SACD and DVD-A don't deliver "perfect-er sound forever"
By Steven Kim 
posted January 21st 2008 10:07AM
posted January 21st 2008 10:07AM
[Via AudioJunkies]
[Image courtesy PerfectSoundForever]
posted January 21st 2008 10:07AM
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It's also true with the new high def video formats. In a blind test, DVD, HD-DVD, and Bluray will look the same.
You can't tell the difference between 480p and 1080p? LOL wow u suxor.
If you watch them on a 9 inch screen...
If you don't see the difference between High definition and Standard definition you should perhaps get you sight checked.
Wow, you guys don't understand a joke.
What about a deaf test?
It's pretty sad how many people didn't get this joke.
I'd disagree with you, impakt, but to tell you the truth...I have a 32" TV (big enough for MY living room) and I'd be willing to bet that if I got the SD DVD of 300, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless I was paying attention.
As far as SACD and DVD-A, I can't say anything about SACD since I don't have any discs, but the one and only DVD-A disc I have, really, is the Metallica black album (yeah, I know.) The only real difference I could tell is that the DVD-A disc was mixed for surround sound...other than that, nothing much. My ears don't go to the tippy top of the human hearing spectrum anyway, and never have.
With antialiasing, CDs can sound darn good. Without, they tend to have quantization errors. But hey, if antialiasing lessens the impact of quant errors, then is a higher-def audio format even necessary, especially given that 95% of humanity can't tell the difference between a regular CD and a good MP3--and that "audiophiles" think that vinyl records and tube amps sound BETTER? Um, okay, enjoy your "warmer" sound if it floats your boat. The other name for "warmer" is "coloration."
This news is sort of irrelevant, because these music disc formats are essentially dead, except for some niche releases.
We have a DVD-A player in our Acura TL. We have ONE disc for it - the demo disc that came with the car. I have to say, it sounds VERY good, and not just because it's playing in surround.
Unfortunately, no mainstream bands are releasing on this format. So unless we start getting into the Blue Man Group or something, we aren't going to be buying in this format.
Ultimately, I can see why these formats died. CD's sound great. DVD-A's do sound better, but not so much so that most will notice. Most people don't have the equipment to hear the difference anyway.
With Blu-Ray it's a little different. Anyone with a 42" or greater sized set and the right equipment and cables, and decent eyesight, should clearly see a difference. And I think most people pay more attention to what they see than what they hear. Lot's of people are running out and buying expensive flat panels, but how many of them are complimenting their new TV with really good sound?
The reviewer makes an excellent point about production values. Dynamic range is compressed on CD's to make the program material seem louder. Over the years, record producers encouraged this practice to make their songs stand out when played on the radio.
A previous comment mentioned audiophiles liking vinyl records. Because the LP master is not the master destined for radio, there is little pressure from producers to "make it sound loud" What's ironic is that CD has a wider dynamic range than LPs. LPs are typcially use more of their dynamic range, and thus sound better than the highly compressed CD. The primary reason that MP3s compression seems to impose very little penalty on sound quality is that the CD from which we create the MP3 is already dynamically compressed, and thus not using the CD's full bitrate. Granted there are many other parameters that determine how good a recording sounds, but dynamic range is a major consideration.
In the end, we are left thinking that LPs are better than CDs, and the MP3 isn't really that bad, all because the majority of commercial CDs are mastered poorly.
There was a fantastic article in the IEEE Spectrum magazine last year that explains this in much greater detail. Google it, and find out more!
Begs the question then...
Is there really any benefit to HD audio formats like Dolby Digital+, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA over DD5.1 and DTS?
Frankly I've been struggling to tell the difference, and I've been wondering if it's my set up that's the problem.
As for CD vs SACD/DVD-A, I've only experienced 96/24 DTS and 96/24 2-channel PCM from DVD-A, but it does sound very nice. However, how much of that is just down to discrete sound surround on DTS, and just a better master for the PCM vs the old CD?
What I will say though is I do generally find on my AV system, that Flacs at CD quality sound better than MP3s, and more so Flacs in 96/24 (ripped from DVD-A). And that's against archive quality MP3s ripped with EAC and encoded with LAME. That's running through a Squeezebox. The Flacs just seem to have more detail to them. I tried as much as possible to do it as a blind test and I went into it sceptical. Not that the MP3s sound rubbish when encoded right though. They can sound amazing, just there's a slight edge with lossless and better 96/24.
On my MP3 player however, I can't really tell the difference, and that's with fairly decent Shure in-ear headphones (fitted right to get the bass perfect). It was in fact the Shure headphones that first started me getting obsessed about ripping and encoding properly as a huge amount of MP3s I had, I discovered were awful encodings. Can't hear it with the standard crap headphones you get with MP3 players, but decent headphones reveals the classic "watery" sound of poor encodings. It's no surprise though that so many people put up with shoddy downloads.
