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New Digital Audio Formats
Hack Jandy writes "Anandtech is running an article about new digital audio formats, including DVD-A and SACD. It also discusses how the newest digital audio processors from Intel will handle these audio formats in the future; a good primer for anyone interested in something a little more capable than CDs."
No doubt we'll be paying for these new audio mediums in a direct proportion to CD capacity and cost (holds 2x audio, we pay 2x much).
My friend runs a small record shop. The basic trends he sees are:
Overall from what I see, the trend is to actively resist any kind of format that requires too much decision making, too much restriction, or which makes too much extra work. This negative wave has extended back against CDs and no one wants the majority of them because they have no physical character. I think from here on out, all new consumer audio and video formats are going to have a huge problem with adoption. The effort to adopt them is well past the acceptable limit of consumers.
I don't think any of these will really take off, at least not in quite some time. CD's are "good enough" for almost everyone.
You want 5.1 (or more) channel sound in your compressed audio? Ogg Vorbis has it today. mp3's founders are working hard to hack something into that format, but that's all it is, a hack.
There *is* a difference in sound quality beyond that of your MP3s or even your Audio CD collection. SACD and DVD-A are a whole new world. It is like heroin for your ears. Once you've heard the same album on CD and then SACD you'll wonder how you ever lived without the newfound detail.
Everyone, go out to your local audiophile shop and try it!
I just hope Apple supports them =)
Are you an open source warrior?
In my opinion, it's all going towards one direction. A global format.
I sat through a very painful lecture by a guy from Phillips telling us about how wonderful SACD was. The end story is that its backwards compatible with CD, but extra DRM goodness. The technical difference between DVD audio and SACD were so fabricated as to make me lose all of my dwindling respect for the audio industry. I wasn't the only one to think so either. They talked a lot about frequency response, smearing, head room, and trelis algorithms. The end result was it was not better quality than DVD audio, but it sold better.
Don't give a technical presentation and tell the audience of engineers that the reason the technology is better is that it sells better and is harder to pirate.
If given a choice between the two pick DVD audio.
We get to "re-license" all the music we've already bought a license for? Without a discount? Great. Wonderful. What a perfect business model they have there.
Oh, by new you mean 3 years old. My mistake.
Seriously though, these aren't new formats, they just took longer to catch on - I'm honestly surprised SACD is still around given the name branding of DVD-Audio. But I digress, these formats aren't new, computer companies are just getting around to supporting them and people are just getting around to buying them.
schild
editor, f13.net
Most of the people who prefer SACDs to normal CDs are the people who frequent HydrogenAudio.org and Head-Fi.org. They also tend to go out and purchase $10,000 audio sources. The general consensus is that SACDs aren't really going to catch on. They cost a tad more than normal CDs, are sort of transparent in sound quality, and most average consumers wouldn't be able to tell the difference, even on high end systems. The fact that CDs are such an entrenched technology, and that there are so many consumer CD players that don't support SACDs right now will only further limit the format.
DVD Audio is a slightly different story. Most DVD players on the market support DVD-A and CD playback. And since DVD technology isn't nearly as aged/integrated into the consumer frame of mind (5 years vs. 15 with normal CDs), people will be able to justify going out and buying a DVD player that supports the format. In addition, the DVD players that can playback DVD-A aren't that expensive at all, and the relative sound quality generated by playback during movies and audio CDs will make the technology a worthwhile investment to most.
I've had my SACD player for well over a year. When I bought it, the model was over a year old, and it was a second gen model.
Given the past record of replacement formats, it's not likely. We look at the dozens of different media and formats from the past and notice that only two have been successful: the upgrade from wax cylinders to circular records and the subsequent upgrade from vinyl records to CDs: and there are STILL some who think LPs are better.
This is why I think they'll fail:
1. Existing technologies are "good enough"
The most dangerous technology is that which is "just good enough". CDs have filled a void perfectly and the average person is perfectly happy with the marginally inferior audio quality they provide as opposed to LPs.
2. $$$
It costs too much to switch to a new technology. Just think about how much CDs cost nowadays: up to twenty dollars! Imagine how much DVD-Audio and SACD cost, especially as they have to accommodate existing players and feature backwards compatibility. (The current projected cost is about $40 to $50! Who will pay that for a few hours worth of music?)
3. No noticeable improvement
Though it can be digitally demonstrated that CDs have a substantially higher audio quality than LPs, many audiophiles will still insist that LPs do better in the low end. The fact of the matter is that the sound of music is in the eye of the beholder. Why? Because the quality of recorded sound is now sufficiently good that any small incremental improvements will now not be noted.
4. People are fed up with the record industry
Considering how good existing audio solutions are already, how many people do you think are going to look on this with an uncynical eye and be glad that they're getting superior new formats?
Not many, that's for sure. We have to realise that your average person feels shafted by the record industry (not the "RIAA") and so is fed up of having to continually pay up over and over for new formats, which come ever faster. First the gap between new formats is 50 years - then 20 - now just half a decade or so. It's tragic, as it means that technological improvements in this won't help matters.
Ah, well. I'll be off to listen to Tarkus now. On remastered CD, naturally.
This was a really, really uninformative article. Bonus points for being "blurbed" as about DVD-A/SACD and then having almost nothing about them.
I have a DVD-A/SACD player. It's hooked up to a home theater system that toals out at about $6,000, not counting TV. DVD-As and SACD do definitely sound better than CD, but they only sound better in scenarios where a person has a stereo that runs more than about $1,000. Below that point, the limiting factor isn't their media but the speakers.
That said, I really regret having purchased it. I'm not a huge classical music fan, and my interest in jazz is minor. There aren't a huge amount of major releases out there for someone like myself. It is amusing, though, to go to the store and see the completely random stuff that does make it out (The Bangles Greatest Hits? Queensryche?!? The Top Gun Soundtrack?).
Wow, now we can buy old Beatles records, 'remastered' into 5.1, when they were origionally mono. Just like those 'remastered' CDs with terrible sterio mixing.
Not like music should be left as the artist intended or anything; there's a profit to be made!
I haven't seen any discussion of that on this thread....
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
Hmm, thought i'd read this before.
3 7873
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106150&cid=90
DVD-A and SACD media and players are available since a number of years, the DVD-A specification is from 1999, and sony's first SACD player was introduced in the same year. Players that support both formats are available since more than a year. Neither format has caught on for a number of reasons, the higher price of players that support any of them beeing the most important imho, but there's also the lack of interesting content and that people don't want to end up with media in a format that could die out in a few years.
