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More on DVD-Audio and SACD
Spock the Baptist writes "This article at CNN covers the drive of manufacturers to get the public to convert from the CD format to two relatively new formats, DVD-Audio, and Super Audio Compact Disk. The manufacturers cite the superior audio quality, and 3-dimensionality of the new formats' reproduction as the reasons for customers to embrace these formats. The article also goes on to say: "An added bonus for record companies and retailers, who are engaged in a battle against piracy, is that the relative complexity of DVD-Audios and SACDs makes them much harder to copy. At the same time, that might turn some consumers off the format.""
what about hardware players? do they already have them? unlike compressed and lossy formats like mp3 and ogg, these are formats people are more likely to carry around and play on hardware players, as opposed to digital copying. so...why switch when the players are expensive and the gain is minimal?
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
I do not need new hardware, or need to buy new copies of all my music.
I would like to be able to buy compilation disks with ALL of a groups albums on it, at CD quality, though..
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
Depends on what you want. All of the SACDs I've seen have an extra track that's CD quality, and plays in your standard CD player. That'll be the biggest help for adoption - you can buy a bunch of these now, and when you upgrade your player, your collection is upgraded automatically at the same time.
Copying isn't a problem though - although you just get the CD quality track. I've already backed up a few, and it's fine for, say, your car if you don't want your discs ripped off. I don't really need 5.1 sound in my car anyway.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
This technology is complete, utter bullshit. Regular DVD audio tracks are just as capable of reproducing high fidelity music as this SACD and DVDA crap. DVD originally stood for Digital Versatile Disc. It has the needed capabilities and sound quality to function as the next generation high fidelity sound source.
These greedy bastards just want to suck an extra, uneeded device from us as well as reintroduce copy protection that ignores fair use.
I will ignore those SACDs and DVDAs until they are digitally copyable so that a scratch in my favorite record/song no longer will set me back 15 to 20 bucks.
Stop the brainwash
Between the prevalence of hearing loss (~28 million Americans, to some degree) and the ambient noise present in most urban settings, who's going to notice that these new formats sound any better?
For most applications, CD-quality is good enough.
I listen to most of my music through headphones. They don't disturb other people (normally) like speakers do and they generally have a better response curve than the most expensive speakers. How is 5 channel sound going to improve my experience when headphones are limited to two channels?
One reason, is that the download would be really huge. Typical DVD holds 5-7GBytes of data. Over a cable modem, running flat-out, you _might_ get 1.5Mbps. That means >10 hrs of download time. Much easier just to get a DVD from Blockbuster. As to it being $5 or $10, it wouldn't be. Quite apart from the issue of how much to charge for the intellectual property of the movie, the bandwidth costs would almost certainly exceed the cost of a DVD and packaging.
DVD's are hard to copy? Nonsense.
I rented the scooby doo DVD on the weekend. Funniest movie I've seen in a long time, and the production quality of the movie is great. If you have surround sound at home, and liked scooby doo as a kid then go out and rent it.
Now I've never copied a rented movie before, because I only have one vcr, but it's a good one with Dolby Surround capabilities. So I plugged the DVD audio, and video outs into the VCR's line-ins and started to record.
The quality of the recorded video was perfect. I can't hear the difference between the DVD's Dolby Digital Sound, and the VCR's Dolby Surround.
You don't need the digital precision of ripping MP3s directly from a cd or dvd. Recording from your cd player to your sound card's line in is fine. I suspect that there is more quality loss in the compression from an uncompressed wave file to MP3, than in the transfer from cd -> analog -> uncompressed wave.
Just my $0.02
i really do love stereo equipment and have certainly spent huge amounts of money on both equipment and cds. but, with the increased costs of dvd audio and super cds, who is going to pay for this aside from the few peopel who buy $20,000 and up stereos. even my meager set up is nearly $5000, and i am not about to go launching into a new format. i am even considering the absolute sin of converting many of my favorite cds to mp3 for availability. sometimes convenience is more important than very high quality. this is why i switched to cd in 1983/4.
These new formats are ploys to sell new hardware and foist copy-protection on us, at higher prices. Do us all a favor and don't buy into this crap.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
At what point does all this technology hit the land of diminishing returns? Sure you can go out and buy a whole new system to capture this great "3-dimensional" sound, but it only works if you are in the center of the speakers (according to the article). So what's the point?
