced labeling of the affected drives so that we know what we're buying.
Rolling Stones suck, eh? Do you honestly think people will be listening to Linkin Park in 25 years? Or the latest "fresh beats" by Generic Rapper? Face it dude, the classics are forever. *Goes back to broadcasting Zeppelin on his shoutcast station while ripping his friend's new Pink Floyd CD* Sony must love me :).
The idea of buying something to listen to on your iPod, or in your car, or on your computer that is SACD makes no sense. You're going to have hardware that is holding you back far more than the qualify of the medium. Unless you're listening on a computer with a really nice DAC and some Grado RS1 headphones, you can probably stick to CD audio or mp3's and notice not much difference. However, if you are listening on a real stereo with decent speakers, then listening to a well made SACD compared to a CD will blow you away.
If I want to make a backup copy of my music, I can buy a copy on CD since I'm not going to be able to make a copy of a SACD myself anytime soon. To me, the compromise of incredibly high quality sound, that does beat the high end vinyl I've listened to, and having copy protection that doesn't interfere with that sound quality is a tradeoff I'm alright with. If you're mad over not being able to rip them for mp3's, then you should just buy the CD.
You missed a word. IF the format catches on, expect future releases to work on an SACD ONLY.
Sony is bringing up a new (and improved) technology. They HAVE the right to protect their IP. If the technology is good, as with DVD, it will catch on. Of course someone will come out with a way around to copy protection just as with DVD's region code. I believe that this is the true right to innovate.
please excuse my apathy
Better quality and preventing piracy [though perhaps also some "fair use"].
There's really not much to complain about here as things stand, although what about royalties? Can people trust Sony not to screw people with fees for distribution by SACD?
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
before people come up with ways to make digital copies of SACDs. When that happens, I'll buy them. Until then, they can suck dust. I do not play music from physical media any more. When I buy a disc, I copy it to my file server and store it away in the basement in a crate full of all my other previously-ripped CDs.
I guess I spent $150 on an MP3 player for nothing. Damn.
$10 says SACDs will cost even MORE too.
Sure its another CD format, but the bait that they plan on using to lure conumers is the improvements that SACD has over the traditional format, such as 5.1 souround sound. That is pretty cool, admit it :).
I admire your stubbornness, and dedication to the boycott. But remember. If you can hear it, you can copy it. There isn't anything RIAA can do to really stop people from ripping the songs. True it's a bit harder to copy it into a MP3 from a CD but you can. Once it's done in MP3, that's all they wrote. They lost.
I don't know why the record companies bother anymore. Sure, it may stop the casual copier, but the protection *WILL* be cracked by someone determined enough, for better or for worse. If it comes down to it a line-in to a sound card is sufficient.
Nothing new.
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
Hey, the format sounds great. Could you guys wait a little before it will be widespread to publish the crack to decrypt the music in DVD players? I would really love CDs to get distributed with 5.1 surround. Its was about time to get good 2.8Mhz bitrate too :)
Basicly, don't tell these guys too soon or you ruin it all...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
this is awesome! but I think dvd-audio is much better........ DVD AUDIO RULES!~
The sound still has to come out of it though. This still won't stop me from putting an audio jack from my discman to my computer, and then ripping it from there. Nor will it stop anyone else, which means I will still be able to download whatever they have locked up so tightly. It's moot and stupid.
From the department of redundancy department.
Give it a few years, some manufacturer in china will release a combo DVD/DIVX/WMA/OGG/SACD/CD player with digital out.
Oops! Another brilliant copy protection scheme bypassed.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
is there anyone can explain to me how come the Music Industry think they can prevent CD copy? i always think i can play it thru speaker, then record it as any format i like, or be more professional, rent a recording studio...
What a deal, at only $14,900 US!
Put me down for 3!
how it works here
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Once the Red Book patents expire, we will have an "open" standard. Don't forget that at the moment the CD is controlled by Sony and Philips.
sulli
RTFJ.
...the `Digital' in the DMCA. Yes, there is an analog hole; no, the DMCA doesn't stop you from using it. I do agree that the labels seem to have forgotten about this for now, but given the current apparent stranglehold on Congress, can the AMCA be far behind?
SACD-rom would be pointless. DVD-rom hasn't even caught on yet, so why would they need a SACD-ROM, well i guess they could waste money....
the problem is that, yes these are hybrid discs now, in an effort to switch the market to the SACD format upon which they can slowly phase out the lower quality cd layer and viola. watermarking and indefeatable copy protection. so no one will be able to make any copies (aside from the analog hole), and fair use goes to hell. so are you just ignorant of the glaring problem, or myopic to the extent that 'as an audiophile' is really just a euphimism for 'i am a flaming asshole with no regard for the rights of anyone but myself'?
Even if this new format is the greatest thing since sliced bread, I still won't touch it given the greed of the RIAA, etc.. Besides, better music at much better prices are available at the used record shops which is where I get my 'new' music now. So fuck Sony. Send SACD the way of the Betamax and the 8-track.
Dubya \duhb'-yah\ n 1: A dim-witted individual. (syn. 'moron', 'dullard') 2: A leader who attacks freedom and liberty while pretencing to defend the same. (compare with hypocrite, tyrant) 3: An individual who is a pawn to lobbying interests. (syn. 'lacky', 'sell-out', 'spineless sock puppet') <George ~ Bush>
When all else fails, run.
as long as they keep cranking out that lame assed anime they like to pull pud at so much.
Corporations are evil and greed-Ooooo SHINEY!
So what. There's a good chance people won't be listening to the Stones in 350 years - does that mean the Stones are inherently inferior to Bach? Not that I like Linkin Park or Mr. Generic Rapper. :)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
People here (and elsewhere) attack Microsoft for very good reasons: Microsoft is evil incorporate and puts its own interests far ahead of its users' needs (whether it be privacy, security, stability, etc) in a very heavy-handed and public way which makes for easy bashing. Many people also tend to be unfairly nasty towards them. Microsoft BOB, for example, got a very unjustified bad rap, as did the paper clip in Office and the jumping "search dog" in XP.
Is Sony any better or worse than MS? I don't know; I don't own any Sony stuff and I don't keep up on their practices. The new CD format thing sure does seem to suck, though, and judging from the ~50 comments I've read many people here agree it's a bad idea. They also appear to think that Sony aims to prevent fair use by adopting it. That sentiment would seem to be in opposition to your assessment of the Slashdot readers. So why all the harsh words?
You've come to the wrong place for unbiased opinions. You'd do better to complain about the weather.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
The fact that SACDs will have better audio quality is the worst. They are just baiting people in, and the thing is, i would have bought these if they had no copy-protection, and were sold at reasonable price. Now i wont
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The FAQ says that "the sound of SACD [tick] is often compared to that [tick] of vinyl."
But just wait until next year, when they unleash UACD (Ultra Audio CD). The rich [tick] emotional [tick] impact of [tick] THIS format [tick] is often [tick] compared to [tick] a 78-RPM [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing [tick] shellac pressing.
However, even the 78 is subject to electronic processes which distort the sound.
The best process of all would be one in which the actual soundwaves create the recording through direct action, without the intermediary of any transducers of electronics whatsoever.
So I wouldn't buy UACD.
No sir, I'm wait for the MACD (Mega Audio CD) that's waiting in the wings, with sound that's often compared to an acoustically recorded Edison Amberol cylinder.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I sometimes wonder how many people that post in here are actually over the age of 16.
1. Sony isn't interested in stopping EVERYONE. They are just like MS. They want to stop the average consumer from being able to copy the music & software. Will it work? Time will tell, but how many people do you think will be hooking up lines to their pc and recording each song track by track of tons of cds? Very few.
Well, what about the *1* guy that does that and shares it? Won't it spread?
2. You can just bet that in a few years down the line, most filesharing programs will not have individuals sharing music or movies. Why? Well, the RIAA is now going after individuals as in the current request for the personal info of an individual sharing a good number of licensed songs over one of the many programs out there. Will they win? Probably. The RIAA will sue enough people to get people scared to share. Yes, it will happen.
Well maybe you're right. So what about SACD-roms? When they are released everyone can copy the dumb music!
3. Do you honestly believe SONY is stupid enough to create a new technology that currently can GREATLY hinder the ripping/copying/etc of music, and then forget to put a small clause in the license contract stating that licensees are not allowed to produce SACD-roms for obvious reasons. I think not.
Will this format work?