On the topic of SACD, SACD2 is currently beeing discussed, so SACD is definitively old news.
Almost all speakers connected to current DVD Video, DVD Audio, and SACD players use an analog connection. In countries whose copyright traditions recognize audio space-shifting as fair use, there's no reason, given a high-fidelity DAC and ADC, that the median listener (or even the 90-odd percentile listener) can't get acceptable quality through the analog hole. Therefore, any digital restrictions management on audio is moot.
As far as I know, each DVD Audio disc has two folders: a VIDEO_TS folder containing the audio tracks in the Dolby Digital format used by legacy DVD Video players, and an AUDIO_TS folder containing the audio tracks in a losslessly packed format called MLP, whose operation is similar in theory to FLAC.
Nobody needs an audio format that has a frequency range of more than 40kHz anyway because they can't hear the difference. You can only hear up to 20kHz, and you only need twice that because of the Nyquist theorem. What people need is good engineers mixing and mastering at ludicrous frequency ranges and then dithering it to something reasonable. Even though sound is also mixed at higher (and often floating point) bitrates, having 24-bit sound for the consumer would be more practical since it offers a wider dynamic range. Not that any rap or pop music has a dynamic range :)
English is easier said than done.
In the porn industry we call this Double Vaginal Double Anal. Only a few girls will do it though.
when will these become more mainstream (I have yet to see newer albums released on these newer formats)? What about supported players? And most important, what about pricing?
These new audio disc formats will probably not take off until a fellow can jog with them. Show me the $99.86 Discman SACD player, and I may buy into SACD. Extrapolate the SACD player price curve, using the history of Compact Disc players as a reference, and you'll see when SACD will have achieved critical mass.
I just hope that the acronym DVDA catches on... that would be funny.
Thats' a technical reason, and it is legit. Sony has sold many SACDs to people who don't even have SACD players. They can do this because SACDs (properly prepared) can work in CD players.
That's a huge technical reason.
As to the other technical reasons, I agree they don't amount to much. Yes, SACD is a little simpler and more capable. No, this is not going to make SACD players cheaper nor sound better than DVD-A.
If I had to pick between the two, I'd take neither. In fact I already have.
In the end, since it is impossible to burn your own SACD (due to the copy protection), I can't see how it can succeed. I'm not sure DVD-A will succeed either, due to its lack of compatibility.
I think we just have two non-starters here.
lol couldn't they come up with a better achronym than DVDA, now i won't be able to use this format without thinking of Orgasmo.
There are NO new audio formats that will replace CD. There are only two groups that want something other than CD Audio anyway: Audiophiles and the Recording Industry. Audiophiles want better fidelity and the industry wants DRM. 95% of consumers don't want either. As long as that is the case, I think it really will be something the market will control and not the big corporations. Add to that everyone already has a CD burner... and new audio formats are destined to failure.
The most dangerous technology is that which is "just good enough". CDs have filled a void perfectly and the average person is perfectly happy with the marginally inferior audio quality they provide as opposed to LPs.
This whole better-sound-from-lps is a bit of a strange myth. Maybe, on a first listening, *if* and only if you keep all of your audio equipment in a clean-room, you might better sound quality.
Since most people don't have the luxury of a clean room and a pristine LP for each listening, better sound quality is hard to get. If it exists at all.
I spent a while recording some LPs to CD a while back on some dedcent equipment (not pro or anything, but not junk). LPs are incredibly static prone. If you so much as look at them they get all charged up and attract most of the dust in the room. Once you manage to get most of the dust out of the tracks (it's impossible to get it all out, and any left degrades the sound quality) you will notice that the sound quality of any of your favourite LPs (ie the ones you listen to lots) will be degraded because they wear. Oh, and of course, you have to go through the hassle of getting all the dust removed *every**time* you want to listen (or you get very crackly sound).
With a CD, as long as you take a bit of care not to scratch the hell out of it, you put it in and get pretty much error free sound every time. With out all the crackling.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It doesn't matter how good a new format is or how many new features it offers, it it doesn't offer significant value (perceived or real), it wont take off.
Sure AAC is better, sure Ogg is better, but for most folks, even those with huge music collections and very exacting preferences in their audio systems, MP3 is still good enough. Why? Because most people care about the music, not the technology.
Caring more about the technology forces you to give up some of the music? Why? Availability. Maybe they've already ripped their audio collections to MP3. Maybe they've already invested in a good MP3 player.
Beta was better than VHS but VHS won too.
I have a SACD setup. Hearing is truly believing - my $150 SACD player blows away $1000 audiophile CD players, IMO. I had written it off as theoretically useless until I heard it, but now I'm absolutely sold.
I know that DVD-A is encrypted with a new, strong encryption and that no rippers exist and according to hydrogenaudio.org probably will not exist untill home quantum computers..
Does anyone know more details? I know for sure that my player only outputs downsampled content on both optical and coax.
Files can be copied with any DVD-ROM drive but the files are useless.
Also, what is the situation with SACDs?
No rippers seems to exist either, so it's
also encrypted and downsampled for digital outputs? What is the filesystem used and how is legacy CD-support achieved?
All accurate info and links would be appreciated.
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
Seriously, does everyone who gets a bug up their ass to write a A/V codec get to add to the madness?
Just think of the advantages.
Some may be tempted to point out these are only benefits for the music industry, and you'd be right. After all, we're just their customers; why should we benefit?
Honestly, tho, this is ridiculous. With the popularity of the iPod and iTunes (disclaimer: I neither have an iPod, nor use iTunes so I'm not being baised), why do they even bother with these new physical formats? People have demonstrated over and over again that they'd rather sit down at their computer, find the song they want, and click "Download". Sometimes, there's even the word "Buy" associated with it.
But shame on me, this is the music industry afterall... a body that wouldn't know what the market wants even after we try beating into their skulls with a giant cartoon mallet.
We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
..don't cause any wear and are on he same price range as other quality turntables.
;)
I also don't have any dust on my LPs, CDs, not even inside my computers so maybe you should just hover more often..?
Also, even on needle turntables dust isn't a problem in any recent equipment and unlike CDs you don't have to worry about 0.2mm deep scratches on the topside.
