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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."
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?
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.
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Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Sony are as evil as microsoft. They seek to control as much as possible of formats and standards.
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.
No, they have not been approved, this is a Sony "standard". DVD-A (DVD-Audio) is a real standard, and more labels than just Sony's are producing material in this format.
There are players than support both SACD and DVD-A, I guess those are okay, not that I'd touch a SACD. Sony does make SACD only players.
Here are some facts about Sony's SACD players. They don't have a digital output. So that $1500+ DAC that you have is going to do no good. Sony wants only analog coming out of their box. Sony says this will get you better quality, cause most recievers won't be able to decode the 96kHz/24-bit audio as well as their built in decoder. I think they are wrong. Just about anyone who is adopting the better than CD formats at this point will surely have a better quality DAC than what they put in the box.
I'm not sure about the region coding on SACDs, but I know for a fact that DVD-A don't have any sort of region coding on their audio only portion. They are like regular CDs. If they include a standard DVD session it can contain all the usual DVD codes, including regions, but the ones I've seen have been region free. Also the DVD-A players I've seen have had TOS-link and/or S/PDIF outs.
I have a full Sony setup at my house, but I'm not going to buy any more Sony gear. They are restricting content more and more, while other companies are freeing up more (see the majority of DVD players with region hacks, except Sony's). You can't trust a content provider to produce content players that let you use the content as you want.
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 :).
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.
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.
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.
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$.
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
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...
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.
Well, and that's it in a nutshell, isn't it? Good masters are few and far between. And I'm not talking dom-/sub- sex relationships here!
Most of the crap that's pumped out of the music industry is recorded like the shite it is, mixed and mastered with the care it truly deserves (ie. none), and pressed onto cheap-ass CDs with aluminum so thin that it has peephole throughout.
SACD is just a complete waste of potential quality on crap like that. There's absolutely no reason to press Britnay Bimbo Spears to the SACD format. It will make no quality difference whatsoever. It's like feeding a fine filet mignon to pigs.
The only reason to use SACD for such crap is the anti-piracy measures. Which, as we all know, will probably be enough to thwart your average teeniebopper. Won't do S.F.A. against the big-time, big-money pirates in Asia, LA, NY, etc.: they'll simply grab pure digital audio direct of the bus of some hacked-up player, and rip that to press.
My only question is this: why are the media conglomerates so focused on the little fish, and ignoring the big fish? What are they gaining by inconvienencing Joe Noone?
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Take a regular CD player, slap an SACD logo on it, sell it to them for 3x the price and laugh and they mention "how much better it sounds".
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
Umm, at that point getting worried will do you no good as you have waited beyond the event horizon and are already sucked into the black hole of TCPA and DRM and your untrusted OS will be cut off as surely as you draw breath. The time to worry is NOW, not after the event that precipitates matters into "OH SHIT, I've got to do something before ..." and then you realize the "before" has already happened and the shit has hit the fan. Wake up people!! ACT, do not REACT, to what corps and governments are doing and trying to do. If all you do is react you have almost always lost.
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