When you spent the same rough amount to upgrade from vinyl to cassette you obtained a record function that was previously missing. When you upgraded from tape to CD you got better clarity and sound along with a format that was durable for years. Each of these is a sizable step. This however doesn't offer all that much of an improvement for the cost of upgrade.
This is more of a general statement, but it seems as if technology in its current manifestation is offering less for the same amount of monetary commitment. In flying this is called the area of diminishing returns, you double the throttle and increase your speed a few percentage points.
At what point can you actually expect consumers to invest in upgrading to something that gives minimal benefit for the same investment of resources?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I own several DVD Audio discs, and so far I am quite happy with all of them. The real benefit of DVD-A isn't the higher sampling rate... as many have derisively commented so far, as people we can't really notice the difference in sound quality, our ears are simply not up to it.
The big benefit comes from being able to listen to music in something better than stereo. Regardless of quality, a good 5.1 surround mix is more pleasing to the ear because it lends new dimension to the music. If this format becomes widespread, I think we'll see more musicians taking advantage of the sourround sound effects to provide better experience. Many of the DVD-A discs I own also provide additional video content as well, and information about the artist that a lot of people might find interesting.
You don't have to be a crazy audiophile to get this, either (although I am). Most places sell all-in-one kits that are more than high enough quality for the average person, and can be purchased for under 400$, or even 300$ in some cases. They generally come with a DVD player, and some sort of 5.1-capable receiver. That's all you need.
All these companies come out with surround sound systems that exist only on a single plane. Why, then, is it referred to as three dimensional? For added flare? Why else? The only way it would be three dimensional is if there was at least one speaker above or below you that actually had an effect on the audio (by effect I mean adding that 3D element). There is nothing I can't stand more than people who don't understand math. It's so flippin easy!
incripshin
Here's a scary thought for you: What if the music industry deliberately reduces the quality of CD audio when the same album is released as DVD-Audio? The wannabe high end magazines will compare the two releases (instead of resampling the DVD-Audio to CD) and attest audibly better quality to the new medium.
Actually humans can 'SENSE' fequencies beyond the 20-20 range. Dolby labs had an article in Hometheater magazine a few years back discussing the need for sub-and hyper sonic data to aid in dimensional perception. While it is unlikely that you can 'hear' a 30Khz sound you brain may still process it in some fashion. I think it was in 1999 around spring that they ran the article. Just because you can't hear it doesn't mean you should discard it. For instance if you encode low freqencies say around 10Hz you may not hear that but you can Feel it. You are absolutily correct that 100Khz is over kill, anyways where does 100Khz sit on the electromagentic list? You have to be getting close to infra-red! (Doh could you imagine being cooked by your music! ACK!!!)
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
That seems unlikely, but let's say they released DVD-As/SACDs for $12, and left CDs at $15-20. DVDs were deliberately priced low to make the format attractive, and that seems to have contributed to its success.
Now, It seems unlikely to me that the labels would do such a thing. If they were that smart, they would already have their own pay-napster and be making $10/month off from millions of people. But if they did, they just might get to that "critical mass" needed to make one of those new formats the next CD.
Why can I not get a DVD with a few hundred, maybe thousand, songs on it?
Besides Royalties?
I'm sure there are a lot of unsigned artists who would give their work for *almost free* (think limited copyright) just to be heard.
It could indexed by almost any field and then given a nice DVD menu. Possibly with several default tracks, just incase the opperator does not have a screen to navigate through.
Well, if these new formats mean that the MP3 files available on Kazaa sound better with the usual, crappy encoding, then I'm all for it.
But unless a new format means that my normal routine of Kazaa'ing files will be enhanced, then I see no purpose of a new format.
Even if artists decide -- either by themselves or by pressure from their management -- that they'll release their new albums on these new formats, then I'll just wait for the MP3s to appear on Kazaa.
The RIAA is dead. Move along. No one will admit -- and you get the do-gooders accusing us of being thieves -- but it's true. It's time people just admit: physical media is dead. Filesharing is where it's at.
What I'd like to know is what Jefferson might have thought about filesharing. I'd bet they'd see it as a way to enrich the public domain instead of the fat punks at the RIAA.
That's right. *Fat punks*. That needs to be said, too. The RIAA is a bunch of fat, fucking punks. We don't like these people. No one likes these people. They're too lame to embrace the edge and figure out what needs to be done. But what needs to be done involves looking forward, not protecting the moola stash in the compost bin like Tony Soprano.