You aren't the only one. I went out and bought a whole new receiver so that I could hear Dolby TrueHD tracks on my HD DVD player and I can't tell the difference. The same is true for Uncompressed PCM on my Blu-ray player. It's possible that I may need to also upgrade my speakers, but the ones I have now sound pretty damn good. I can't justify spending any more money on it. Anyway it just shows how poor human hearing is.
A recording downconverted to 16 bit from 24 bit will sound better than a native 16 bit recording. So the experiment only proved that CDs downconverted from SACD/DVD-A sound indistinguishable from their SACD/DVD-A masters. Since there are no such discs commercially available, consumers are forced to still purchase SACD/DVD-As. Also, the writers offered no data that confirmed that the SACD/DVD-A players used in the experiment actually had an output with 20bit+ bit noise levels. Sound and Vision Magazine test players monthly, showing many cheap SACD/DVD-A players only have 16bit noise levels. Also the article still states that SACD/DVD-A sound better than their CD counterparts due to common CD mastering processes.
Exactly correct. You beat me to it.
A 16bit CD often looses resolution down to around 10-12bit due to digital jitter.
"A recording downconverted to 16 bit from 24 bit will sound better than a native 16 bit recording. Since there are no such discs commercially available, consumers are forced to still purchase SACD/DVD-As. "
Didn't Sony Classical release some CD-Audio discs back in the early 1990s that were mastered using a process they called "Superbitmapping"? The jacket insert described the process as using 20-bit masters, then "mixed" down to 16-bit on the disc. Sounds a lot like what you are talking about. Maybe there are other CD's manufactured using the same process....
I'm sorry to say, but this paper is being misrepresented. For the past 20 years, Meyer and Moran have been arguing that 16/44 is acoustically transparent, and they have demonstrated this many times in double blind tests. All this study does is to repeat the previous results using an SACD player as the source. And, truth be told, all other things being equal, that should be true. The fact is, however, that virtually all 16/44 systems aren't really capable of delivering the full dynamic and frequency response that 16/44 is capable of. The HD audio formats also don't deliver all that they are capable of, but at least they are more capable of delivering on the promise of 16/44 than 16/44 is.
"because these music disc formats are essentially dead"
That was my thought. Not like it matters since almost nothing is released on them.
Anyone who cannot hear the improvements in quality of sound via DSD~SACD compared to Red Book 16-44 CD, let alone the improvements of 24-96 on DVD Audio should be banished to MP-3 land or old cassettes forever, and banned from EVER making sonic evaluation statements in a public forum. As a classical music recording engineer, I have recorded in ALL the digital formats and analog tape formats am quite familiar with the sonic signature of each. The ONLY recording medium that is virtually indistinguishable from the live mic feed is DSD, published in the consumer format of SACD. This format is not dead and never has been. It is growing like crazy. Every title produced sells out worldwide in months or less. There are now approximately 15 million SACD players in use worldwide, and over 5000 titles have been published. It is not a trillion dollar business like mass market formats, but it is an EXCEDNGLY healthy and growing small market segment. Another note: When listened to via bad enough equipment, all the formats sound pretty much alike, crummy.
Check out this website for truth http://www.superaudiocenter.com/.
I wouldn't say it's growing. Sony just dropped SACD support from its latest PlayStation 3 SKU.
Adding to JWC's comments in support of SACD, I'm shocked to see that no one in these comments (including JWC) has noted that SACD and DVD-A are the only way to deliver multichannel audio material, other than DVD-Video disks that include lossy DD5.1 or DTS audio tracks. So, while a highly subjective debate continues to swell about whether you can notice a difference in sound quality between lossless standard audio CDs and lossless high-definition audio CDs, the bigger issue is that standard audio CDs cannot deliver surround sound.
Although audio engineers have been overall lazy to master releases in surround, the results can be wonderful. Bjork's entire catalogue, for example, has been meticulously remastered into surround sound (and her newer releases have been engineered with specific surround placements). It is an entirely new world of music listening, and there's no need to justify it just as there's no need to justify (anymore) the necessity for surround sound in movies. It's just the next natural evolution in listening to music. (And yes, it's true that quadrophonic systems existed in the '70s and failed. That was a limitation of technology at the time.)
You sound more like a Sony/SACD PR guy rather an engineer!
Quiet funny how you try to make SACD look like it's doing wonderful. 15M players (mostly from PS3) and not a thing happened in the sales of the format. Also it's been proven mathematically that DSD is inferior to PCM in many cases especially for noise in high frequencies.
SACD selling out worldwide; what a joke! Can you point me out to some website or an article that shows how wonderful SACDs are doing? Last time I checked many stores don't even have shelf space for SACD anymore let alone selling out like hot cakes!
Plus, I take a scientific study over your subjective "DSD/SACD rulez" opinion!
YEAH!!!!!!!!! You HIT it!!!!
Id like to give a double blind test to these double deaf guineas with my system! Man! No difference???? What were they listening to?? No wonder the multi-ch formats don't sell more.
DVD+RW, would you be kind enough to share those comparison study links with us?