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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
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?
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
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.
Phillips, which developed the CD standard, collaborated with Sony in developing SACD. Sony appears to be trying to avoid repeating the Betamax mistake by licensing the technology.
I'm not happy about the watermarking, and won't buy them at first, but I think it has a good chance of catching on, since the transition path is virtually transparent, and costs nearly identical.
The audio quality of SACD is significantly better than traditional CDs, even on typical home audio systems.
The players still have analog outputs. I suspect mp3s ripped in real time will sound pretty decent.
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.
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.
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
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 :).
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.
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.
Not really...the discs have a physical watermark, so you could rip them with a sacd player (you can try to prevent ripping, but someone will always find away around it). The big thing is that you won't be able to burn SACDs because of the watermark. So, you'll be able to rip but not burn. Just get a portable ogg player whenever they get released (since vorbis supports an abitrary number of channels encoding those 5.1 streams should work, right?) or an mp3 player now. But then you'll lose the extra quality (mp3 can't use greater than 32-bits per sample, right? I have no idea). I really need to read more on what vorbis can do (it works for me now, so I don't have much of an urge to), but I bet it can (or will) be able to encode > 32-bits per sample (at least for input).
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
how it works here
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Of course, SACD players play regular CD's... so uh... like Apple says, Rip, Mix, Burn.
*shrug*
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 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!
Perhaps I was not hard enough on DVD-A. I was just looking at the specs. I don't like it much either from a technical stand point, but at least it is a ratified standard.
Problems with DVD-A:
Copyprotection, uses a system called Content Protection for Pre-recorded Media (CPPM). It is a bit like CSS (they were going to use CSS-II until DeCSS was released). But the keys are 56-bit not 40. It also has a nasty feature that encrypted data can include a list of revoked keys. So if a manufacturer does something the media producers don't like they can disable their players from playing all new releases. The list of revoked keys is updated every 3 months. So if someone cracks CPPM they better find all the keys, to totally break the usefulness of this feature.
There is also watermarking included in the audio stream. It was designed to not be audible, yet can be detected in an analog output. I think if it can be detected by equipment is has to be doing something not natural to the content. That is what Sony was getting at with their physical watermarking system.
Oh well. I'll just have to be happy with my harddisk recordings of my friend's bands. They are high quality and not molested. Otherwise I'll wait for Harman Kardon to come out with a player, they seem to be looking out for the consumers.
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.
1. SACDs don't store data using 96KHz/24bit PCM. They use 2.82/1 bit Direct Stream Digital. (PCM records a 24 bit volume sample, 96000 times a second. A Direct Stream Digital recording simply indicates whether the sound should be louder or softer than before. DSD is also (generically) known as pulse width modulation.
...
Think of sending directions to a plotting device. One method (PCM) should say (0,0),(pi/2, 1), (pi, 0), (3pi/2, -1), (2pi, 0). The DSD way says up,down,down,up
There are a number of supposed benefits to recording using Direct Stream Digital, but it's difficult to edit without converting first to PCM.
Many DVD-Audio players limit the resolution of the S/PDIF output to 48 KHz.
The Sharp DX -SX1 SACD player has digital output (admttedly its proprietary, but so what? Most DACS can't decode PWM)...
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?
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$.
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that. DSD encoding is reported to have flaws when it comes to high frequencies, causing distortions.
I think the only benifits to DSD is the ease of converting to analog. It is harder to encode.
You are right about the limit of DVD-A players that have digital outs. I was also forgetting that 2 channel DVD-A can be as high as 192kHz/24-bit PCM. I don't have a DAC that will do that. I was mentioning Harman Kardon in another post. The have a straight DVD player that will output that high from the S/PDIF. I really want to see what they'll offer in a DVD-A/SACD player.
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
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
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?
I'm seeing SACD specs as being 100kHz bandwidth, 120 dB dynamic range, with the same quality for all channels.
So are they saying 100kHz bandwidth meaning the carrier would have to be 200kHz? 120 dB is about 24-bit. 6 channels of full quality, is 200kHz*6, giving you 1200kHz == 1.2MHz.
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.
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...
...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.
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?
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/
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."
It already happens. At the local film-fests, there's usually one or two really interesting things only distributed on VHS (or BetaMax, or some variation thereof), because that's the best quality format people can duplicate and send around the world without being a major studio. Once you could only get tapes or the odd 45 of small, interesting bands.
What's changed over the years is that people have been able to cheaply and easily produce in higher quality formats. Instead of accepting my friend's band will only ever release on tape, I know they'll be able to cut CDs to demo, and produce a whole album, probably with a better recording studio than was available 20 years ago (for any money - and that studio can now be built cheap, apart from the physical environment) at a price so cheap they can sell CDs at their gigs for NZD$10 a pop.
That's very empowering for the artists, just as the existence of cheaps CGI has allowed small moviemakers to make an indie film (like The Irrefutable Truth About Demons) that isn't another Go Fish or Clerks.
Combine that with a ability to easily and cheaply distribute high quality information (compared to traditional distribution mechanisms) and you've got a real threat to the existing regime - because the likes of Sony Entertainment and 20th Century Fox are big because they have distribution networks stitched up, and get a slice of every pie. Even if you're independent, if you want your art to be available to anyone other than a small slice of the potenetial audience, you'll have to deal with the distribution arm and fork over your money.
Forget piracy - what scares MPAA and RIAA members is that their cosy little oligopily is threatened by the potential for the re-emergence of the old small-to-medium studios like Elektra who could eat their lunch. And that, incidentally is why all the laws this mob lobby for specify minimum damages for IP theft - if I (or they) steal the IP of a small indie, you can't claim squat. If I steal a copy of crap bands or the Season 7 Buffy, I get hammered.
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.
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!
me too - people mod this up!!
www.enthea.org
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 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.
"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.
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
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
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...
"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
Hey, you're forgetting that today is Thursday. Thursday is the day that we don't hate the RIAA and MPAA on Slashdot. So, it's the best day to post stories about Sony.
I never could get the hang of Thursdays myself.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Doesn't it bother you that you can't make a backup, and that if/when the disk wears out or gets damaged you have to buy it again? Or even that Sony is going to use the money they made from you to buy legislators to enact crap like CBDTPA?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
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.
Said chip is covered in very hard black goop. Now what do I do?
As has been mentioned before, SACDs don't use PCM, so the digital signal, if you can find it, is totally useless.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
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.
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.
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.
To cut costs ... Sony would presumeably use off-the-shelf parts, meaning they basically need to convert to boring ol' PCM *before* running the signal through the DAC.
Of course, if they are doing that, then we wouldn't be able to hear the supposed "better sound" of DirectStream Digital, since it would be converted into "inferior" PCM in the player anyway. Maybe that's the difference between last year's $2000+ SACD players and the $150 ones mentioned in the article, though. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if Sony is blowing smoke out their ass and ripping off consumers by promising something they're not delivering - that's the American way nowadays.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
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.
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)