Me, Winky, Drummer Todd put our stuff up on MP3.com. (Look for the band called 'Pink Eye' on account Drummer Todd had pink eye not long ago and we needed a name for the band. In fact, we've been working on a song called 'Jack Valenti.' And, yes, we know Maddog Jack is MPAA not RIAA, but he's got a cooler name than Hilary Rosen. Plus, the thought of Hilary reminds me of that psycho in the Stephen King movie who decides she needs to hobble James Caan to get him to write a new installment of his book. That's some sick shit, but I do believe a metaphoric parallel can be drawn between the hobbling of James Caan and the hobbling of the on-line music industry. It's a pretty common trope, I'd wager, and I'd bet even good ol' Professor Harold Bloom could find some more parallels in his beloved Kaballah if he looked hard enough or in some esoteric Gnostic doctrine that only Bloom could figure out. If you don't know Harold Bloom, he's a Falstaff-like tragic figure who teaches poetry, literature, and criticism at Yale. He's one wacky thinker, but as Drummer Todd and Winky always say [in unison when we're all smoking our Russian 'Dneiper Robusto' cigarettes that Frederico imports from a girl he knows in Moscow] everybody needs a healthy dose of Plotinus/neo-Platonic mysticism now and then.]
Certainly Valenti and Rosen.
People might be surprised at how good conventional stereo sounds if you put speakers to your left and right, where your ears are, instead of in front, where your eyes are. You get "three dimentionality" out of two speakers, like with headphones. Try it sometime.
That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
CD's (and their cases) take up a LOT of room - I just packed up two double-stacked crates of CDs to get 'em out of the way (they're all ripped anyway and the iPod takes care of the portability). I'd love a cd that can be played on a standard CD player (well, a tray or spindle one anyway) that's half the size of a normal disc and holds the same amount of audio. I don't think there's anything wrong with the FORMAT, just the BULK of it. The last thing I need is more big shiny disks. I buy 'em, rip 'em and store 'em. Smaller is ideal. :)
Triv
I read an article several years ago about the origination of SACD. Sony wanted a way to archive thier music library as master tapes were becoming brittle, and the magnetic dust was coming off of them so that they could only be played one or two more times.
Thier solution was a grain silo sized thing with robotic arms, climate control, redundancy, auto rewriting media with bit rot, etc. It was quite impressive!
I think that Sony also records all new music in this format.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
If the RIAA wasn't too busy making itself into an Evil Empire by geeks, yeah, SACD and/or DVD-A would be doing a lot better. Right now many geeks are pirating, not buying music, largely to spite the RIAA. :P
I myself get CD's at thrift and used stores.
My trusty old CD player died about a year ago, so I surveyed with an open mind. I got a Sony SACD mostly because it was a good CD player. I've only bought 3 SACDs compared to a collection of about 300 CDs.
/. SACD debate way back. You're much more likely to get better recording levels that don't saturate the medium, just because they're not targetting kids with their $50 boom boxes.
Is the SACD format better? Rarely and barely. Maybe it's a little smoother in the upper midrange. If you're just listening to pop/rock, I wouldn't bother. This would probably appeal to the classically obsessed. I didn't see any difference between to $700 player and the $5000 player.
But there is one thing someone pointed out in a
Now if you have more than two speakers, which I don't, you might like the 5.1 mode. I'd rather take the money for 6 speakers and use it on 2 superior speakers.
I still haven't seen anything that can make a choral work like Mozart's Requiem sound like a live performance. I had thought it might be the sampling rate, but now I really don't know.
Totally agree. The only decent 'hi-fi' thing I've seen of late which actually seems to be worthwhile, are superbit DVDs. These are essentially releases of popular "smash-hit" movies (like Terminator and the like) with all the "extra" DVD crap cut out. No director's commentary, no outtakes, none of that. Instead, the entire 9+GB of DVD space is consumed by the highest possible encoding of the video, after the audio track is laid down. If you're the type of person that can easily notice MPEG-2 compression artifacts, then you'll seriously appreciate the extra effort put into these "superbit" CDs. My bro is a hi-fi fanatic and audio/videophile. I got him one of these for Christmas and was impressed by the quality on his Sony Wega HDTV. Quite impressive. Definitely wasn't noticing any compression artifacts anymore!