4. Yes. There is one thing about sony that is different from other companies. They don't know when to give up. Even in the day and age of small mp3 players, they still push their minidisc players. A dead format which no one in their right mind would consider using now that USB mp3 players take about 60s to copy 100mb to. And don't even get me started on their memory sticks that work in just about every sony device. So back to the question of will it fail. I doubt it, as long as it does what sony claims. At least it will be around for awhile.
Well what about fair use? I want to make a copy of the music to listen to on my mp3 player.
5. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you think that it's violated here, you do not understand what it means. Whenever a new format is introduced, a company is not (big word) *required* to provide you a method to back up the content. Yes, you are probably allowed to backup the SACD, but no, a way to do so need not be provided.
Well screw it, I'll just rip the normal audio data on there.
6. How much longer once this format gains acceptance do you think that the lower quality tracks will remain on there? Does this even need to be explained?
Finally, will piracy ever be stopped? Yea, flame if you will, but we all see it coming. The day when we have to connect to some server in who knows where under who knows what encryption and verify that we own the music / movies / software. By that time though, households will all have OC3 ^.^ connections and file storage lockers on some server. All purchases will be secure and products will be saved in the locker. You can play your digital content from there. And guess what MS will own it and we will all have flying cars by then. But for now? Piracy will just go underground. That's what its all about guys. Fess up, no one cares about backing up their music. We just care about getting sh*t for free.
Life's short. Find something you like. Do it well whatever it may be, and have fun.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If it only plays watermarked CDs why don't we all visit circuit city to pretend that we are testing the sound quality of our CD-Rom playback when in fact we would be testing whether or not they play the discs. How stupid does Sony think the consumer is?
We'll then post the models of their equipment which are affected to the web and blacklist those.
I think (s)he only missed two letters:
IF the format catches on, expect future releases to work on ly on SACD.
If you dont know what it links to, you DONT want to know!
Damn! I'm back to the days of my double cassette deck! I have to copy my music in real-time again!
The five minute copy was nice while it lasted.
As for the watermark stuff, yes, these will fail more readily if scratched. But, that was all part of the CD plan. In the 80's they said, "they'll never wear out!" From *PLAYING* that is. Of course they'll wear out!
Once they're on a hard drive, I have no more use for the original disk except as a backup copy. I don't think that will change.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS! I don't trade music except in rare instances, I just don't feel like getting up and changing all those damn disks all the time! And I'm not gonna dammit!! A little analog loss is not enough to make me do it!! HA!
this wont catch on for a very simple reason: its name. SACD. say it out loud. ess-ay-see-dee. its long and inconvinient. people like things thats are short and roll off there tongue. unless they change their name, they aren't going far.
the thing is, while the stones and zeppelin are good and extremely influential, people need to get over them being gods. there are PLENTY of fantastic great bands nowadays. Fugazi, Counting Crows, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, U2. In fact, I'm one who just cant stand led zeppelin.
does a peice of scotch tape patch this one up too?
the review of this cdrw which I skimmed a few days ago at cnet9 2504.html?tag=rev-rev
http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1095-405-201
includes the ability to
" the drive also supports an intriguing new technology dubbed DiscT@2, which lets you "tattoo" images onto CD-R media."
hmm, maybe it'll burn a watermark.,
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Who cares? The only way we'll change anything is to vote with our feet: strange new players, detracted from the age-old standard means we all have to upgrade and follow the whim of good Ole Jack.
I say, screw'em. We've only got 30-60 years of recorded music...and almost everything we have is on mp3s anyway...and all the new stuff is so soul-less and cut-n-pasted from other bands, why pay more and get less?
If they produce a few hundred thousand of these titles and then have to pay to have'em destroyed, that'll send a bigger message than anything ever posted on SlashDot!
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Computers, and electronic devices in general, are increasingly an important way in which we interact with the world around us. They are increasingly our eyes, ears, and voice in this digital age, and they should work for us, their owners, not an amoral corporation determined to milk our culture for profit.
This is not to say that I disagree with people, or groups of people, working for profit, but I do disagree with the government tipping the balance in their favor at the expense of those who they are supposed to represent.
You wouldn't tolerate a Cop sitting in your home guarding, not you, not even the rest of society, but some faceless corporation who doesn't care about anything but their own profit - so why tolerate a Cop in your computer or CD player?
Sony hates you.
It does love your money though, so just keep forking it out.
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
DSD? Sounds an awful lot like how the good old FM radio works.
;)
Still it doesn't sound like it will stop you from ripping the CDs, as much as making it harder for you to extract the extra information... why would you want 5.1 on your earphones anyways?
Unfortunately, hearing that because Sony is on a promotional drive to sneakly setting up to take over the market worries me. It seems in some ways, one crazy copy protection scheme is to keep the technology changing so quickly that the tools and hardware remain out of reach of the consumer.
But, if that's the case, doesn't that stifle creativity? Fledgling musicians, artists will be compelled to use the lastest media and may not be able to distribute their work and make any profit to continue. I remember considering buying some music of a great little indie group a couple of years ago and didn't bother since they only had cassettes and those were 20$.
Anybody who's a slash regular is gonna know. Have some faith.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The geeks seem to have forgotten that they are not the targets of the copy protection. The geeks are too small in numbers to matter. Anything that makes copying a little more difficult for the numerous high schoolers that barely know how to copy audio CDs on their PC's CD-RW is a big win for the labels.
I didn't know that.
Incidentally, are there fast algorithms for converting PWM data to and from the frequency domain, without first going to PCM (I'm thinking of an FFT equivalent)? I ask because I'm curious how difficult it would be to encode and decode perceptually-compressed audio to a PWM DAC.
If I can't play them on my computer, to listen to music that I bought and paid for while I work, then these SACDs are useless to me.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Hardly. In their Spring 2002 in the audio section, the have the first page (like their other sections) discussing the excatly technical details of specs so the consumer can make an informed decision. Super Audio CD is described there. All they standalone CD players that also do it are tagged as such. It's not like Ninjas come into your house at night and rip the little black tape off the SACD logo a week after you buy it.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
That's 2.8MHz at 1-bit precision. See, sound is encoded on a SACD kind of based on density. The greater the amplitude, the greater the density of the on bits. This way, the audio can be rudimentarily decoded by passing the 2.8MHz stream through a 22kHz (or 30kHz if you want to annoy your dog as well as your neighbors) or so low-pass filter. You can convert that 2.8MHz 1-bit stream into a 192kHz/24-bit stream, or a 96kHz/32-bit stream, or whatever you want, because the sound information is still there. I'm not sure exactly how they convert an analog stream into a 2.8MHz stream of 1-bit data, because I'm getting my information from the super audio CD official website. (...like they'd give away crucial information to their competitors before all the patents are approved...) I'm sure it's just an engineering problem.
A solution to the problem with music today
Since most humans ear have difficulting actually hearing the performance difference that 24-bit res gives (usually more around 18-20 range)the post from someone early about pluging into an digital/analog is a perfect solution since even with some quality loss it should still sound better than 16-bit CD quality (although since your original source of music will be 16-bit your data loss will mean you are hearing some kind of 13-bit actual sound quality.
.WMA Professional from MICROSOFT (aach!) coming in Sept. (24-bit lossless compression)
Solution. Don't buy SACD, do buy DVD-Audio (comes with 24-bit res) don't buy Creative Labs products (they advertise 24-bit res, but downsample to far less in actuality) do buy other real or true 24-bit solutions (see M-Audio, Terratec) . Don't use MP3 compression (16-bit) do use
The music industry is an oligopoly. A handful of players control the market. I'm not really concerned about Sony's offering, per se. But if AOL/TimeWarner, et. al. start using the same technology, there isn't really much chance that "some other" company will come along and seize the opportunity, because there are no other companies.
Plus, if an artist is under Sony distribution, the only alternative means of distribution is P2P, which is under increasing attack both legal and technological, from the RIAA.
This ain't a free market, boyo.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
You can use an external DAC to decode regular cds. The SACD format is much higher than 96/192khz. It is about 1.2 MHZ (I am not kidding) The only time you were correct was about 3 years ago when the SACD-1 (which was 5k) came out. Also Phillips, Marantz, Cary audio, Classe, and many other brands do use SACD. I have a Marantz SACD player at my house.
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
Sony have been pushing MiniDisc as ( I shit you not ) a studio mastering format for years. I dare say that this would be their 'approved' system. Needless to say, it is not even close to being acceptable for this purpose.
Most of BBC radio 1 uses Minidisc at the moment ( lots of audible fsck-ups live on air ) for some unknown reason - if anyone can tell me why, I would like to know.