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
A rather cheap one, sadly, but the sound is still incredibly good. Dylan's Blonde on Blonde sounds fantastic in 5.1, and the choir in the Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want has never sounded better. Dark Side of the Moon is, of course, astounding. In all cases, higher frequencies sound better than they do on standard CDs.
As far as pricing, I bought most of the SACDs new for about $10-11/disc.
actually, the people who frequent HydrogenAudio.org mostly believe in ABX (double blind) testing and regularly rip audiophiles a new one.. just look at the anti-audiophile links in people's sigs to get the feeling over there. you must be thinking of another site. (yes i am an HA member but not a regular one, i just find it a useful not-too-biased resource).
Higher sample rates and larger bit depths sound GOOD. No suprise eh? They really make CDs sound like crap. Even most amateur albums are recorded at a higher resolution then CD's and resampled.
However, as usual there's much more to the story. You *DON'T* need 5.1 or 8 channel audio cds, thats stupid. Your brain can process 2 channels of audio, thats why every modern recording format only has 2 channels. 5.1 is great for movies, but stupid for music. Its basically an attempt to sell really expensive stereos/amps.
And here's the conspiracy theory: As usual there is ALOT of money to be made off format changes. There will be licenscing fees, patents, royalties, and millions of new copies of the white album to sell so you can finally hear it the way it was meant to be (note: sarcasm). But whats really happening is -- the record labels want to reestablish control of the audio format, these formats will reset the arms race and send us digital audio enthusiasts on a 5 year quest to crack their format.
Sony has lost *EVERY* format battle they've started (Minidisc, beta, ATRAC, Memory Stick, and the upcoming Cell Processor), they will loose this battle to, so expect DVDA to overtake SACD. However, I am personally resigned to not buying any format until I can make an OGG or MP3 from it, and you should be to.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
"We get to "re-license" all the music we've already bought a license for? "
Why? Did the "license" for your old music expire?
I'm not a big fan of the MPAA/RIAA but all your doing is "scare-mongering". Your old music will play just fine, be it 8-tracks, cassette tapes, or CDs. The only thing you need to worry about is taking care of your media, and player. And you can't blame "external" forces for that.
"Without a discount? Great. Wonderful. What a perfect business model they have there."
Damn those car manufacturers. Not giving me a discount when I wanted to upgrade from this horse and buggy. What a terrible business model they must have.
It's because you haven't been paying attention either.
DVD-Audio has been a total non-starter so far. Until the new "flipper" idea, DVD-A hasn't been backwards compatible with CD players. DVD-Audio has also been majorly bungled, being run by a boneheaded consortium, instead of a slightly less-boneheaded single company.
SACD is still around mostly because Sony owns it. Sony has stuck behind MD, even in the US. They just stopped making Beta tapes a year ago. Why would you think they'd ditch SACD? Sony is very tenacious. SACD also has ano enormous advantage in that it is compatible with regular CD players. Sony sold a large number of SACDs in the regular CD bins. No extra cost premium, no requirement for retailers to stock an additional item.
The major players in audio retailing are the Targets and Walmarts now, not Tower Records. Do you think Targets is going to stock a specialty item like a DVD-A? No. But Target has already sold some SACDs, because Sony sold them as regular CDs to Target. No spearate SKU means much easier acceptance by retailers.
As to people just getting around to buying these players now, I don't know that that is even the case. Neither format is taking off because people aren't seeking them out. The only reason SACD and DVD-A players are becoming more commonplace now is merely because these features are being added on for free by DVD player makes in a vain attempt to differentiate and get some price leverage back. I mean, "regular" DVD players are available now for as little as $35 (saw one at Target for $35 with progressive component out!), so they have to make some kind of play.
"Most of the people who prefer SACDs to normal CDs are the people who frequent HydrogenAudio.org and Head-Fi.org. They also tend to go out and purchase $10,000 audio sources."
How's that any different than what we see with HDTV?
Imagine how much DVD-Audio and SACD cost, especially as they have to accommodate existing players and feature backwards compatibility.
Accommodating existing players? Most DVD Audio titles I've looked at include a backward compatibility track for use with DVD Video players.
Oh, you meant backwards compatibility. You mean like the alleged "Satan move through our voices" in the song "Snowblind" by Styx?
The whole thing could've been handled better from the perspective of the record companies and from the SACD if they had done the following when the format originally came out.
That would've left them with a DRM-strong format with good fidelity, and due to PS2 ubiquity, they'd have enough market penetration to phase out the production of CDA altogether.
Fortunately for us, Sony/Philips aren't as smart as I am.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
It is very likely that there are more DVD players with SACD capability sold each year than DVD players with DVD-A capability, and each person is paying less of a premium for their SACD playback than the DVD-A people.
I have no idea what you are talking about by an increase in "relative sound quality during movies and audio CDs". Are you stating that DVD-A players make CDs and movies sound better? Are you also stating that DVD/SACD players don't?
To be honest, I think your argument is approximately on par with arguing that DVD-A will be accepted better because it shares 3 letters with its parent format and SACD only shares 2.
Yes I hear this argument ALL THE TIME. However the "analog hole" doesn't render DRM "moot". Moot is when you get out exactly what was put in. And if that's the case then why are we even having a discussion over a higher-fidelity format? Let's all go back to cassettes, and vinyl.
...are very expensive. After about 10 mins of googling, I only found the ELP one costing $10000 and up. I would call that more than just a quality piece of kit. It's very high end. I certainly can't afford one, and most people I know can't (the rest wouldn't).
:-)
0.2mm scratches would certainly be audible on an LP and might well cause it to skip as well.
As for dust it depends on what kind of place you live in. If you have nice wooden floors, then dust isn't much of a problem. If you have carpets, it gets much worse, unless you also buy a $10,000 hoover as well
SJW n. One who posts facts.
All these fancy formats: 192kHz, 24 bits, everything is perfect, until you plug your DVD-A, SACD player to your stereo, that has a 44kHz, 16 bit DSP for equalizing sound...
Sorry...
how long until
You can only hear pure sinusoidal tones up to about 20 kHz but it has been shown that in complex wideband sounds such as percussion the effect of frequencies over 30kHz is still noticable.
Deducting from sinewaves to arbitrary waveforms is not valid unless you are talking about linear systems. The ear is not linear.
Most people don't have equipment that can faithfully render even the quality of a standard CD but the frequency range of these new formats is not totally useless.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
They've been around since at least 1999 - see here.