Cheers.
That's mostly true for the vinyl/CD difference (it's possible usually to distort a CD into sounding like vinyl), but tube amps really do have an advantage over transistors: they have better linearity over a wider dynamic range. It's a small effect, but there and worth considering with really high-end equipment. OTOH tubes frequently introduce more thermal/random noise on top of the signal.
I mean literraly there are only so many chords and note combinations possible. Unless something radical comes along I think that we will only have new instruments to rely upon.
Heck not even new instruments. If you use the same melody as a previously published song, you're likely to face legal action. Four notes are enough to infringe, and there are fewer than 50,000 possible combinations.
The theoretical limit on the number of distinct works is the subject of a short story called "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson. Read it and weep.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm surprised how uninformed people are about this technology, given that is isn't exactly new.
I can appreciate the improved resolution of DVDA and SACD. The argument about the 22khz limit is quite subtle and lots of people miss the point. If a digital filter operating at 22khz isn't designed perfectly (which isn't easy), it does artifact the music in the audible range. What the 96khz and 192khz resolutions bring is the ability for even the cheapest audio system with substandard filters to escape the artifacts because they are shifted way up beyond normal hearing range, instead of being smack bang in the middle of the program material.
You won't be ripping SACD or DVDA anytime soon, or even playing them on PC's. Neither has a PC based player today to my knowledge. DVD-A uses Meridian Lossless Packing codec, and the only way to get an MLP codec on a PC today is to spend $$$ on DVD-A authoring software. I'm not even sure if that is encode/decode or encode only. I have also read that the DVD-A disk format is not compatible with the DVD-V format per se i.e. a DVD-ROM cannot read the DVD-A tracks.
Anyone ripping a DVD-A today is simply ripping the DVD-V compatible Dolby 5.1 track included on some DVD-A's.
The Sony SACD technology is based on DSD and operates at incredibly high frequencies. You couldn't design a system to be more unfriendly to digital audio (or pirates). At the recent AES show Sony were showing off OEM modules to people for encoding and decoding SACD. The reason is that off the shelf chips just don't work with their design. It's a major pain in recording studios as well, since nothing is designed to work with their standard, and only Sony can author SACD's today to my knowledge. About the only good thing SACD has (apart from the sound) is the backwards compatibility with dual layer discs in ordinary CD players.
None of this gets around the fact that in the current economic environment (1) consumers are happy with MP3's and CD's and their existing systems (2) studio's aren't going to ditch their existing 24 bit 48 khz limited equipment, especially Pro Tools rigs and (3) much of the catalog of SACD and DVD-A is boring old music for stereophiles!
1) would love to read about a test where an IDENTICAL signal source was recorded in CD and SACD and compared, BLIND, by ordinary consumers. Is the difference really audible?
2) More to the point, is there any way to STOP CD publishers from deliberately introducing degradation into the CD track in order to make the SACD sound better by comparison? Not that they would ever do such a thing, of course... but I'd like to see at least a truth-in-advertising disclosure if they did.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
$99?
I just saw the latest Apex model at Wal-Mart for $65. This isn't the year 2000. Apex and other commodity manufacturers seem to find new ways to make DVD even cheaper.
VHS NEVER got this cheap before it took off. It's a forgone conclusion that the public is going to grab DVD like wildfire. And Walmart and other "normal folk" outlets are largely responsible for this mass acceptance.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if VHS started dissappearing in as soon as 2 years. Circuit City has already stopped selling VHS tapes as of this year. The prices are steadily coming down on easy DVD recording, and once that happens it's curtains for VHS.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I've already purchased a license for the music on my CDs (since, according to the RIAA, I don't really "own" anything). Shouldn't I get to trade them in for the new format for the cost of the raw media plus, say, 15% for overhead and profit?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Blue Man Group's CD "Audio" is available in the DVD-Audio format. I have it and the DTS soundtrack is far better than anything I have ever heard from an audio CD. I'm not about to replace my collection of ~300 CDs for this new format, but if something comes out that I know would sound damn good in 5.1 DTS, I'll consider picking it up.
I've heard the difference, and it's remarkable.
My only friend who has a SACD player also has a $20K+ stereo (and I mean *stereo* -- no surround nonsense) with external amps, gold-tipped cables, etc... He played Brubeck's Take 5 on normal CD and on SACD for me. The change to the cymbals was unbelievable; it sounded like they were in the room.