Do not buy Sony products. To do so would be like a turkey voting for Christmas ( or Thanksgiving for USA'ians )
Hol' on there, lil' bucaroo. So an entire decent, working, accepted hardware platform is abandoned? Gee, guess what? The indie crowd suddenly has a home!
Can't get cool stuff to play on your old CD hardware? Fear not dear friend, we here at Indi# have just the tunes for you!
voila!
(at least, that's a hopeful scenario...)
MjM
I only mod up...
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I'm going to figure out how to connect to the digital signals before they're converted to analog in my cd player. I don't think that will be too hard.
I'll be listening to Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik years from now, I'll bet. Sorry, just had to reply. =)
-This quite possibly mangled, stupid, demented comment was brought to you by Askii64.
Alright, here is a question that has been bothering me for awhile. Just flow with me and tell me what you
think after you have read it all. Replay TV and all that crap that lets you record stuff is legal so it seems
at the current time. So, here is the hypo.
Step 1. Buy Satellite TV and purchase the music stations. You know, the ones that play all that music but
no videos.
Step 2. Have a minor purchase a tivo or similar device and complete the remainder. Reason being is that if
there are any user agreements that are included within the tivo purchase, enforcable upon opening
the box, obviously the minor can dissafirm and continue use until its requested back one would assume.
Step 3. With the Tivo or similar device, record all the music you can fit on the internal HD (upgrade it first
to 160gb ^.^). Dismantel the device, remove the HD, connect it to your pc, rip the audio for each song
out from the blank video. Delete the data on the tivo drive. Convert all the audio to mp3s now.
Rinse and repeat.
Again, this is a hyo. Lets stem the above into two directions with different outcomes in search of solutions.
a. Assuming this is legal, which so far it seems since at the moment it appears to be legal buy them at your
local stores. (Good way to determine legality heh, "but I bought it at the store?" "Sorry son, you are
going to jail")
Now setup a server to share the music with anoyone that can prove they also have access to the satellite
music stations. I believe that the tivo's are legal since they fall under fair use?
Would this sharing with other members that subscribe to the service be legal? I'd assume though that there is
not yet a determined minimum time limit to be subscribed. I'd figure that as soon as you sign up for those
satellite channels, you are given fair use over anything broadcast?
b. I suppose A and B should have been switched. The question here is if the above minus the file sharing with
other individuals is legal.
Alright, have at it.
I was wondering what this might be refering to. I guess this may be it.
How big can the difference in quality be? If a normal person with no musical ability, say, like myself, listens to both a CD and the new format could I tell a difference? Is it as pronounced as moving from tape to CD?
(Harman/Kardon)++
Mmm, SoundSticks...
The SACD specification currently provides for digital output of the DSD data stream using a proprietary interface only. This enables players to use separated transports or specialized amplifiers which can decode DSD. Currently players from Sharp, Accuphase and dCS implement such an interface. At this time there is no open digital interface standard though a protocol is under consideration. Until receivers, pre-amplifiers etc. implement a corresponding interface, digital output is of no use however. Most players support digital output for CDs and the CD-compatible layer of hybrid SACDs.
So once a protocol is created I'm sure all the new players will support it. Also note that current players can still support digital output - it's just it'll use the CD data in place of the higher quality SACD data.
Personally, I really like the idea of an open standard. If it truely is open, someone will be able to take that digital data and convert it into MP3/AIFF/WAV directly. Very nice.
If you can hear it, you can duplicate it.
This whole SACD stuff is just a sneaky way of trying to replace the CD with something the RIAA and their minions have more control over. The audio CD's acoustic format is sufficient even for the finest ear. I challenge anyone to be able to distinguish CD from SACD in a blind listening test. See something like this thread on Hydrogen Audio if you don't believe me...
Are you for real? You are claiming we only have recorded music going back as far somewhere between 1972 and 1942? Records were invented in 1877, so you're off by just a little bit there. Shoot, even the first flat circular records (as opposed to cylinders) date back to 1887!
Zane
Is this really relavant to anyone but audiophiles? I understand that you can hear a difference which will be great for the living room.
However, I rarely listen to my home system for anything other than 5.1 from my DVD player. Any sound benefit will be lost when you compress the songs to MP3 for the computer or MP3 Player. I would guess that even with digital out to my minidisk player would lose the added benefit when it converted to ADTRAC by the player.
There's no way that the majority of people are going to replace huge CD collections with SA-CDs.
Think about that for a moment. Replace CD & SA-CD with vinyl & CD. Sound familiar? Do I still have a stack of LPs? Yes. Do I listen to them or my CDs? The CDs of course.
...copy protect cowboy neal, at least by natural methods.
Cut his balls off.
This would be analogous to a "digital" copy protection scheme, as if they cloned him, with the current state of biotech, they'd end up with an inferior, short-lived copy, AFTER 80 failed attempts to get anything to live in the first place.
Of course, his +5 Geekfield probably also has a side effect of repelling all nubile females, so you probably don't have to worry anyway. Though Cmd Taco overcame this limitation...
(No ill will truly meant towards Cowboy Neal, it was a joke that had to be made.)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Around here I've seen SACD players but no DVD-A players, so for the moment Sony's ahead (here, at least). Like DVD-A SACD has no regional encoding so that's no a problem. The lack of digital out is quite annoying though. Utlimately the winner will be the format that gets the most support from the media providers, and I expect a lot of systems capable of supporting DVD-A and SACD will appear until one or the other dies.
As far as "pirating" the lossy mp3 format is king, and in the eyes of the IP industry, their greatest threat.
The fact that most mp3s found are in 128kb, a bit rate that quite frankly is *not* CD quality and not as good as the orginal, already puts the lie to the "perfect copy" myth. (that is to say pirates can get perfect copies of the orginal)
Not to drag the DMCA into this, but this is one of the most distressing things about its anti copyright circumvention clauses. Those who pirate rarely, if ever, copy a media perfectly. (Anyone who's seen an internet movie can atest to that.) They don't need to so long as their copy is "good enough".
In practice the only thing the DMCA clause amounts to is a soap box for the RIAA and the MPAA to stand on.
China-brand electronics maker may release one with a digital out, but even a $2,500 receiver wouldn't know what to do with it.
Let's take an Onkyo 989 receiver as example. It can decode PCM, DTS, and Dolby Digital, none of which an SACD uses. The DSD format that it is recorded in was specifically designed to skirt the tinny sound of PCM audio. Of course, there was the added benefit of "thwarting" "pirates". SACDs and DVD-Audio disc players output their music audio in analog, predecoded. That way, there's no issue for the receiver to understand it. Really the only way to handle it would be to acquire a pre-decoder as people did in the early days of the 5.1 era, and patch it in over a DB-25 connection.
So we'd run into a bit of a chicken and egg issue. If I don't have a receiver that can decode a DSD signal, I would have no reason to buy china-brand SACD player. If there's no market for people looking for such a player, then china-brand isn't going to squander its measley per-unit profits on a processor to output such a signal. You'd also be dealing with a market ("audiophiles") which would take one look at China-brand and pass on by to the $1,000 SACD player. The non-audiophile public might buy it, but they'd buy them for the same reason they buy china-brand nowadays: price, not the unique features.
I don't doubt it might happen, but it would have to be a long ways off. The audio world has already established that it's willing to pay large amount of money for patch cables to sustain analog signals. There would need to be a more serious desire in the audiophile world to make them dump existing equipment in order to accommodate the digital output of the new format.
When there is no CD Layer you will have to get the SACD info, but you can't just take the "analog" data from the RCA jack, you have to add in a matched inductor to turn the PWM into a real analog signal!
Another good (technical) play by Sony.
But, who are we really kidding? Someone will find a way to copy them before too long.
We as consumers get out of this much higher quality music. It is relatively win-win other than the fact that sony does not deserve to control a standard format.
I know we all would like to copy our music to our computer. They won't stop this. At the low end you can do analog copies. At the high end I am sure it will be devised how to make digital copies and most likely someone will just release a player with a digital out. So what if you can't burn that SACD to play in your player? You can get a more technical, less used player solution to get your high quality. But the masses will not copy in high quality and will only have low quality copies which DOES seem like a fair trade off. You can rip, download, burn low quality music, but if you want high quality you'll need good, relatively costly and rare hardware or to buy the SACD.
The compromises between quality and copying are fair other than sony wanting to control them.
I do security
Incidentally, are there fast algorithms for converting PWM data to and from the frequency domain
DSD is essentially 1-bit PCM, similar to that used in "1-bit DAC" CD players. It can be window-FFT'd into the frequency domain just like any other PCM; you just have to discard the top 63/64 of the spectrum. Going back from window-FFT to 1-bit PCM is a matter of going to 24-bit PCM, oversampling, and then using heavy dithering. However, most audio coding (MP3 or Vorbis) uses MDCT rather than FFT because MDCT is real and overlapping, better matching the characteristics of audio.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now, if Sony really wants this to suceed, they'll have to open their standards out to other companies. But, as soon as they do that, someone will make a "watermark-free player".