.. or does anyone ELSE giggle when they see the acronym "DVDA"?
ORGASMO!
The DSDs (SACD) discs sound truly amazing. The Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out DSD sounds like you are in the studio. I have it in regular CD as well, the difference is very audible. The remastered Dark Side of the Moon DSD is incredible, as well as another classic, the first Boston album. I like the sound of this format. I think even the mechanical-transducer bigots (hah! phonograph!) could be convinced about DSD if they got off their $12,000 turntables.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
"In general, people who listen to their equipment prefer LPs. People who listen to the music are happier with CDs."
Another clever wittism brought to you by the same guy who did "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach".
I doubt it will be that hard. For a DVDA to be playable, the user must have the key to decrypt it. That key might be encoded on a chip on the circuit board in the player, or in the software on their computer, or wherever. That's the weak link - that's what hackers are going to go for.
All it takes is for someone to analyse that chip, or decompile that software, or find that a sloppy bit of programming leaves the key in memory in a plain form... and then it's cracked. Estimates vary, but it probably won't take too many Norwegian-Teenager-Hours to do.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
With the right software you can play DVD audio with your computer. I am considering getting a high end sound card (~$100) and doing this.
Anybody tried this? Did you notice a big difference? I have good speakers and a good receiver, but nothing spetacular. I wonder if you need super high end stuff to even notice a difference...?
Tor
Waaaa haaaa sob.. I feel so old.. that aside, I agree. But on top of that I think they are trying to mess us up. When people realized that they could sell you the same thing 3 times, but in different formats they saw a great niche. But with MP3's they got kicked in the ass.. (Yea for basement computer geeks doing stuff because they can and realizing that it is useful) So I see the industry trying to regain their old paradime of sell it again in a different format, but this time they are using music encoding. I think the best example is Sony. Ya, the minidisk is cool,. but why couldn't they just have it work off Mp3 and not they're own stupid encoding format. iTunes did the same crap with their own format, the encoder on iTues which is preset on their crappy "I can't be used on an Mp3 player because I'm special" format. Could it be because both those companies make a shit load selling the music? Conflict of interest is what I see. The movie industry also caught onto this media jumping frenzy.. lets see, reel to reel, laser disk (now that was an ugly format) some other giant disk format that my friend had, VHS, ah yes Beta, DVD, next.. oh wait the internet came to the rescue.. and I need to see if I've finished downloading "Big Fish"
I ran for the border.. and I'm not looking back!!!
I've had DVD-A and SACD for what seems like ages. The problem I've found is that unless you order them online, they're a PITA to find in brick-and-mortar stores as most times they're mixed in with standard CDs (at least the SACD ones are). Just my $0.02: The SACDs are crap. I could barely tell a difference. Now the DVD-A ones are amazing .... Miles Davis DVD-A .... *drool*
Bark less. Wag more.
> I doubt it will be that hard. For a DVDA to be playable, the user must have the key to decrypt it. That key might be encoded on a chip on the circuit board in the player, or in the software on their computer, or wherever. That's the weak link - that's what hackers are going to go for.
Please take your facts elsewhere. Every slashdotter knows that DRM is magic. You can't reverse engineer DRM with a debugger and/or a disassembler. You need magic and/or divine intervention.
Awww, look at the guy who doesn't grasp the difference between physical and intellectual property. The music content hasn't changed, just the quality level, and you pay twice for the SAME intellectual property. With the car, the vast majority of the cost is for NEW materials and services, not for the design changes. With the car, you own it. With the music, as the RIAA will tell you, you're just buying the right to listen to it.
But more seriously, I think you are confusing the ideas of being content with and the idea of not being able to tell the difference.
There's no contradiction saying that your wife can tell the difference in newer equipment and saying that most people are happy with less.
I've heard plenty of audio systems better than mine, but I am still happy with mine, I don't feel the need to spend more. And I can tell the difference between 160kbps mp3 and CD quality, but I am happy with 160kbps mp3 (I am usually not happy with 128kbps mp3).
"Next; there's no such thing as a floating point sampling rate. You're thinking bitdepth, and using a floating point bitdepth is uncommon. Most current digital editing systems (i.e. ProTools) record 24bit fixed point audio during tracking, and maintain some higher level of precision during mix; IIRC, ProTools 5 had 60 bit main buses, but I could be quite off on that."
True about the sampling rate, but there is floats past that point
"I'm with you on the lack of dynamic range in modern music though; load a Britney Spears track into an editor, then load a classic jazz track (I recommend Miles Davis' "So What") and compare the envelopes. Scary."
What's "scary" is that you have all this technical knowledge, and you still managed to compare an apple to an orange.
Various kinds of music either don't have, or would benifit little from having the dynamic range that classical music has.
Why is cost an accurate indicator of the quality of someone's system? Do you have conversations with people bragging about how much more you paid for your system than theirs? "they only sound better in scenarios where a person has a stereo that runs more than about $1,000." Gimme a break. This is audiophile bullshit at its finest, all you want to do is justify the obscene amount of money you spent on fancy blue LEDs and optical interconnects that were dipped in holy water (reduces jitter). I'm picturing someone walking into the audio store and saying "I'd like to make my system sound $2000 better today."
Something quite interesting I read in a Reg article about DRM and other "protection" schemes:
"As your reporter sees it, music is created to be shared, so there's little sense in finding technological solutions that try to stop people sharing. The real problem is that the artists aren't being compensated, so rather than engaging in futile attempts to make people not share music, something we have always done and will not stop doing, the much simpler task of compensating the artist can then be addressed."
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
DVDA... porno style
Do you have any links?
The encryption on DVD-A is much "improved" (for the content holders) and they really took lessions from DVD-video.
All the internal communications are encrypted so no sniffing of the (de)compressed audio in it's digital form.
Currently no-one even seems to know where exactly the keypair is stored, when the player authenticates it seems to read what seems random parts of the disc and possibly create a hash of some kind.
As all buses are encrypted it's all just quessing..
The analog hole still remains but very few soundcards (AFAIK no consumer sound card has this ability) offer multichannel *recording* - you need to hook up all 6 channels to your sound card and re-digitize the sound and keep all channels in perfect sync to make a decent analog copy.
On Creative sound cards even 2-channel recording is impossible - my Audigy 2 card simply refuses to record analog audio from a DVD-A player so even the analog data is watermarked.
