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.""

Comments

players

[dollargonzo]

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?

CD's are good enough and cheap.

[WittyName]

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..

Copying

[Anonymous DWord]

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.

Bullshit technology

[Jeppe Salvesen]

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.

Headphones?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Buy it for your pet bat.

[wunderhorn1]

Sure, DVD-Audio sounds better... to your pet bat. Otherwise, the 44.1 kHz sampling rate more than covers the frequencies our ears are capable of hearing, and with a greater dynamic range than LPs. Hello? No human could hear 100kHz frequencies, even at ear-splitting dynamic ranges over 120dB, *even* if they could afford the speakers to reproduce them.

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.

Re:Audio Concept

[Jobe_br]

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.

Melancholy Elephants

[yerricde]

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.

Quality; deliberate degradation of CD track?

[dpbsmith]

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.

Re:Quality; deliberate degradation of CD track?

[uqbar]

They don't need to do this - in the rush to cash in on the CD jackpot, 100's of your favorite records were rushed through mastering with absolutely no care whatsever. The first generation of SACD mastering is being done with meticulous care. So for example, all those "digitally remastered" Rolling Stones reissues from the 90's have awful stuff like drop outs on them. Even without using the SACD layer of these releases, the new Stones records sound amazingly better.

Anyhow here are a few points:
1) the mixers and mastering engineers are still learning how to use multi channel formats. Just as early stereo records sound awkward,expect similar awkwardness in the early years of these formats.
2) I don't think most of the folks here have heard these formats, so it's stupid for them to argue whether or not they sound better.
3) With multichannel formats, spatial imaging is easier to attain than in stereo. The surprising result is that speaker and listener placement is actually less critical than it is in stereo. So unlike with stereo, you can move around the room and still have good imaging.

Re:well well well

[BobBonobobo]

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

Re:well well well

[Jobe_br]

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.