Some of the posts alluded to this, but the ultimate goal of SACD and, to a lesser extent, DVD-A is a format that the major content producers control, their by eliminating indie labels and musicsian from producing and selling high quality recordings. If you're a independent musician, and want to sell high quality recordings off your web site? You're stuck with cd's. If DVD-A is really an "open" standard, then maybe DVD pressers can press DVD-A's for anyone with enough money, much like CD pressers now can do for people who will pay for the glass masters and can deliver something to make that master from.
Anyone here who owns an IBM desktop or laptop wonder why they can not get linux to boot on it?
Well according to the July edition of CPU magazine,(sorry its not online) IBM secretly implemented palidome drm chips implementating Microsoft/intel's trustworthy computing called tcpa in almost every desktop sold! Andhere are the crippled laptops, and here are the crippled servers. Infact the system is so locked down with each component trusting one another that if you replace the floppy drive for example the system will not run! Remember the motherboard and the eide card both trust the floppy drive with the right encyption sequence in it. Readit and weep.
Oh and yes I submited this to Rob and he did not post it here. Grrr. I encourage everyone reading this to submit it as a story because this is x100 times as worse as what sony is doing.
http://saveie6.com/
Until I remembered that I don't listen to RIAA crap.
yah.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I'd mod you up if I had points.
Okay, as a quick DMCA-violating exercise (from someone who has never even *seen* a SACD player, making claims that I may have reverse engineered it laughable):
1) Open case.
2) Trace the analog-out back to a chip.
2b) If chip has heat-sink, trace back one more.
3) Look up the specs of the chip on-line.
4) Stick a probe on the digital input.
5) Record probe signal.
You now have a digital output, and this will work on *ANY* device, not just an SACD player. At worst, you might need invert the bits and reverse the bit order, which you can do easily in software.
(Disclaimer - If you fry your new toy, don't come whining to me. You shoul have had a friend-with-a-clue do the above instead of trying it yourself)
Audio quality is the key here.
I can't tell a difference between 320K mp3's and 128K mp3's. I don't need any higher fidelity than the CD standard. Sure, make them hold more and make them smaller or shaped differently (yes a clear 1" cube would be neat) but I'm not buying anything that "sounds better than CD" because I can't tell a difference.
As far as not being able to make copies of the SACD, that's bogus. Exact digital copies, not yet (who would want to because it's a proprietary format), but there's nothing stopping me from from taking SACD output to the line in on my soundcard. I highly doubt anyone could tell a difference from the original.
As people have said before: "If it can be heard, it can be copied."
vinyl still sounds better.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
I came up with one for Sony's SACD:
"It felt like I had crawled into a warm and inviting sonic womb, where my fair use rights were gone."
I was just reading through this article and I realized what a bunch of losers the /. crowd really is. What I'm curious about is if this spec is really better than the old cd spec, and I figured someone would discuss it here. But no, everybody whines about watermarking taking away their right to steal copyrighted material.
losers, I'm going back to k5
Search first, ask questions later.
but i think it must be related somehow:
Eight years ago I bought some sony headphones. They sounded great at the time, and probably still would now. However, last year, for no reason, the plastic the headphones are made from turned to goo. I'm not kidding. Those of you that bought Sony headphones long ago know what I'm talking about.
I have a SACD player, cost me $139 and also plays CD's and DVD's. The SACD sound quality is a lot better than CD, even my more expensive CD player does not sound as good as the $139 Sony playing SACD. You need a pretty good system to hear all that SACD is capable of, but I'm glad I can get this level of quality sound. There is still a CD layer, and this works just like a regular CD. The SACD sound can be copied via analog methods, but it won't sound quite as good. And if you copy the CD layer you get CD quality sound, which is fine for making MP3's. So those of us who want a really high quality medium get that, and I for one am not at all upset that I can't copy it. I'm just glad to have the opportunity to purchase something of this quality. If I really want a copy to play in the car I can just copy the CD layer and that perfecly good enough. I think the rumors that the CD layer is somehow degraded compared to a normal CD are bogus. On my system the CD layer sounds as good as any other CD. It's just that the SACD layer sounds even better.
High quality A2D convsion to redbook is hard - you've got to oversample, sample at a higher bit depth, do digital filtering and dithering. At least this has to happen at SOME level, maybe hidden in a chip. But the quality of chips, electronics and processing power has gone so far past what's necessary to do this that everyone who reads slash dot could get a cheap setup that does all this. So we never have to worry that going to analog and back is going to mess up our sound again. Therefore disk watermarks can be completely ignored as basically irrelevent.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Both photo's explain EXACTLY how the new system works. In fact, when I clicked on the first link, I fully expected to be sent to the second link!......Now that's truth in advertising!.
It was rumoured Senator Fritz's infamous cpbpta or whatever its called is being implemented in small patched. This is one of them. Before you know it it will not only be a felony or federal crime to disable it but rather be a crime of federal maximum pound me in the ass prison for not using it. Oh and only Windows can do it so its maximum prison for using linux.
http://saveie6.com/
>Everyone with any knowledge of audio will agree that CDs are
>a poor format. Crappy error-correction, only 16-bit precision
>(20 is optimal), and a relatively low sampling rate are all
>problems. Guess why audiophiles mostly listen to vinyl.
Amazing how much you can get wrong in three little sentences. CDs are a fantastic audio delivery format when compared to their predecessors. CD error protection is fairly bulletproof - witness the ability of most quality (and many cheap) players to track even severely scratched discs, while inaudibly correcting for any read errors the optics can't get past. Try doing that with a scratched analog LP or jammed tape. CD's 44.1 kHz sampling rate meanwhile is adequate to reproduce the full 20 Hz - 20 kHz range of human hearing, and then some (this article explains how the oddball 44.1 kHz became the standard).
As for "audiophiles", I don't know how you'd possibly go about defining an audiophile these days, now that many low end consumer multichannel receivers and surround speaker systems boast specs that demolish those possessed by high-end, $1000+ pieces of equipment just a decade ago. I do know there are plenty of self-identified audiophiles out there who won't touch vinyl with a 10 foot pole. Given the format's numerous limitations, I can't say I blame them:
* Loud tics and pops caused by stray dust and wear, resulting in a *negative* signal to noise ratio - i.e. the noise can become louder than the music! (with N'Stynk, I suppose this would be a blessing in disguise . . . or simply redundant.)
* Rumbling caused by the turntable's motor and the friction of the stylus as it passes through the groove
* Wow and flutter, caused by speed irregularities in the turntable's drive system and by any imperfections in the geometry of the disc
* Phase irregularities caused by the RIAA equalization and the subsequent need for the preamp to de-equalize the signal
* Frequency response irregularities caused by the RIAA equalization / de-equalization process
* The inability to reproduce loud bass accurately (the cutter making the wax master would pop out of its groove if it tried to reproduce the kind of bass CDs can handle effortlessly)
* The tendency for the turntable, platter and even the disc to function as microphones, picking up room reverberations and - particularly - the sound being produced by the speakers, smearing and distorting the audio in numerous ways
* Cartridge / tonearm misalignments, causing inaccurate stylus pickup, accelerated record wear, or both.
30dB of stereo separation, vs. CD's 70+dB of separation
* A theoretical maximum of 60dB of dynamic range for virgin vinyl of the highest quality (and only at certain frequencies - obviously, not in the low bass) vs. around 90dB of dynamic range from even the cheapest CD players, across the entire spectrum
* In practice, roughly 40dB of usable dynamic range across the majority of the spectrum
* A relatively flat frequency response from only around 60 Hz to 15 kHz, with severe rolloffs beyond those limits
* The need for mastering engineers to severely compress and re-equalize the signal in order to steer clear of the format's limitations relative to CD, which requires no such distortion-educing compensation
* Pitch and frequency errors caused by the speed difference between the cutter used to produce the wax master and your turntable
* The tendency of the media itself to wear out as its played, and to be damaged during routine handling with audible results
CDs are based on 25 year old technology now. Newer formats - such as DVD Audio - offer even more impressive specifications (and multichannel audio capabilities), but the difference between them and the Compact Disc is nothing like the quantum leap in fidelity the CD represents vs. the vinyl LP. Vinyl was obsolete for at least a decade before the CD rolled along, and it was probably only confusion in the marketplace regarding the various tape formats (the 8-track, Philips' compact cassette, open reel) that allowed it to survive as long as it did.