I really wonder what this watermarking does with the sound quality, not any good that's for sure..
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
With the VBR MP3s that I rip, no one can tell the differences between them and the original CDs, even while listening via my posh Grado headphones.
And open source or not, there will always be encoders and devices to play MP3 - legally or illegally. Whatever.
I go to HydrogenAudio to get good advice about basic stuff. I ignore the posts by the people whose ears are supposedly better than my own - it's not precisely that I doubt their words, I'm just not going to buy into the "hi-fi" dreamworld of sound reproduction, it's too expensive and full of nonsense solutions.
We all danced this dance before with the advent of the CD. I am not going to buy mutliple discographies again in a new format - I just don't care.
The RIAA has reached the end of the road enriching itself from back catalogues. We can take it from here, thanks.
"Awww, look at the guy who doesn't grasp the difference between physical and intellectual property."
Oh that's rich. Being told by an AC no less.
"The music content hasn't changed, just the quality level, and you pay twice for the SAME intellectual property."
Um...NO. One you're paying for quality, which some people think is worth paying money for (Walmart nonwithstanding). Two as I indicated, you don't HAVE TO do anything of the sort. You using your CD's as frisbiees is your own damn fault. Not the RIAA or anyone else. Three, try listening to it live, and then listening to a CD, then try telling me it's the SAME IP[1].
"With the car, the vast majority of the cost is for NEW materials and services, not for the design changes. With the car, you own it. With the music, as the RIAA will tell you, you're just buying the right to listen to it."
The FAIR USE laws say otherwise. Want it to stay that way? Get off your AC butt, and vote. Get involved in government instead of whining about how damn powerless you are.
[1] Funny how it's IP when you want to get something in your favour, but NOT IP when it's against you. Slashdot *sheesh*
How come I never saw this before. Michael Jackson owns rights to quite a few recordings, eh? Michael Jackson gets arrested and... Well, you can fill out the conspiracy theory yourself. South America, I think, what about you?
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
Moot is when you get out exactly what was put in.
I hate the passive "what was put in" because it glosses over the question of who put it in. Did you create the recording from an instrument and sheet music? No? Then why should you feel entitled to get back exactly what the author of the recording put in?
why are we even having a discussion over a higher-fidelity format? Let's all go back to cassettes, and vinyl.
If you want to get a recording where you can do what you want with the raw audio, remember that there exist sources other than labels that are members of the RIAA. The RIAA cartel extends only to the limited kinds of music heard on commercial FM radio, and FM radio is anything but high quality, possibly worse than cassettes and vinyl.
There's a difference. The car you bought the actual car, not a license to use that car. That's why you pay the state $78 for a year (at least here in IL). The difference resides in that the RIAA says that you buy a license for the music when you buy a CD, but then they say that if you want the new format you have to pay full price. When licensing software, if you previously licensed said software and a new version comes out, you get a discount on the new license.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And the analog hole is always an option. I don't know what you're smoking by saying that most consumer soundcards can't record two-channel audio very well... That's how I made my first MP3s back in 97, in stereo. When I got the levels right, I couldn't tell the difference between them and the ones I ripped digitally later.
That's right, consumer soundcard and it could record stereo, and do so with no noticable noise or loss of audio quality.
Fucking good enough for me, and good enough for 99.9% of other people.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
How about a two-layer DVD full of FLAC tracks, maybe 48kHz 24 bit audio.... I mean, as opposed to the CD, the filesystem is alredy in there.... that'll be 9GB of compressed lossless audio.
Dylan's Blonde on Blonde sounds fantastic in 5.1, and the choir in the Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want has never sounded better. Dark Side of the Moon is, of course, astounding.
All those albums were originally recorded in analog stereo. Anyone trying to sell you more information than is on the original master tapes (like 5.1 channel recordings) is full of it.
0 1 - just my two bits
Whole new market for the RIAA would be to release special albums that were recorded without the vocals.
I would gladly buy Metallica, Bush, etc if I could only just hear the instruments.
OR use this new DVD-A and have all the vocals on the front centre speaker so I can very easily cancel them out.
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
Article
The intimate, seemingly effortless, "crooning" of Crosby and Sinatra was uniquely a product of the vacuum tube era, just as early rock will be forever identified with the electric guitar, 45s, vinyl, and the transistor radio.
Music has changed and will continue to change as new technologies are introduced.
There are technologies that simulate surround sound using two speakers. Not the same, but better than nothing. TruSurround XT and Dolby Surround Headphone come to mind.
Any SACD/DVD-A player concerned with quality will probably have those technologies built in.
Nobody's putting a gun to your head to rebuy your albums. If you're happy with them on CD, vinyl, or MP3, then don't rebuy them! What exactly is the problem?
I fail to see where you're the victim in this.
People see "DVD," they'll expect extras. Will DVD-A permit enough space to have menus, music videos, making-of documentaries, and interviews? I'll feel ripped-off otherwise. At the least, there should be the DVD-A album, and as a second disc a normal DVD with the included extras.
I imagine albums becoming the huge, massive 2-disc experiences that movies are. Imagine the material that would be included on, say, a Tool album.
Nope. The master tape for Blonde on Blonde is 4 channels, and 16 for DSOTM. (Which was quite a feat for the time, incidentally.)
Very few recordings are made directly to stereo; this would force the mixing to be done in realtime which would be very inconvenient.
This article talks about DVD-A and SACD as though they just started selling them yesterday. Best Buy and Media Play have been selling these things in my little town for at least 2 years... and no they don't cost more than CDs.
SACD uses packets for stuff outside the typical CD audio dynamic range - meaning, really loud or really quiet parts.
Or so I recall. I thought I posted this on a previous story about SACD, but I can't find that comment, so, I could be misremembering completely.
Well DVD-A can be recorded by your computer using the same old 40 cent blank dvds. As far as commercial DVD-A and SACD's they cost about the same at Best Buy and Media Play as the CDs. In the case of the first Norah Jones release, the CD was 13.99 and the SACD (with CD on the same disc) was 11.99. No big deal.
You're incorrect. SACD is owned by both Philips and Sony. In fact, Philips is the more important company of the two, since they're actually a technology company, whereas Sony is only interested in making lots of money with their not-so-awesome products.
I heard one of the latest Satriani songs on the radio and I loved it. I went to the store to buy the CD, it was 18.99 POUNDS! (NOT $). What a rip-off. I did the decent thing, went back home and downloaded the whole stuff of alt.binaries.*. Sorry Joe, I love your music but I'm not an idiot.