Granted, I don't know how much amp/speaker investment is required before you can hear the difference. But if the investment is low and the price of these fancy CD-replacements drops, I'd be interested. As for copy protection, anyone who thinks new formats will prevent copying is a fool.
-Mr. Bonobobo
I know exactly what they all mean. I've had long discussions with my audiophile brother and I've read all the articles in Home Theatre magazine and god knows what else is out there. I'm no audiophile, but I'm as interested as the next guy in cool tech, so things like THX and DTS interest me. What makes me a 'non-audiophile' is the lack of any sort of desire to spend thousands of dollars on audio equipment.
I know very well what the differences are between THX,DTS, even regular THX and THX EX (and DTS v. DTS ES). I can run down all the salient points between composite, component and s-video connections. I'm there, man. The thing is - the end effect should be a noticeable difference in what you experience. And that isn't really there. Maybe its there between DTS/THX and Dolby Digital. Given the right equipment, blah, blah, blah. But, in the environment that many people setup their home theater systems, the differences are lost quite easily.
Know how to avoid standing waves in your home theater setup? How 'bout measuring the distance between furniture objects, walls and speakers to provide the appropriate distance for sound waves to expand appropriately? Know how to tell if the audio you're listening to has a compressed signal? Not digitally compressed to save space - compressed to change the way the sound waves come out of the speakers. These are the things that ya need to know about. If every audiophile were an audio engineer, these are the things they *would* know about. But, its far easier to spend the money on high-end audio equipment than it is to get into a decent audio engineering school, isn't it?
Cheers.
Let's see:
- Philips introduces the audio cassette in 1963.
- 1963+17=1980.
- CD-audio format introduced in 1982. Philips and Sony are the major companies involved.
- 1982+17=1999
- DVD format introduced in 1995 (Philips/Sony, Toshiba & Warner), with US launch in 1997 and DVD-audio(1.0) by 1999.
Of course, having something new, doesn't make it commercially successful. But add the hype I remember in Nov/Dec 1998, and you have a popular new format.It seems that if patents expired in 40 years instead of 17, we'd only now be introduced to CD-audio format.
This is not my sig.
I peaked out at about 8 out of 10 correct IDs, a 94% confidence. After that, my ear burned out and the confidence dropped with a series of bad guesses- I was ignoring good advice to not attempt to do a full course of 16 trials in one sitting, much less while fatigued and incapable of continuing to hear at that level. I got mad after that and blew off ANOTHER set of 16 trials real fast, and got 77% confidence I was hearing that one, even after burn-out. This is still with traffic outside and all.
I'm sorry- this stuff is not easy to consciously hear, but it has its subliminal effect and it IS real. Sometime I'm gonna take a recording of an acoustic space like my room, listen at a good volume at 3 in the morning rather than (cringe) 5 in the afternoon when I did those tests, and ace the annoying little buggers. For now, however- odds are, you're wrong.
That would be because a "THX-certified" amp does not even come close to a high-quality audio system. Let me guess: you are listening to it on small cheap satellite speakers and a big crappy subwoofer. Real audiophiles use separate speakers that EACH cost about a grand. You don't have to have them that expensive, but try listening to things on some real speakers instead of crappy surround satellites. You'll notice A LARGE difference.
The amp itself probably sucks, too. $1500 is pretty cheap for a surround amp. It probably is fairly low-wattage per channel, uses cheap components (i.e. ceramic capacitors in the signal path, not enough output transistors, insufficient power transformer), and has tons of crappy cheap sound-corrupting electronics in it, especially since you say the decoder is integrated. Inexpensive audiophile amps cost something like $1000 PER CHANNEL, unless you build it yourself (about 3x cheaper). The only feature they have is a power switch - their sole job is to amplify sound and not do other stuff. Finally, toslink is not as good as the coax output; the only good thing about it is that it does not cause ground loops.
Anyway, my point is that there is a good reason you can't tell the difference between high-end and lower-end equipment: you have tons of cheap equipment in the middle of the signal path, so the one or two good components that you have (DAC and speaker cable) do not make a difference. I can assure you that if you will be able to tell the difference between lamp cord and real cable if you get some real speakers and a high-end amp (and possibly a better transport). You'll just find that the sound takes on another dimension, one which you can't perceive with cheap gear. However, be prepared to shell out some serious bucks.