Just from browsing the FAQ, the main advantage over current CD's, at least in the /average/ consumer's eyes seems to be more than two channels. There's definitely an imrpovement in sound, but not one drastic as say, the jump from analog tape to CDs.
In the early 70's Quadraphonic vinyl was released, which was backward compatible with stereo styli -- and it never caught on because it required hardware upgrades, and presented no real clear advantage over standard LPs; this seems to be a similar concept.
Besides, $30 for a disc? No thanks.
Good, now the music I feel is good enough to buy will sound better. All you software developers quit yer yackin, cuz you guys prolly hate piracy just as much. The fact of the matter is, everyone steals everything, be it music, software, or wheels of cheese, but the economy doesn't collapse because people still buy the products they strongly like.
Well shit...then I'll really have to wait for someone to rip a new release before I listen to it because there's no way in hell I'll be buying one of these SADCD players!
You're using her as bait, Master!
The record comanies used to grumble about home taping onto cassette tapes. That grumbling disappeared when it became clear that such home tapes were vastly inferior to the new CDs that everyone was raving about. Then burning CDs and a reasonable sized compresed verion of the same, MP3, became available and all that changed. So maybe what sony is saying is...let them have their CDs and their MP3s. We can't stop them. Instead let them come to us because we will offer this vastly superior format that they can't make themselves. Trying to impose some sort of DRM solution on top of CDs and MP3s is a problem because you wind up breaking backward compatibility in the process. On the other hand create a new and superior format with DRM built into it at the start and you can mbake it solid. So I think that this is the beginning of having mp3s fall into the same level of worry from the RIAA as making cassette tapes from radio broadcasts.
now i think i'll just hook the headphone jack to my audigy card, and record it to regular cd and play my legal backup that way.
me too - people mod this up!!
www.enthea.org
That is a popular misconception. I know a few of my college buddies who are audiophiles. A good sounding system does not have to cost obscenely large amounts of money. On the other hand what is needed is a love of music and the patience to actually listen and compare different (affordable)equipment before buying. The patience to carefully setup that equipment is also crucial.
I started out by buying used gear and I didn't spend very much money on equipment, but I got much more realistic sound than most people spending the same amount of money.
By the way SACD players are available for $150, and they are also very good CD players to boot. One cannot go wrong with even the cheapest SACD models today.
Now, this is not to say that TCPA does not have some unsettling implications. For now, TCPA-enabled machines can boot "trusted" or "untrusted" OSes. What worries me is what might happens years in the future, when TCPA or its moral equivalent is in just about every machine and "trusted" OSes are the exception, not the rule, on mainstream users' PCs (should that ever come to pass). At that point, I'll start getting worried about the possibility that manufacturers might turn off the ability to boot an untrusted OS.
Region-locked DVD players have never sold very well here. For a long time, sellers haven't even dreamt about selling region-locked DVD players. After all, I live in the middle of the Atlantic, what region should I use? :)
Okay, so SACD players won't read non-watermarked discs such as CD-Rs. This sounds okay on the outset, but think about it for a moment.
(fictional scenario)
I have my own startup band, we burn and distribute our own CDs. Suddenly, I *must* go through the RIAA if I want to distribute my music.
This is bad bad news if it is true.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Sony and Philips come out with music technology that samples 64 times more than CDs, can hold almost two hours of stereo audio at that sampling rate [due to the data capacity of the physical media], can be played on players that also play CDs, can even be used as hybrid discs with CD-Audio, and this is A Bad Thing because there's actually [gasp] copyright protection on the discs?
Did you really think you're going to rip 9 GIGABYTES of music directly onto your iPod? Since you're just going to compress it down to MP3 anyway, what's the point? Yes, a more pristine source means better output files, but at this level I can't imagine any sort of noticeable difference. And for the moment it sounds like they are more worried about market penetration than people ripping the data -- ref the CD layer, which should be just as rippable as ever.
Sure, at some point they'll phase out the extra CD layer....although I can't imagine that will be soon. It's taken twenty years for CDs to become the primary method of music distribution, and vinyl is still around. But even if there are no more CDs out there, then we're back to...well, twenty years ago, making copies through the audio jacks or as directly as your stereo would allow. Slower and less digital, true, but then the source is presumably a lot better as well.
This is GOOD! There's no DRM included,no region codes, no inherent assumption that customers are criminals, and nothing [ref DAT] to stop you from making as many copies as you want. Just not digitally.
Yet.
DVDs have been out for what, five years, now? and manufacturers are already flaunting region-free players. How long do you really think this copy-protection method will last past the point that customers find it annoying?
And all of this is assuming that the format does well enough to put CDs permanently out to pasture before the patents on *this* technology expire. Heck, I'm just starting to get used to CDs, myself.
IMHO, it's not worth worrying about.
TSG
2.82 MHz. And of course, my illustration of a sin wav encoded in DSD doesn't take advantage of the greatly enhanced sample rate.
I think it will take a good 10-15 years for any new audio format to 'catch-on'. You may cite DVD video as a format that caught on in only 5 years, but I would submit that Audio formats are a whole different ball game. It took CD more than 10 years to finally outsell cassettes in the US (It happened in 1993 - if I remember correctly).
So Sony/Philips will keep releasing music as Hybrid SACDs (both SACD and CD layer included) until that 'catching-on' occurs. Given that SACD players even today cost $150, I can't see why in 10 years it won't be acceptable to release new music in SACD only single layer format, given that all our current CD players will likely be dead.
No, seriously.
Music watermarks had two opponents
But they seem to have forgotten about a third opponent of many of these schemes: Independant artists. Those that havn't sold their souls to the devil. What happens when they want to release high quality music?
Do they have to pay the powers that be exorbiant amounts in order to get their music to fans at this quality? Or are they just turned down, and told to come back once they are owned by a label?
Is it just me, or does this sound like illegal product tying? (Want to sell high quality music, sign up with us. Want to listen to this high quality music, buy our players. Want to use our players, buy our music)
"CD degrades the vinyl recording.
If you know what you're doing it doesn't have to."
Even then it does. CD quality is inherentily less than vinyl.
Well, actually no DAC is needed with PWM or DSD. Another advantage of this format (aside with better resolution compared to CD) is that only a low-pass is needed to achieve to digital to analog conversion.
Sony is producing audio players that, in addition to standard CDs, also play super-high-quality audio etched onto a second layer on the disc. These discs are also backwards-compatible with standard CDs and also contain audio in the 44 KHz/18 bit/stereo format we all know and love. The discs are watermarked in hardware and no one can play the high-quality audio without the watermark.
Meanwhile, the MP3 file traders are passing around audio files encoded at 192kbps or less, notably inferior to the standard audio still encoded on these discs.
So what's the reason for the new format? Does Sony plan on taking over the entire CD media, discontinuing the standard media layer and distributing SACD-only discs? I doubt they could manage it. Even if they did, the super-high-quality audio output, in analog, can still be resampled and MPEG'd.
So what's the big deal?
OK, so it's all very well that you can now use SACD with more accurate signal reproduction, or even DVD-A (isn't that a term used in porn movies? So I've heard) if you want better quality.
Whose ears are actually good enough to listen to 24-bit audio and tell the difference between that and 16-bit anyway? I have often heard it said that analogue transmission of audio is far worse than digital. I don't entirely agree with that, but supposing it's true - surely the cables between SACD player and amplifier, amplifier and speakers are going to withdraw a lot of the benefits of the more accurate signal?
Yes, we can only hear about 20-bit accuracy. The point of the additional accuracy is, therefore, questionable. The difference in quality it will make is miniscule. The LSB on 16-bit audio represents a variation of 0.0015% in the output signal. The LSB on 24-bit audio represents a variation of 0.000006% of the output signal. Can you hear that final bit? Does it make all the difference? Er, no.
Those who say that the MP3 format is too lossy for them might be interested to know that audiophiles can't actually hear the difference between 256kbps MP3 and the original CD recording. Those who think they need still more quality should perhaps check out the MAD plugin which has the ability to decode mp3s to 24-bit, recreating bits that weren't even there in order to improve quality.
As regards introducing watermarks as a kind of copy protection - well, that's just reducing the quality of the audio, which defeats the point of what you were trying to achieve in the first place.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
Now, I'm not 100% sure of this, but I've read that the patents for compact disc are running out. As it is now, every manufacturer needs to pay royalties to the patent owners (Sony and Philips) for every drive they make. They don't want to lose that revenue, so they make up a new standard. They only need to make it a commonplace standard like the CD - which might prove to be a difficult task... Arguing better sound quality is a bit hard considering how terribly crappy sound systems most people have.