I read about SACD over 2 years ago in The Absolute Sound. It's been around for a while. I guess it's starting to get into the mass market. The first SACD player, the Sony SCD-1, was a fine piece of electronics ($5000).
While DVD-A is encoded the same way as standard audio CDs, SACD uses a novel method to encode and decode the analog signal. Many audiophiles claim that SACD sounds nearly as good as a live mic feed, whereas DVD-A suffers from the same drawbacks as standard audio CDs.
-- n
the RIAA says that you buy a license for the music when you buy a CD
It is flat-out false, and as far as I know the RIAA has never directly claimed that. They certainly do spread tons of disinformation hinting in that direction though.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
no one seems to have mentionned this format. it's basically an audio cd format with 6-channel data on it. you get 6 channels, similar playback time, as well as an existing physical format. has nobody heard of it?
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
I'm picturing someone walking into the audio store and saying "I'd like to make my system sound $2000 better today."
Here are some ideas.
"they only sound better in scenarios where a person has a stereo that runs more than about $1,000." Gimme a break.
In my experience, that sounds about right. People who really care how music sounds often spend a lot of money on their audio systems, and most people who do so claim better systems are more revealing. I'll admit we could be fooling ourselves if you'll admit this could simply be true. I couldn't tell the difference between $200 CD players on my $2000 system, but on my $20,000 system (no blue LED's, no fancy faceplates, no bizarre theories, all from manufacturers who have been in business 10+ years), in blind A/B comparisons three people were consistently preferred a $2,500 CD player over a $1,100 CD player.
There's a lot of hype and hucksterism in high-end audio because these are subtle differences, but do you really think that long-term manufacturers' more expensive models don't sound better than their cheaper siblings? I didn't open my wallet until I was knocked out by the sound I heard, and listening to music on my system gives me enormous pleasure. Even the most wild-eyed audiophile space cadet feels the same. <pathetic>Why do you hate us so?</pathetic>
above turntable (20 years old!)
Linn Genki CD
VTL 5.5 preamp
VTL MB-450 power amps
Magneplanar 3.6R speakers
Cardas cables
=S
I wrote this comment on May 3rd, 2004:
3 7873
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106150&cid=90
Can a mod please banish this user ?
It's not only insulting not to be quoted (I wrote the original) but lots of people are going to think that this loser is speaking for me. Slashdot needs some kind of community mod system where there's a "Ban" option. If enough people ban a user the account gets shut down.
DVD-A and SACD are better than CD. Regardless of different masters between formats, the new formats have a noticeably pleasing sound which is less fatiguing than CD. That doesn't make all recordings on the new formats better and it doesn't mean that a CD can't sound excellent, but the new formats have the potential to sound better. How much is the question? From what I've heard, I'd say that I'd choose SACD every time, then Vinyl, then DVD-A, then CD. SACD is perhaps 10% better than CD to give the spread. I don't care for the surround sound aspects of the formats either, that's just on the resolution. In respect to the kind of stereo you need to have to tell the difference, I think after you cross $1500 the difference is pretty clear. Below that there isn't much point.
You can find DVD players for under $200 that support SACD, and while the selection isn't huge, I see new albums coming out in the format fairly regularly -- and despite what a few posters seem to think, SACD prices are no higher than CD prices. (Most of the SACDs I've bought I paid about $15 for.)
SACD is designed to have a "hybrid" format that can be played on both CD players and SACD players, which unfortunately a lot of manufacturers aren't taking advantage of. From a technical standpoint there's no reason why all new CDs couldn't be dual-format CD/SACD, though -- the big impediment to this has little to do with the format and a lot to do with RIAA-ish politics, one suspects.
It does not matter how much "improved" the encryption is. The fact that you can play the file at all means that you *must* already be in possession of the decryption key.
It may be a pain in the ass to do, but it *is* inevitably possible to rip open your player and read out that key. The moment a single person does that then all existing SACD's are readable and decryptable using that key.
That's why they need the dumb-ass DMCA, because it's impossible to make secure DRM. DRM is not and can never be cryptographically secure because it is not actually a cryptography problem. Cyrpography is about keeping secrets away from unauthorized people. That's fairly easy. DRM is about GRANTING people authorized access and GIVING them the key and then attempting to keep what you've given to them a secret from them.
DRM is a schizophrenic and fundamentally impossible task.
All they can do is the key obscurely inside the player and hope that no one makes the effort to look at it.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
BTW, about your sig (which currently reads): You're not being 'modbombed' by some Slashdot 'hivemind', you're being correctly modded down as the troll and karma whore that you are. Get used to it.
This has been a public service announcement
I was quite disappointed by the CD. I was all set to buy it, so I gave it a full listen to, and I find most of the songs were really poor.
It made me get out my STP albums and give them a listen.
Slither ain't bad, but after 3 listens, I'm done with it.
Your shilling for us lately hasn't been returning the proper bang for the buck that it used to. Either shape up or we're cutting off your checks.
RIAA Marketing & Public Relations
I am an audio professional - note, not "audiophile", but a real working pro in the field. Higher bitrates - 24, 32, etc. have a real benefit in pushing quantization noise down below the analog noise floor (16 bit has a maximum 96 dB s/n ratio, and the bottom of that could be audible if you crank your system up so that the maximum level is, say, 120 dB SPL - not recommended, BTW. 24 bit has a maxum of 144 dB SPL... so the noise floor would then be at -24 dB SPL... way below the analog noise floor. Beyond that - 32 bits - is unnecessary).
And higher sample rates have a benefit, too... and not the "there are tones higher than 20 kHz that you can't hear, but you can feel and make a difference" claim that "audiophiles" try to spout without knowing what they really mean... Very few speakers (we're talking super high-efficiency lab instruments at this point) can reproduce a 48 kHz tone cleanly, so on that point, there's no need for a 96 kHz sample rate...
However, to prevent aliasing of the audio, the Redbook standard says that levels going into the A/D converter during recording have to be below -40 dB VU at 22.5 kHz... To do so, and yet pass 20 kHz cleanly requires such a steep brick-wall filter that there is some serious distortion, ringing, etc. back down lower in the audio band. Moving the requirement up to 48 kHz (with a 96 kHz sample rate) allows the engineers to use much softer filters that will not cause so much distortion - a 3 dB drop through a filter causes a 45 degree delay in the phase, so the higher you can push those delays, the better.
