DVD-Audio and SACD - have these formats a future?
Mar 6, 2010 at 4:54 PM Thread Starter Post #1 of 31

GilesM

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I am looking for opinions, a few years ago I really thought that DVD-A or SACD would take over from CD. Now it seems they have been by-passed by HDD storage and mobile players, MP3 etc...

I have some DVD-A's and SACD's and they really are very good, but do these formats have a future?

Are they going to be surpassed by HD flac files while CD stays just as it is?

It seems such a shame that quality formats like these seems to have been rejected by 'joe public' while folks like your good selves who care about audio quality see the benefits.

What do you all think?

Should I invest in these any further or just move to high def flac files?

Just heard the latest : Blu-Ray Audio discs! wow, will this fail as well?
 
Mar 6, 2010 at 5:41 PM Post #2 of 31
short answer: no

long answer: ... well it's not NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...

people (as in the "joe six pack" types) have become happy with buying lossy music through itunes... often the lossy files are cheaper than the CD (at most brick and mortar stores) and they have the option to cherry pick the songs they want to buy

if they could even find DVD-As or SACDs they saw higher prices than the CD versions and on top of that they learned they would likely need a new player to handle these formats (you'd probably be surprised at how few people know a PC can play DVD-A with the right software)

add to that the fact that the noticable benefits of these releases generally come from the fact that the SACD or DVD-A uses a different master and a CD using the same master would only have a very subtle difference that average joe won't hear through his $20 headphones

also i must ask... have there been any SACD or DVD-A releases recently? any that weren't classical or jazz?
 
Mar 6, 2010 at 5:56 PM Post #3 of 31
yes, it seems that DVD-Audio and SACD have been consigned to the bin of audio formats.
Such a crying shame that the general public don't appreciate quality music formats.

I have been looking at DVD-A and SACD and your right it's mostly Jazz/Classic on SACD and precious little on DVD-A.

I wonder if the new Blu-Ray Audio discs will go the same way...?
 
Mar 6, 2010 at 5:59 PM Post #4 of 31
yeah i don't think so. i'm happy with vinyl, more "mainstream" music (not classical) is released on LP... hopefully that stays around, because i just bought a new turntable...
 
Mar 6, 2010 at 8:14 PM Post #5 of 31
Quote:

Originally Posted by salannelson /img/forum/go_quote.gif
yeah i don't think so. i'm happy with vinyl, more "mainstream" music (not classical) is released on LP... hopefully that stays around, because i just bought a new turntable...


Lol. I'm happy with vinyl for alt.rock LPs and modern stuff. Classical - I end up trawling to find on the net - mostly from artists who were never transposed onto CD.

No problem with vinyl going away; the record industry has picked up after the watershed of the 90's when CD peaked. There's a definite market for it - and it's a cult and collector market too. Have a look on CDwow.com - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's new album on vinyl costs a rip roaring £24,99 compared to £13.49 on CD, or a rip-off £12.99 for MP3 download. And their albums regularly command up to US$150 for their vinyl. That's the 'new' vinyl market: niche.

As for Blu-Ray, it looks like Walt Disnified colours. Kind of ultra fake.

What's the story with SACD? Was it too pricey to make it into mainstream? What about XRCD, HDCD, DSD, LPCD? Are these all marketing ploys, based on the same digital technology>?
 
Mar 6, 2010 at 9:21 PM Post #7 of 31
For how much longer will you be able to buy a new SACD player? If it gets to the point that you can no longer buy a new SACD player then the format will be dead and your SACD discs will be only nice shiny things with digital music trapped on them.

So how long do the SACD players have till companies stop making them?
 
Mar 6, 2010 at 11:06 PM Post #8 of 31
This is an interesting thread so far. I made up my mind to forgo Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio years ago when I realized that downloading music onto cheap and massive hard drives was the future. I stopped buying SACDs and DVD-Audio discs for good. In fact, I purchased my Resolution Audio Opus 21 full stack system to optimize playback for the old Red Book Compact Disc format because I simply can not afford a tip top high resolution source component like Data Conversion System (dCS) or Wadia...at least not yet. I am building a low resolution music server on my Toshiba netbook with 128kbps .mp3 files. Hooking up a pair of Grado SR-60is to the headphone jack on my netbook produces acceptable sound quality and convenience. I will be getting into the high resolution legal downloading scene later this year though.
 