The SACD logo can be seen as a 'S' and a 'P' for Sony and Philips when turned right. They both worked on it.
p s.com/b2b/technology/
From what I understand, the plan is to get all CD's to become SACD's asap. Then after you own about 25 of these disks you'll be more willing to buy a SACD-player. Or they might just start selling SACD-only disks.
http://www.sacd.philips.com/http://www.sacd.phili
This is a damn good idea. Sony can use the physical watermark to prevent piracy WITHOUT requiring that mandatory DRM be included in every piece of computer hardware and software. (Which would kill a large proportion of the software industry due to exhorbatant licensing costs)
This is the future. I suggest that Hollywood and the music recording industry be encouraged to use solutions like this; this was they can be as restrictive as they like with respect to their content and the devices that play it (through licensing), without affecting PCs and the internet. I would suggest that the entertainment industry DISALLOW manufacturers from producing players that interface with PCs. After all, not many people will buy high quality SACDs only to put them thru a PC soundcard rather than a good HiFi, or buy a DVD to watch it on a PC monitor rather than a personal cinema.
Just live with it: If a PCs can play MPAA/RIAA content, DRM will become mandatory. You can't have one without the other; MPAA/RIAA wont let you. I would suggest that the two be walled off from one another, to restrict the damage done to the computer industry.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I would rather have a PC that cannot play music/movies (thus needing a separate HiFi and TV), and have no DRM, than find myself unable to use my PC the way I want to (I like to write and distribute open source software with my PC).
Just remember, if you don't like the onerous DMCA style conditions attached to media like SACD / DVDs, just DON'T BUY THEM!!! (don't pirate them either; you'd just give the MPAA and the RIAA all the reason they need to convince the government to make DRM mandatory)
Unless the price of SACD's comes down extremely rapidly, they will simply fail - you can't play them on normal CD players, they cost twice as much at the moment, they have some sort of DRM included and the range is very limited (looks like more back catalogue stuff than new stuff to me). It's like the pre-recorded Mini Disc (which still aren't cheaper than CD's !) debacle all over again...
"HDCD-encoded CDs sound better because they are encoded with 20 bits of real musical information, as compared with 16 bits for all other CDs. HDCD overcomes the limitation of the 16-bit CD format by using a sophisticated system to encode the additional 4 bits onto the CD while remaining completely compatible with the existing CD format. HDCD provides more dynamic range, a more focused 3-D soundstage, and extremely natural vocal and musical timbre. With HDCD, you get the body, depth, and emotion of the original performance not a flat, digital imitation."
So, you still need a special player to take advantage of the format, it is better that oridinary CDs, but inferior to Super Audio CDs, but at at least there doesn't seem to be anything to stop you from making your MP3s.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The other next generation audio format appears to be DVD-Audio, as described by this FAQ
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I *personally* used high-frequency, 1-bit digital sampling, for the purposes of recording and re-playing digital audio, many, MANY, years ago, (my first experiments were done using a couple of resistors, connected to the parallel port of a 286).
What's more, I may even have proof of that, (video recordings, and friends who will back up my claim).
Can I claim prior art, and invalidate the Sony patent?
They sell or make available all the seperate tracks on the disk so I can hear my 'own' mix - and I will pay more for these 'definitive' disks. I do not want somebody elses idea of the
.
mix that should sell widely.
Forget piracy - there is a better way to slow it. Have your hearing tested and profiled. Then register it with say Sony, tell them the disk you want to play, and based on your profile, they send a 'recommended' set of profiles, that make the most of individual tracks, boosted for selective hearing loss,and defined preferances much like hearing aids are 'tuned'.
Bind this with a memory stick, and another for every radio/CD then you hear best, what you want to hear, without effort.
Basically kill priracy by giving infinite mix varability, and 400 variations of the same 'hit'
From the FAQ: "SACDs, on the other hand, use DSD (Direct Stream Digital) high resolution coding. This samples the music at 64 times the rate of CD, or 2.8MHz
So the sample rate of this new CD format is 2.8MHz. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these CD's will all be pressed from a DAT or other such digital master that would have been recorded at, at best, 96KHz. This makes a 2.8MHz sampling rate pretty redundant does it not?
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Moderator's essentials
at full resolution so his story may be correct and he really did listen to an SACD multichannel disc.
Of course, than there's this matter of which hi-rez format is better (SACD or DVD-A (even at 24/192 resolution))..
Seems like a strange choice by IBM: Much of their business strategy is built around Linux. They say they spent $1 billion on it last year (or this year?), and the executive that spearheaded their Linux strategy got promoted to CEO.
Why would they stop people from installing Linux on their own hardware?
Ive been waiting for the 'new format' that will slowly push out 'open' formats in exchange for the DRM realm.
Sort of like how 8Tracks were slowly phased out. not quite as sinister of a plan back then, but it was the same concept.. people will change their hardware when the old formats arent availble anylonger.
True its a slow process, but in the end.. we get it in the end..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
its not clear that this SACD format has been created solely for the purpose of content protection, and i do expect it to sound better, and maybe Neil Young will finally release his last 6 albums on SACD ....
People here are saying that well Sony is alientaing their customers by forcing them to buy this and in the story about the Palm with fewer colors, everyone is saying its a huge PR disaster, everyone is going to abandon Palm, etc.
And i'm sure both companies will lose a few customers over these things. BUT for the most part, no one but us techies know or care about this. Until my parents put a SACD into their computer and Windows puts up a message that says "Format not recognized" or until they try to play a mp3 or CD made by some of their bluegrass playin' friends and get the message "This is an illegal bit of music and cannot be played" from their computer they will not know or care about the details of how the music they listen to is stored on a little shiney disc. Or how many colors a PDA has.
Part of this is proof of its pointlessness...if you could not tell your PDA did not have 16 bit color then you were probably not viewing digitial images on it and dont care. Part of this is complete lack of information.
How many of us have written letters to the newspaper to inform people of these issues? How many have called/emailed news stations to suggest a story? How many of us have written to CNN/[your favorite newspaper] to point out the factual errors in their stories?
How many of use just like to sit back and whine and bask in our own sense of superiority as we, meek little us, defend all of freedom by ourselves?
Guess I should have read the next line, eh? :/
I say let em keep producing these copy protection schemes, and we'll keep rejecting em. Eventually, as they enter bankruptcy proceedings, with their last breath maybe they'll ask themselves, "Why did we want to end fair-use in the first place?" Spend as much on R&D as you want Sony; I'm never buying.
Few people seem to remember it now, but Laserdisc was quite popular with videophiles (a similar species to audiophiles). It didn't catch on with joe consumer, because it's only benefit was higher quality and it had the inconviences of higher price and no recording.
The masses don't really care enough about high quality to pay more or be inconvienced for it. For most people CDs and mp3s are "good enough".
Myself, while I can tell the difference and could probably afford a SACD setup, It's hard for me to justify the cost to myself. maybe when there are more titles available in stores that interest me.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
The problem is the recording. The vast majority of people (probably upwards of 99% of the population) are listening to their music on sub-par stereos. The problem is these are unable to respond properly to the dynamics of music (the speakers are mostly at fault). So in the recording studio, the dynamics are compressed so they give that visceral "impact" without taxing the speakers. Good speakers (driven even by mid-range gear) can respond to these dynamics (shit like Bose cannot). And I'm not talking absolute dynamic range here, I'm talking ability to instantaneously respond to changes, "relative" dynamic range.
So the problem here is, most people are happy about this, because it makes them say "ooh" when they crank their Klipsh Promedias, but try listening to popular music through a good stereo; it sounds compressed. Maybe that isn't the word that comes to mind ("shitty" would be better), but that's why every true audiophile will tell you that rock music doesn't sound good through high-end speakers. In fact, speakers shouldn't sound good, they shouldn't "sound" at all - they should accurately reproduce what's fed into them. When you feed them shit, you are more likely to notice. There is a good analogy for this: think of it like a TV. You can watch a show on a 13" TV, or even a 19" TV, and VHS quality is acceptable - a decent VCR with a clean tape (we aren't taking degradation of media into account here); this might be indistinguishable from DVD. Now look at a >40" TV. The difference is becoming much more obvious. As the screen gets even larger, like on a big front projection, even DVD can start to show deficiencies. And no digital medium currently used can prevent washed-out images on the largest screens - that's why IMAX still uses film.