And that's why 96 kHz and even 192 kHz have some benefit. But it sure ain't so you can hear a 48 kHz or 92 kHz tone.
-T
In design, DVD-A and SACD are just about as opposite as you can get... Ignore multiple channels, just look at one channel: DVD-A is essentially the same as Redbook audio (16-bit, 44.1 kHz PCM) except much higher (24-bit, 192 kHz, but still PCM).
SACD, on the other hand, has a 1 MHz sample frequency, and only 1 bit. Instead of asking at each sample "what level is the audio, on a 24-bit scale", it asks many times more often "is the level at this microsecond higher or lower than it was last microsecond?". And thus, you get 1 or 0.
Functionally, the difference ends up in the way the encoded wave appears: whether is a string of data representing multi-bit samples, or whether it's a string of data that represents the actual analog wave, digitally:
4 bit sine wave in PCM: 1010 1011 1100 1101 1110 1111 1110 1101 etc.
1 bit sine wave: 11111010100000000000101011111111 etc.
And that's the difference.
Whether they sound better/worse is up for debate, but there is a huge technical difference between the two formats.
-T
"For a format to be very successful it has to be compelling to the masses and not offer something so boringly incremental that it doesn't even matter."
A CD sounds fine, but it doesn't hold much music. Same form factor, but holding perhaps 40-100x as much music would be compelling.
Of course, I don't imagine the RIAA members all the eager to sell us something like this, but that's about the only thing left.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"Many audiophiles didn't want it, and the buying public were content with vinyl and cassette."
Not true.
Vinyl records were always considered a bit of a compromise. What consumers wanted (and never got) was an "indestructable" format that wouldn't scratch or skip.
Those of us who were old enough to be around when CD's were introduced got a rude shock when (a) CD's were easy to scratch (b) They skipped (or stuck).
What we got was a better form factor, and better sound. And it was better sound. Plus Vinyl records were a PITA to deal with.
CD's were and are "good enough".
Or, I should say, the recording industry does not seem to be interested in offering us a format that has some actual benefit for the consumer.
"Beta was better than VHS but VHS won too."
This is off base and wrong.
Care to tell us how Beta was "better"? AFter you answer, I'll tell you where this is incorrect.
Most people don't have good enough sound setup to hear the true quality of an audio CD. Even if you have the perfect equipment, often times the surrounding gives you much more noise, especially if you live in the city. The demos they gave to introduce new formats often sound better simply because they use better speakers in a sound isolated room.
Tracks mixed for additional channels might sound better because the mix can more easily position sound than stereo. However, it's more complicated to setup a 5.1 speaker system for the correct sound image just because of the number of speakers involved, and furnitures and other obstacles in the sound-path.
What the consumer really needs is actually an intelligent sound system that would adapt its characteristics to the way it is setup at home. It would deliberately alter the sound it outputs to sound better in the given environment. I can already see a commercial headline, "make your traditional audio CD sound like DVD-Audio," which is ironic so to speak. While a very useful system indeed, I can see how audiophiles are going to shun from it for the desire of prestine sound.
I once had a signature.
This reminds me of something I've read somewhere...
Some guy (after saying he has a $30K sound system with gold-plated wires/connectors, of course) said the new Apple *Lossless* CODEC was really better than MP3, WMA, AAC and other, but still lacked the depth and quality of the original CD.
I guess he thought "lossless" was subjective or something. I've never laughed so hard in my life.
This is a _common_ repost that always seems to get modded up.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
DVD-A is supported by most DVD players, but not by CD players. Most SACDs are the hybrid type that work with CD players, but a few "universal" DVD players like my Pioneer DV-47 and DV-45 support them as well. For classical music, which is most of what I listen to, SACD seems to be leading in title availability, and only adds a couple dollars to the price.
I tried a double-blind test of two albums I have in both CD and SACD, Bach's Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould (the 1982 recording), and Hickox's recording of Vaugan-Williams' Norfolk Rhapsodies and Pastoral Symphony (technically, the SACD version is not "pure" DSD but rather converted from 24bit/98Khz PCM).
I listened to them from a Pioneer DV-45 through a Headroom Little headphone amp and Sony MDR-F1 headphones. The double blind consisted of shuffling the discs with my eyes closed and popping one of them in the player. I then tried to guess whether what I was hearing was SACD or CD. 3 times out of 5, I failed.
I retried the experiment after careful A/B listening to the discs, and I was then able to distinguish them in 4 out of 5 cases. Glenn Gould's humming along is a little easier to detect.
I am sure you could get better separation using a more expensive setup than my $1000 one, but I have a hard time believing it is going to make a huge difference. The audiophile world is full of companies selling snake oil like $1000 power cords, and relying on cognitive dissonance to convince buyers they can actually hear a difference.
Conclusion: the difference is there, but it is very minimal. Don't believe the SACD or DVD-A advocates who tell you about "night and day" differences, no more than you should to vinyl LP advocates who do it mostly because of the perverse retro chic.
If you have a good surround setup, you may benefit from the multi-channel experience, but in the real world most recordings are not that well mastered, and that is going to be the limiting factor in most cases.
If you want the best audio experience, get off the couch and go to a live concert. The home audio experience is going to be at best 25% of the real thing. Paying $50,000 on an audiophile setup to go from 24.5% to 24.99% is a phenomenally stupid waste of money.
My conclusion is that the much-maligned CD Audio is an excellent format that exceeds the useful parameters of any home audio experience, and am busy backing up my CD collection to lossless codecs on my home computer.
You get huge dynamics, huge frequency resolution, etc. but with what speakers will you be able to reproduce the sound?
Having your normal speakers with SACD is like having muddy broken bottoms of a Coca Cola bottle as eyeglasses when watching holograms.
I do not moderate.
I don't know much about DVD-A's encryption, other than you can obviously decrypt it since you can listen to it.
I do know that SACD cannot be output on standard digital outputs. This is because SACD cannot be represented by standard digital outputs. Digital outputs are PCM, and SACM is DSD. You would have to downconvert it to output it on PCM outputs at all.
Sony does allow digital output of SACD from their high-end SACD players to their ultra-high-end amps (one model right now). It comes over Firewire and it is encrypted. They will not even release the key so that other vendors' SACD players can emit it or other vendors' amps could receive it.
discs would be perfect for any new audio standard, storing 1.8GB a piece if I remember correctly. Then Discmans would become as small as MiniDisc players or possibly smaller, yet the production costs of media would be cheaper as it's already an accepted format.
