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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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"
In general, people who listen to their equipment prefer LPs. People who listen to the music are happier with CDs.
That, in a nutshell, is the reason behind the audiophile community's preference for LPs. Those people think of music the same way Lance Armstrong thinks of chain lubricant.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
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.
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.
As a recovering audiophile (I'm in a 12 step program) I sampled SACD back when it was new, on some of the priciest audio gear around (B&W Nautilus speakers, monoblock amps, Sony's flagship $3000 SACD player) and was sadly unimpressed. I heard no difference, and thus correctly predicted its non-adoption by anyone but the audio zealots.
DVD-A and other multichannel audio formats are just not something the general public is interested in. They're gimmicky, simple as that. Aside from the gee-whiz demo in the store, they offer nothing to the average music listener. And it goes back to the main point, stereo audio when properly done, does an outstanding job presenting an audio programe. The only honest rationale for DVD-A is so they can sell more speakers and surround receivers.
In my personal expience if you want a drastic increase in audio fidelity, you have to find well mastered recordings or remastered reissues. The mastering process does more for the final product than the format. For my money the remastered Muddy Waters Folk Singer album is without a doubt the finest audio recording I've ever listened to.
The next big improvement is to go out and buy a pair of good speakers (no Bose do not count), my personal favs are B&W, but that's just me. I guarantee you'll get 10x the improvement than from any other part of the chain.
most SACDs have a regular cd audio layer, so you can still use them in current players.
besides, WHAT POINT IS SURROUND SOUND IN HEADPHONES?
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"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
When CD's first came out they were 11.99. Back then I often had a bigger CD collection than music stores did. They had a little display at the end of he aisle.
They raised the price saying they need to pay for new pressing facilities to meet demand, there were only two in the world at that time. When supply caught up with demand and the vast catalogs of the record companies were on CD the prices did not go down. Why not, the public was used to paying it by then.
Back to the topic, I think that DVD-A should be the standard. It's 192kHz more than enough for sound quality and its support of the 5.1 standard ties in nicely with all the 5.1 systems that are already out there. Hopefully it will be artfully used like many of the old Quad records were. I really don't see much of a use for 5.1 192kHz Brittany Spears disc.
If the record companies overprice them then they will run into the same problem they have now, piracy. At least the DVD-A format will require more bandwidth to pirate than current CD's do and that may help the record companies in the long run. Of course with the RIAA behind them they are usually never at a loss for stupid business decisions.
My favourite example of the exact opposite of this is cub's "Betti-Cola" (the Mint Records release anyway, not sure about the LD&K release). No compression, DNR, or clipping done during the CD mastering - the transients top out at exactly 100%. Every single bit is used to its fullest potential.
;-)
But most of the songs were recorded on what sounds like a 4-track cassette recorder, in cheap basement studios or someone's backyard - complete with absolutely horrendous earth loop hum and extraneous animal noises
Still love the album though - "Satan sucks, but you're the best!"...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
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