Now change over to audio and substitute screen size for speaker quality - on low-end speakers, MP3's sound pretty good. The deficiencies of the recording don't become apparent until the reproduction equipment gets better. The problem is that only jazz and classical regularly get the good treatment in the recording and mixing process. If you like pop and rock, and you like great sound, then you'll be hard pressed to find a stereo that makes you happy. Very few are at once forgiving and capable.
Of course, there are limitations to the CD media, but it may not yet be necessary to replace it. Especially not with a multi-channel solution. Surround has no place in the reproduction of music (at least not until recording / mixing technology is light years ahead of where it is now). Don't get me started on that.
its redbook actually
Can't make archival exact copies of your own media. Can't get a replacement for the disc if gets scratched. So much for Fair Use.
The point of "Fair Use" is that you're legally permitted to make back-up copies of the media you own. It doesn't mean the producer is legally obligated to make it easy, or even possible. The fact that you can't make archival exact copies of the media is inconvenient for you, but it has nothing to do with Fair Use.
Standard CDs are rapidly and quietly being replaced by a variety of non-standard "secure" formats. How long will it be before new releases are only available on "protected" media? If you ever intend to make a mix CD, format-shift an album, play it on your computer or even (gasp!) share it with your friends, buy it now. Forget about boycotting the record companies. Face facts: if you don't buy it now you'll be buying it later, and in a less useful, less flexible format. Grab what you can, the brief age of open media is coming to a close...
I came across the SCD and thought they were something you can toss into any DVD player. It had a bunch of new features and new sounds to compliment your insane audio system.
"Anti-counterfeiting Amendments of 2002 - Amends the Federal criminal code to prohibit trafficking in an "illicit authentication feature." Defines that term to mean an authentication feature that: (1) without the authorization of the respective copyright owner, has been tampered with or altered so as to facilitate the reproduction or distribution of a phono-record, a copy of a computer program, a copy of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or documentation or packaging, in violation of the rights of the copyright owner; (2) is genuine, but has been distributed, or is intended for distribution, without the authorization of the respective copyright owner; or (3) appears to be genuine but is not."
That is a piece of crap legislation but it does NOT prevent anyone from independently producing information in any format they desire and and distributing it by any method they wish. Noone has even attempted to suggest that this could be prevented because it would be such a clear and undeniable violation of the First Amendment. Okay, Some will say yeah, but they'll use this to make non-protected formats illegal. Not according to the language of that bill: They still can't make Ogg, say, illegal: just tools designed to strip DRM-processed files to open formats, or distributing copyrighted files that have been stripped of their DRM information.
And this is the other side of the coin. Just as any artist has the right to release their information any way they want (due to free speech and their copyrights on original works), the publishing giants have the right to release their garbage in any screwed up format they want - and the idea that the constitution in any way shape or form gives you some "fair use" right to do anything you want with that information may be the way it "should" be but it ain't the way it IS. If you read the fair use provisions in copyright law (I wonder how many
By all means, fight the power, yeah yeah yeah - watch how you vote, write a letter to your reps. You might even consider unclenching that "omigod if I don't vote for corporate-sponsored candidate X the horror of candidate Y, that ultraliberal tax-n-spend gun-hating tree-hugging/super-conservative religious right corporate-pandering gun-crazy wacko (choose one) in office" knee jerk reaction. You might even ask yourself how likely it is that their are only two possible approaches to solving the world's problems - and that the "side" you have picked of the two options you've been given is the one right, true, correct side, and all them other dips is just crazy stupid deluded fools with no sense. You might wonder what would happen if a whole lot of us started voting for people who don't get their political positions by constantly begging corporations and wealthy individuals for support.
But remember their is another (not mutually exclusive) alternative, which is simply to not support the publishing industry's products and to instead seek out artists that do not artificially impair the versatility of their product or encumber it with information and costly extra production steps that have no other purpose than to remind you that they think of you as a thief first, a customer second.
Think about it.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
is any one ,(audiophiles aside), Going to care? Most people are happy lisening to 128kps mp3's ,(which is ruffly half the sound quality of averege minidisks I think),and the main reason most people bought cd's and converted to them from tapes and vinyl was for convienience ,(easy to get to the song you want etc),more than any thing else.
,(which your average person won't really notice ),what does sacd have to offer and will it be enough to get joe six pack to buy a whole new system to play it?
My main point is aside from superior audio quality
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I don't get it. The simple truth is, every single "copyright protection" scheme has to allow the un-encrypted raw data (video or audio) to reach the playing component (speakers for a sound system, speakers + tv for a DVD player, etc etc etc..) So why worry too much ? Let the SACD player play the SACD track, grab the output, pipe it through your sound card with an mp3 encoder waiting on the other end, and presto. It's a bit more work compared to popping the CD in your drive and clicking "rip", but if you're adamant about getting your songs on MP3, this is barely an obstacle.
This is a new format. Given the huge number of cd players out there, the music market will NOT abandon the CD format anytime soon. Also given the huge number of CD's out there new CD players will always be backward compatible with the CD format, and will add the SACD format. This is not the same thing as 8 tracks, LP's and cassettes, since the physical media is the same as CD's. Mostly this is a software change (some underlying hardware too). The DRM stuff will prevent copying a disk since the copy wouldn't play on a licensed SACD player. It still might be possible to rip a SACD and make an mp3 or cd out of it though you'd lose the advantage of the SACD format. Maybe we'll never see licensed SACD recorder and be stuck with CD recorders (another reason why the CD format won't go away).
That's not true in law. Fair use, according to case precedent, includes the right to copy music for personal use, timeshifting, spaceshifting, backup purposes, etc.
If you can beat Sony's copy protection, more power to you. Then your fair use right remains intact.
Except that the DMCA forbids circumventing copy protection, so some of your legally-protected fair use rights can only be obtained at the cost of breaking federal law.
If not, tough shit.
Nice attitude. I say the same to Sony and the other media companies, who are going to run into a lot of trouble with the one-sided "negotiating" they're doing. Consumers can "negotiate" too, which is exactly why the media companies are running scared.
You're better of digging out your old vinyl (or even cassette) and sampling it yourself.
I can't stand to hear "19th nervous breakdown" since they remastered it.
The remastered Led Zepplin "Presence" CD sucks big time, too. The original vinyl abum had, well... some presence. Bass you could FEEL at low volume, crystal clear high notes. The mastering on that album was of the highest quality.
The CD, however, sounds almost as good as the mp3s I made out of the sampled vinyl.
Of course, his +5 Geekfield probably also has a side effect of repelling all nubile females, so you probably don't have to worry anyway. Though Cmd Taco overcame this limitation...
;-)
Well everybody knows that CN can't get laid anyway, but there's always the option of making a deposit at a sprem bank
...mixing dance tracks. Any decent DJ well tell you that. But I wonder how many /.'s are actually into Dance music?
FP, maybe.
If they were clear about what they were doing, I wouldn't object. It's far less objectionable than companies buying legislators. I mean far!
... I want backups as much as anyone, but I sure understand why the distribution companies don't want to allow copying and distribution. I think that the musicians should, but then I'm a programmer that believes in the GPL, and I know how much more difficult it has made it for software companies to make a profit (i.e., that's not how you make your money in the GPL world).
In that case, they are just deciding that they want to exclude a part of their potential market, and as long as they aren't a monopoly, that should clearly be their right.
The thing that causes concern is that the story at least implies that the disks are being sold as if they were ordinary CD's, when acutally they are unplayable on computers. This strikes me as fraud, and nobody should be allowed to do that, even if they aren't a monopoly.
If, on the other hand, the music can still be played as CD's on a computer, though without the special features available in the specialized Sony format, then I see nothing wrong with this. Computer speakers aren't designed to play high quality audio anyway. And this is certainly a possible reading from the story.
As for copying
Were MicroSoft not an abusive monopoly, I would feel sympathy for them, and the other software companies. As it is, I see the GPL as nearly our sole hope for salvation (and I still feel sympathy for the software companies that *aren't* abusive monopolies).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Exactly how incredibly messed up is this technology?
Seems to me that it's not that incompatible according to sony's claims... from their website:
Playback can consist of 3 channel, 4 channel, 5 channel or 5.1 channel, depending on what the artist/producer wants to achieve musically. Whether 2 channel or 5.1 channel, multi-channel SACD delivers the same high resolution audio through all channels simultaneously. All channels provide for up to 100kHz frequency response and a sampling rate of 2.822 Megahertz. That's 64 times the sampling rate of a regular CD! With the hybrid disc option, a multi- channel SACD disc can contain up to 6 channels of high resolution audio, a separate 2 channel, studio-mixed version of the same music, AND a regular CD layer which contains the same recording in CD quality so you can take the very same disc and enjoy SACD in your home, car, portable or any existing CD player.