% mkdir
% ls -dF
That was called MiniDisc. Looks like you didn't buy one. A lot of people did (mainly in UK/Europe) but not enough to make it into any sort of meaningful standard.
..and frankly, CD"s did drop in price, at least comapred to the extreme premium they were priced at on launch.
Frankly, when CD's first launched, they were very very expensive, as were the players, and certainly didn't have many of the attributes given to them hear (they skpped, they skipped badly) - and certainly were not portable. Sony developed MiniDisc as a portable format precisely BECAUSE CD's didn't travel and didn't play after gaining tiny scratches. The players unfortunately developed by the time MiniDisc ganing some sort of popularity, dulling many of it's USP's (and they were also very expensive too)
You clearly misunderstood my post or you talked right out of your arse.
Recording two channels is not enough - we need 6-channel recording to copy an analog 5.1 audio track.
You COULD do this with a consumer sound card but it would take three passes and would require laborous post-processing to sync the three recordings back to a 5.1 track.
Also, if the keys are inside custom chips they won't be extracted without some serious equipment including a couple of scanning electron microscopes AND a complete blueprint of the chip insides that you simply won't get anywhere.
If cracking DVD-A is as easy as DVD-V, where are all the rippers?
Where is even the most basic information about the keys, even the most basic information how the data is decrypted and moved around?
DVD-V's weakness was storing some of the keys outside hardware, that made DeCSS possible. Also, the bus could be sniffed and the keys were always stored at the same place on the disc.
All these shortcomings have been corrected with DVD-A, so my bleak prediction is that ripping the full fidelity tracks won't happen within the next five years. (note that DVD-A also checks the physical parameters of the disc so like with crippled DVD-R discs you can't physically make a 1:1 copy)
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
To elaborate on this, you'll find that most audio is recorded in multi-track. It's the way it's always done and it's why we're lucky to get some great stereo mixes. It's not just a pair of mics in the studio - there can be several dozen in the case of a complex recording and it's all in the production stage that it's all thrown together.
This is how we got the quad recording of Dark Side Of The Moon and Tubular Bells - DSOTM was remixed for 5.1ch SACD (the mix is substantially different to the quad) and Tubular Bells was simply restored and remastered from the original recording and kept in its original 4 channel mix.
>The fact that you can play the file at all means that you *must* already be in possession of the decryption key.
Well, it means that your "trusted" DRM-player knows the second part of the keypair - not "untrusted" human beings like you and me.
I completely agree that absolutely robust DRM is an impossible task, however ripping keys inside custom chips will take years and huge resources ($5M+) even from professional copyright infringers and even after that the actual algorith will be still unknown (and you can't sniff it since all traffic until the D/A stage is encrypted).
SACD has been in the market from 1999, five years and still not a single method to rip the digital data out of the disc and DVD-A's DRM is even stronger on the paper.
This is not something that Norwegian teenagers can crack - but I truely hope that I will be proved wrong or I simply won't ever purchase any SACD of DVD-A titles.
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
MP3. once all your stuff's converted to MP3 or similar, then it's backed up on your home machine, on disks, on your ipod.
it's no longer at the mercy of scratches and hot sunlight.
http://www.audiorevolution.com/news/0800/09.dvdwat ermark.shtml
I really liked the bit about "watermarking causes 24-bit resolution to drop to even less than 16-bit in practise..."
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
Of how much it will cost to get one's entire music collection in a new format? Two up front and two in the rear is probably quite accurate.
:P
Besides, how the hell am I supposed to get The Shizit to re-record with super-hi-fi equipment when they've broken up?!?! That's bullshit
You are correct, of course, that recording 5.1 in analog is a problem. However, if DVD-A or SCDA catch on and decryption is too difficult, recording 5.1 won't stay a problem for long, heh :)
Back to decryption... If decryption will be possible in software, it will be crackable relatively easily. Will there be / is there any consumer software that can play these formats, where the decryption is done in software, not hardware? If so, game over. If not, then the utility of these formats is severely degraded vs. what people are currently used to.
Meh, in any case, I'll be refraining from buying any of this shit, and I'll encourage others to do the same.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
The technique is not novel. It's Delta-Sigma. It's been used in CDs equipment for a decade. But it's no good for storing a signal. Because you can't dither a 1 bit signal. I guess Sony forgot that. That is why SACD is inferior to CDs over 11kHz. DVD-A suffer no drawbacks, neither does CDs. SACD sucks. DVD-A is overkill.
Especially now with new home stereo receivers incorporating digital audio connection cable connections.
What's nice about both Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio is that they eliminate the biggest complaint about Compact Discs, namely the harsh-sounding treble frequency sounds due to the relatively low 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Under DVD-A and SACD, the high notes on a piano, violins and cymbals sound pretty much exactly the way you hear it in a live performance. Indeed, that's why many people who've heard DVD-A and SACD note how much warmer sounding these new formats are compared to Compact Discs, mostly due to the dramatic reduction in treble frequency distortion.
I say within the next 18 months we'll see software that will allow computer users to create their own SACD and/or DVD-A discs using DVD burners and/or we'll see new DVD recorder drives that can create DVD-A or SACD discs.
They do, and this led to many problems. Most of the early DVD-A players would not function without a TV. You needed it to use the menu to select which version of the disc to listen to, etc. I don't know about you, but when I put a music disc in, I don't necessairly want or need a display hooked up.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Ripping a chip is not trivial, but it's not as hard as you think. The key extraction, and even algorithm extraction (if necessary) would be an interesting project for a bright student with access to a suitably equipped college lab.
SACD may have existed since 1999, but no body really cares about it. If SACD sales hit 10% of the level of CD sales then someone is going to take an interest and throw one of these chips under a microscope.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
CD players will be blind to the SACD layer and will play the CD layer. SACD players can see both and will play the superior SACD layer on the disc.
Thanks for the info yodha!
Thanks for the info Alsee!
:(
I hope somebody manages to rip off the watermarking from DVD-A titles, some tests at hydrogenaudio show that many people find the slight but clearly audible hiss or buzz caused by it very distracting.
I would love to get some classical pieces in 5.1 DVD-A but I won't buy a crippled format no mater what