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| Just curious if people thought one format was better than the other. |
Unfortunately, there aren't any discs that come in both DVD-A and SACD formats, so there's no way to do a direct comparison. Over on audioasylum, the debate over which new format sounds better has raged sinced day one. It has been argued so many times that they recently had to separate the DVD-A and SACD forums to keep the two sides separate and out of each other's way. Suffice to say, there are roughly equal number of supporters on both sides who present equally esoteric technical reasons why one *should* in their opinion sound better. The only real important point is that both formats are substantially better than Redbook.
I have a DVD-A player, and until a couple weeks ago, also owned a SACD player, both of very good quality, so I can give you my very broad general thoughts. To me, the SACDs I have (about a dozen) are a very different beast than my CDs, and DVD-As, notable for the very "analog"-like sound they provide. Compared to Redbook, there's a friendly warmth and smoothness to the sound, a less "synthetic" flavor to the music, a wider soundstage, a bigger sonic pallette capable of rendering very subtle tonal information, resulting in a more "realistic" or "natural" image/presentation. In short, it sounds less like a recording and more like a live event.
DVD-A, on the other hand (I have about 10 discs), is more like "uber-Redbook" or "Redbook on steroids". If you are a detail freak (like me) I think DVD-A provides much more low-level information than I am consciously aware of with SACD. DVD-As in my small collection tend to sound more "crisp" and "hyper-digital" than my SACDs. The penalty you pay for increased resolution of DVD-A seems to be a more "synthetic" sound than SACD, a more "manufactured" signature. You really feel like DVD-A has wrung out every last drop of info from that master tape, but some might feel that it's presentation is far too close to the recording, meaning you are listening more to the original tape than to the music. Some people will like this some won't. Still, DVD-A has more immediate "wow-factor" than SACD, while SACD may be more satisfying over the long haul.
Would these impressions be different if I was using different recordings? Possibly. Would they be different if I was using two different DVD-A and SACDPs? Possibly. So FWIW, those are my general thoughts as to the differences.
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| I'm confused. Will a player like the Philips outperform a decent CD player like the Meridian 507 for CD? |
It's doubtful any $500 DVD player should outperform a recently-made $2K+ CD-only machine on Redbook. Although it is possible that SACDs/DVD-As may sound as good on the $500 machine as their Redbook versions sound on the $2K CD-only player.
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| Basically from what I understand SACD and DVD-A have higher and lower frequencies (so you can feel the base (low frequencies are felt more than heard) as well as hear it) and to give you uncompressed (dolby and DTS are compressed multichannel)multichannel audio. So if you have the right setup up with a good AV and speakers you can have the music properly surround you. Probably means investing more money to get that level of sound though. |
Yes, SACDs and DVD-As are capable of producing vastly more information at the frequency extremes than CD. However, that's really only about 25% of the value. It's what they do to the rest of the 75% of music that we hear most that is key-- SACDs/DVD-As carry something like 10X or more the information that a CD can carry (I forget the actual number). So there's just more information there, hence more detail, and a more complete, analog-like full-resolution picture in the middle.
You should do a search here, there are dozens of threads on this subject.
Mark