^^^
there it says you can play it in your home, car portable, or ANY EXISTING CD PLAYER...
well we'll have to stick 'em to it won't we?
So obviously if the cd can be read by normal cd players, there's a normal audio cd layer, right?
[)(]subliminal labs[)(]
thanks for the correct colour, I realized what I wrote when I hit "submit", alas it was to late
Party?!? What kind of party is this? Where's the damn keg?
Virtus Junxit Mors Non Separabit
SACD's have been out for years, no one's buying them. DVD-Audio discs started coming out around the same time, are aiming for the same market, and can be played in the DVD players that everyone already has instead of forcing users to buy a new SACD player.
This is another Sony audio format failure on par with the MiniDisc -- it meets the needs of a niche market, but generally there are better solutions available.
Isn't this the format that was circumvented with a black waterproof felt-tip pen in Chile, my homeland? Geez, now they should sue Faber-Castell, Artline and Sakura for manufacturing DRM-violating technology. I hope I don't get busted while I'm labeling cardboard boxes. -What'ya gonna do now? -- "Mama, I don't know. But what's on every play: it's gotta be funky. Yeah."
Umm, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't getting a player capable of playing much higher-quality music at no extra charge a good thing.
"well, gee I only paid for a Ford, but they gave me a Ferarri engine. How dare they!!"
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
SACDs offer incomparably better quality over CDs. The difference is like that of a digital satellite TV over analog cable, or an Apple Cinema Display over a no-name digital LCD. There's no reason why naive slashdotters should be criticizing this new technology based on an incomplete understanding of the specifications - Just Listen!
If you think the redbook CD is the perfect digital audio format, ask yourself whether CDs have ever made you feel like there was a live performance being played right in front of you. Even on wonderfully mastered recordings with >$50,000 sound systems, I've never really been convinced that what I was hearing was the real thing, and not just a recording. Even binaural recordings on >$3,000 headphone systems don't convince me. SACD does.
I've listened to Miles Davis improvising an immortal work of jazz, Isaac Stern playing Vivaldi, Ben Zander conducting Mahler's 9th, Gould playing the Goldberg Variations, Bernstein conducting Gershwin to the background of the subway under Carnegie Hall.
The music was THERE. I could close my eyes and hear the musicians there, I could position them in my minds eye, every note so clear and fluid and relaxed. Musicians dead for decades were reborn, reliving their greatest moments right in front of me. SACD doesn't sound like a recording. It sounds like the real thing.
If some silly slashdotters want to complain about this preservation of the human music legacy, well, let them. Their lives are poorer from not hearing this wonderful music as it was meant to be heard. All they have to do to understand is Just Listen.
Sony and Phillips already get fees for every CD sold. Does that stop you from making CDs of your garage band music? Of course not.
Sure, right now the SACD recording process is probably pretty expensive, and there are only 2 machines in the world that can stamp out the hybrid SACD/CD discs, but it won't stay that way. Sony and Phillips must make it cheap to produce SACDs or else it will go the way of mini-disks.
Frankly, I think this is the "right" way for Sony to try and improve security on the music. Its not a law. Its not a digital water mark or cactus crap that reduces the music fidelity. The format offers something extra, but doesn't allow you to copy it. I don't see any difference between this and DVD-pre-deCSS. All the people who buy DVDs but don't copy them will see this as pretty much the same kind of thing. Yes, we won't have the technological means to make a our fair use backup, but I can't backup my LP's either.
If the artists get together and quit the record labels, cutting out the middle men, and start selling ogg vorbis tracks, well that would be really cool, but if the record companies are going to control music distribution, then they might as well give us better sound. I don't see technological measures to stop fair use as being more morally wrong than file sharing.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Sony's ideal marketing strategy 5 years from now will probably be like this:
:)
MP3 THROUGH SUBSCRIPTION-BASED NAPSTER-CLONE
Target customer: People who don't care about music quality, want "perfect" digital backups, want to play on pc, home stereo, and portable player. aka Typical Slashdot reader
Willingness to pay: Low
Value proposition: The music you want. When you want it. Where you want it. Faster, more convenient, and more music than Napster or Kazaa
Quality: 128kbps MP3 equivalent, but claimed to be "CD quality"
Releases: Entire catalog
Cost: Cheap (50c a track or $12.50/month for unlimited downloads)
SINGLE LAYER SACD
Target Customer: People who care about music quality, want to listen primarilly on home stereos. Typically classical, jazz, or historical recording fans.
Willingness to pay: High
Value proposition: Perfect sound forever
Quality: SACD
Releases: 20% of catalog, or selected albums by specialty order
Cost: Expensive ($20/SACD for catalog, or 30$ for specialty order)
The result: labels make more money, consumers get precisely what they want at a bargain.
Anything which prohibits 60s lamers like the Rolling Stones from being heard helps mankind.
Note to the "Rolling Kidney Stones", please retire.
He claims that every DVD-A disc will play in a DVD-ROM device - which is true. But there is no DVD-ROM device that will play true DVD-A. There are actually quite a few DVD players that will play DVD-A at full resolution - those players will clearly have the DVD-A logo on the front of the player.
Young children can hear out to 20kHz, and occasionally even beyond (I think the observed limit is around 22-24kHz ... but it's vital to note that even then, the sensitivity of our ears to sound at 20kHz is extraordinarily low.
It's important to distinguish between the what the ear can hear and what the eardrum can hear. Your comments are spot-on for the eardrum, but at some ultrasonic frequencies, there's more to it than that. The range varies from person to person, but often ultrasonics will cause the tiny bones in the ear to vibrate, which in turn creates action against the eardrum, which is detectable by the auditory nerve. You're not really hearing the sound, but you are sensing it with your auditory system.
Some people believe this to be an essential distinguishing component to the difference in live sound vs. recorded sound. Others think it's important in sound location. I think the jury is still out on both issues. Even if both are true, that's still not the the entire value proposition as to whether we should try very hard to reproduce those signal components. A wise man once said, "Audiophiles listen to noise, not music, and are thus not to be trusted."
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The SACD watermark will not prevent you from playing the CD-compatible hybrid SACD in your computer or any other CD playing device. There is no watermarking signal imbedded in the audio data of an SACD. Hybrid SACDs are completely backward compatible with all CD players. Further, SACD contains single-bit sigma/delta data sampled at 2.8 mHz, aka Direct Stream Digital. It is NOT heavily dithered pcm. It is NOT 96/24 pcm. There will be SACD players with digi outputs at some point soon - just not yet. probably firewire. One more point - SACDs are not high-priced. Already you can find SACDs discounted to 13.99 USD in many places. Multichannel SACD/DVD players can be had for as little as $119 USD - I just bought one at Best Buy! Best Regards, Michael Bishop Telarc International Corp.
I never did understand why they spend all kinds of money on this copy protection stuff. At some point the raw unencoded sound has to be transfered to the speakers. So you simply connect audio output jack of one player to the input of another and you press record. This is how I've recoded songs off the radio, and from cd to tape for ages. Always has work fine for me, and the only way I can think of stoping it is to make special speaker/audio player combinations. Even then a microphone in front of a speaker will get a low to high quality copy depending on what you spent on the microphone.
At some point, the data has to go to a D/A (Digital to Audio converter) At that point the data HAS to be unencrypted. This data may be only available inside the chip, but that will not stop a Chinese CD copier from paying $10K to get the chip opened and probed to bring out this signal. Once one copy has been extracted, it seems rather silly to inconvenience the consumer. Regardless, piracy will continue.
authentication of digital rights...
all of this can be defeated by a simple cable with two RCA mini-jacks, or a similar cable to adapt from audio-out to audio-in.
Is it really worth the [money|hassle|argument]?
No, Beowulf clusters can't imagine in Soviet Russia.
If I buy this POS, erhm, SACD player, will the discs I get for it not just have one or two decent tracks and the rest of it SHIT?!?! 'Cause that's the ONLY reason why I don't buy CDs nowadays.
What is the need to waste time with that crappy SACD format when you can have 24 bit 96Khz PCM audio on standard DVDs? I don't even see the need for the so called "DVD Audio" format when the standard DVD already has enough audio capabilities. And DVD-Rs are becoming more and more common. No need to waste time in "Yet Another Sony Deception" format. There are plenty of "24/96" sound cards for production on PCs, and some as cheap as 128$, are a good option for alternative distribution in a media that will play in all dvd players and dvd rom drives on earth.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.