[Chri5peed]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sgrossklass Many '80s CDs sound pretty nasty because of the modest quality of A/D equipment back then, so if the original recording was done on oldschool analog tape it is usually beneficial to re-record this. All-digital recordings can usually only be "improved" with dirty psychoacoustic tricks.

Thats probably why its better then? Just bein rerecorded with better equipment, simillar to the 98 Iron Maiden remasters I bought.

All pre-1994 Queensryche albums have been remastered in fact. Lucky I got into them after they did this.

 

[JahJahBinks]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BubbleChamber Pardon my ignorance, but does that mean a ordinary CD player can play SACD or HDCD as long as it's hooked up to a 24 bit DAC, since the CD player is merely used as a transport and all the decoding is done at the DAC? Please advice.

This is a very good question.

I am going to quote from wikipedia:

"Objective lenses in conventional CD players have a longer working distance, or focal length, than lenses designed for SACD players. This means that when a hybrid SACD is placed into a conventional CD player, the laser beam passes the high-resolution layer and gets reflected by the conventional layer at the regular 1.2 mm distance, and the high-density layer is out of focus. When the disc is placed into an SACD player, the laser is reflected by the high-resolution layer (at 600 µm distance) before it can reach the conventional layer. To the same point, if a conventional CD is placed into an SACD player, the laser will read the disc with no problem since there is no high-resolution layer."

Even though you need a DAC and a player designed to play music encoded at higher sampling rate, you still need the optical mechanism to read that data.

 

[Xakepa]

Quote:

Originally Posted by coolmanvn1 can someone explain why increasing bits improve sound quality? thanks

Dynamics, dynamics, dynamics...the range b/w dead silence and out loud is divided into ... 512(24*24) levels, not 256. It could be argued weather our brain could distinguish 0.xdB somewhere in a middle of a drumroll, but still it gives more flexibility to the mixing engineer...and MP3 modeling algorythms.

 

[Xakepa]

Quote:

Originally Posted by coolmanvn1 can someone explain why increasing bits improve sound quality? thanks

Dynamics, dynamics, dynamics...the range b/w dead silence and out loud is divided into ... 512(24*24) levels, not 256. It could be argued weather our brain could distinguish 0.xdB somewhere in a middle of a drumroll, but still it gives more flexibility to the mixing engineer...and MP3 modeling algorythms.

 

[BubbleChamber]

Quote:

Originally Posted by JahJahBinks This is a very good question. I am going to quote from wikipedia: "Objective lenses in conventional CD players have a longer working distance, or focal length, than lenses designed for SACD players. This means that when a hybrid SACD is placed into a conventional CD player, the laser beam passes the high-resolution layer and gets reflected by the conventional layer at the regular 1.2 mm distance, and the high-density layer is out of focus. When the disc is placed into an SACD player, the laser is reflected by the high-resolution layer (at 600 µm distance) before it can reach the conventional layer. To the same point, if a conventional CD is placed into an SACD player, the laser will read the disc with no problem since there is no high-resolution layer." Even though you need a DAC and a player designed to play music encoded at higher sampling rate, you still need the optical mechanism to read that data.

Thank you much for the info. I have another question if you don't mind, on these SACD or HDCD CD Players, usually there is an additional decoding chip for SACD or HDCD. Hence, even though my transport is capable of reading the HD layer, the DAC still needs a special decoder ?

 

[JahJahBinks]

The decoding chip should kick in before the digital signal going out of your transport. Now, HDCD is a proprietary process, and no accurate technical description has been released to the public. SACD uses direct stream digital which has much higher sampling rate than conventional CD, so your DAC has to be designed in handle this type of signal in the first place.

 

[sgrossklass]

Quote:

Originally Posted by JahJahBinks SACD uses direct stream digital which has much higher sampling rate than conventional CD, so your DAC has to be designed in handle this type of signal in the first place.

And of course, you have to get it there somehow. Which is less of a problem inside of an SACD player, but you won't see a DSD signal or a converted PCM version thereof on a digital out. This is only possible with a hardware hack; Glassman was working on a mod board for players though I don't know what the status on this is.

 

[Cage]

Quote:

Originally Posted by coolmanvn1 can someone explain why increasing bits improve sound quality? thanks

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xakepa Dynamics, dynamics, dynamics...the range b/w dead silence and out loud is divided into ... 512(24*24) levels, not 256. It could be argued weather our brain could distinguish 0.xdB somewhere in a middle of a drumroll, but still it gives more flexibility to the mixing engineer...and MP3 modeling algorythms.

These should be 2^16 = 65.536 (16-bit) and 2^24 = 16.777.216 (24-bit).

Sound is a continuous signal. This has to be approximated on a CD. You do this by sampling the signal a number of times per second, 44.100 times for a cd, and assigning values to those samples. Those values range from 0(silence) to 65.535(full volume) for a cd (16-bit). When you use a higher sample rate, you have more samples. With a higher bit depth you have more accurate samples. Hence, with a higher bit depth (or sample rate) the original signal can be more closely approximated and it will sound better.