Mar 7, 2010 at 2:02 AM Post #9 of 31
Quote:

Originally Posted by GilesM /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I wonder if the new Blu-Ray Audio discs will go the same way...?


There may or may not be many releases but one is thing certain. BD has reached mass adoption, something SACD and DVD-Audio failed to do. If you're speaking of profile 3, nether a player or disc has been manufactured to date. All the current "music discs" play on regular BD players, the same that can boot up Harry Potter.
 
Mar 7, 2010 at 2:29 AM Post #10 of 31
Quote:

Originally Posted by plaidplatypus /img/forum/go_quote.gif
In my opinion it wasn't marketed enough. If Sony pushed it like they pushed BluRay, I believe it could have taken off.


The biggest disadvantage of SACD was that it couldn't be, nor was it supposed to be, played back on a computer (CD layer in hybrid SACDs aside). The whole format was conceived such that copying would be pretty much impossible (something that gave record company execs a big headache at the time). Even if you managed to access the DSD audio stream, you couldn't do anything with it.

In other words, for folks with PC-based music setups, SACDs are Useless with a capital U.

One of the smarter things I've seen so far is hi-res (e.g. 24/96) audio tracks on regular video DVDs. Not sure how compatible that is in terms of DVD players, but you can most certainly access that kind of material with a PC.

HDCD, btw, is a spiced-up redbook CD hiding extra information in the least significant bit. You can software-decode them these days, at least with some of the more popular options.
 
Mar 7, 2010 at 5:49 AM Post #11 of 31
I hope not, I hope that digital distribution begins giving 24bit/96khz music out as standard. But so far even lossless isn't the industry standard so it will probably be a while till we are satisfied

frown.gif
 
Mar 7, 2010 at 6:06 AM Post #12 of 31
Interesting thing happened yesterday. Before learning that I was getting ripped off on sq I used to dl mostly 256 kbps mp3 off Amazon. Now I get the cds and rip them to flac. Well, yesterday I just had to hear an old Fate's Warning album and I wasn't going to wait, and since it was only $7.92 on Amazon I went ahead and downloaded it. Well lo and behold it's 320 kbps. Fascinating. This is the first time I've ever gotten this mp3 quality from Amazon. I wonder if this will soon become standard as more people catch on to the fact that they are listening to crap.
 
Mar 7, 2010 at 6:23 AM Post #13 of 31
wow, am I depressed. I had no idea eveyone was so glum. I'm banging my brains out in a different thread in the source forum to try to figure out how to rip/download and play high res from some kind of hdd device, and i've gotten zero response.... Does that mean the only way to manipulate the 50-60 sacd's/dvd-a's i've got is to keep swapping them in and out of the player? I've read up a little on ripping hi res formats, and it certainly doesn't seem like there's the quick and easy solution I was hoping for, and i've yet to find high res downloads of what I want to listen to.

as to why no one flocked to these formats- i've got to say, whem I got my first ipod (late- as always- maybe 1998 or so), I thought the sound was incredible through those little white earbuds. When my boss got me some bose qc 2's, I was in heaven- what i'd give to be able to get back that feeling of awe. Now i'm all upgradeitis-ed, so while i'm still blown away when listening to my multi-thousands-of-dollars headphone rig, I find myself slipping sometimes into "gee, this would be even better with copper cables instead of silver" or "maybe I need that line conditioner after all." i'm sharing this because, relatively speaking, joe and joanne average consumer are still thrilled when they see the flashing lights and downloadable apps and touch screen and pandora-on-the-go of their beloved iphones, so when they listen to their 128 or 256 kbps favorites, they're still perfectly content, and I sometimes envy them.

but then I put on a peter gabriel sacd, power up my tube rectified singlepower sds with tung sol round plate 12sn7's, slip on my jvc hp-dx1000's, and float away, carried by incredible music that sounds incredible, and appreciate how lucky I am to have the means and motivation to aim a little higher, and this incredible community to help me along the way.

I can't imagine anyone's still reading this, even I had to check the thread title to remember what I was supposed to be writing about.
 
Mar 7, 2010 at 6:34 AM Post #14 of 31
Quote:

Originally Posted by chzplz /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I can't imagine anyone's still reading this, even I had to check the thread title to remember what I was supposed to be writing about.


actually, i read every word.
 

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