SACD / DVD-A?

[DanG]

From whatever you may know about SACD and DVD-A technologies, which do you think is better in terms of sound quality and sound quality alone? This can take into account different kinds of equipment, etc. My vote, of course

goes for SACD technology; I believe it really is fundamentally better and more natural than DVD-A's update of PCM.

 

[aos]

After reading about how SACD works, I don't think that I could pick a winner from the technical standpoint. SACD has simpler path and more logical implementation if the sigma-delta is used as ADC. I am actually a little surprised that no other analog-to-digital methods are used (which I know exist, since they used to teach us about them), that would give you immediately the approximation of the signal instead of you having to use "decimation" filter or whatnot. If there were, SACD would loose its biggest advantage.

24/192 on the other hand is just the approximation of ideal sampling theorem, on which the whole digital signal processing is founded upon. With 24 bits, quantization noise will be close to theoretical and practical minimums which cannot be reduced unless supercooling is used and signal dynamics will be exceeding limits of human hearing (120dB?). 192kHz sampling rate is high enough that, same as with SACD, simple low order analog filters can be used as antialiasing filters or if more aggresive filtering is desired/required, there would be no artifacts close to audible range of 20kHz, and there certainly would be no need for oversampling. The advantage of standard approach is that you can use any kind of digital processing on it if desired, as all the algorithms are expecting this kind of data and this is nothing more than approximation of ideal sampling. With SACD I suspect you'd have to convert the one-bit stream to standard format anyway if you need processing done. But I don't see the need for processing so for normal music this is moot.

So I'd wait to hear them for myself first and decide by listening tests...

The bigger problem is of course that neither of this can at the moment be ripped so that you can make your own backup or compilation. I love making compilations. Good old CD (audio/data) format is extremely versatile. New paranoid formats will probably call cops to your house if you put your disk in the wrong cover box or more likely charge you a fee directly from your bank account if you put it in your car player or your portable (don't laugh, some US car rentals are already using GPS to charge you directly from your account if you speed over contracted value).

 

[coolvij]

I said SACD all the way, simply because DSD looks so promising...to me, DVD-A aint gonna do much more than give us the ultimate home theater setup....

 

[JohnActon]

It sounds like, from an audiophile's perspective, SACD would be the way to go. The DVD Audio models (Technics, Panasonic, etc) that have been introduced so far have been decidedly mid-fi in comparison to the more high-end SACD players (Sony, Marantz, Accuphase). SACD seems to appeal more to die-hard music audiophiles. I think DVD Audio is positioned more to benefit the Home Theater consumer segments with its designed-in multichannel features and functionality.

All that said, I haven't heard either technology and am currently very happy with my 16/44.1 Redbook CD player and library. I think I will wait and see which format survives for music playback and how much it will detriment the CD industry.

Very good summation of the two technologies, AOS! I learned more from reading your succinct post then from some of the longer, math-oriented articles I've perused in the big-name audio rags.

 

[ckoffend]

SACD - because that is what I own, and this is afterall, the primary basis that people rate things highly in forums!

JK - Technically my Oppo can play DVD-A, but I have never purchased a DVD-A disc. I have owned two SACD players - Esoteric and EMM labs and found that both perform very well.

 

[jilgiljongiljing]

I have setups for both, my win goes for SACD. While DVD-A has its own set of advantages when it comes to content on the disc vs SACD having just the music, SACD just sounds better to my ears. But then I cannot play both on the same player to compare, Oppo would be the best bet for such a test, but in my current setup, I like SACD. Besides I like that audiophile labels like Chesky, MFSL have embraced SACD technology and produced some outstanding discs.

 

[robm321]

I don't know if people are voting on sound quality, but DVD-A sounds better to me. Because of all the issues though, I use SACD mostly.

 

[Yikes]

From a sound quality standpoint DVD-A 24/192 wins, unfortunately DVD-A is dead, and out of the 50 or so DVD-A's that I have less than 5 actually took advantage of the 24/192 capability. They emphasized 5.1 over H.Q. 2 channel audio. A couple of the Classic Records 24/192 disc's are absolutely amazing, better than any SACD that I've heard.

Unfortunately it's only a matter of time before SACD joins DVD-A on the funeral pyre, since Sony has officially stopped supporting the format. Both formats offered higher quality, when the average consumer was not asking for higher quality.

So I didn't choose any of the choices. I've done my best to support both formats, I'm now on my fifth High res player. First four Combi-Players and now an SACD/CD player. We'll be very lucky if SACD even survives as a niche format.

 

[ComfyCan]

I couldn't vote either because "neither" wasn't an option. I wish there were more titles (other than classical), but there just aren't. I'd buy them if they existed--I love good SACD or DVDA. My preference is SACD simply because I have a much better SACDplayer than a DVDA player.

 

[BigTony]

I have both SACD and DVD-A capability, and SACD wins for me. The DVD-A sufferes from all the same PCM problems as do normal CD's, and this is not the case with SACD. I find it to have a fuller sound, more natural, and in a straight 2ch mix, in a league of its own over redbook and DVD-A.
SACD at mid-fi prices will outperform high end CD, and the discs are pretty cheap to boot, and most come with redbook, so its a win-win situation.
Shame that apart from classical its dead as a dodo!

BT

 

[Redo]

Legendary bump

 

[Uncle Erik]

I've gone with SACD, as well, and I hope it survives. Funny how the best that digital has to offer is very niche but vinyl is making a strong comeback.

 

[Gabe Logan]

These hybrid disks can the SACD be played in a Playstation 3 correct?

 

[krmathis]

Holy thread resurrection!

SACD wins for me..

 

[nick_charles]

In a quite interesting experiment Blech and Yang[1] had 110 subjects try and discriminate between DSD and 24/176.4 PCM recordings of the same material. Their results showed that only 4/110 subjects could reliably discriminate between the two formats[2] and then only by listening on headphones to single instrument or voice samples, these 4 were also young (25 - 28) and strictly trained tonnmeister students. For over 97% of the subjects the encoding format was not discriminable.

There seems scant evidence from this study that the encoding format makes a critical difference in and of itself, this despite the numerous claims and counter-claims made by folks like the ARA (PCM proponents) and Sony (DSD proponents).

1. Blech, D. and Yang, M. (2004)
DVD-Audio versus SACD Perceptual Discrimination of Digital Audio Coding Formats
116th AES Convention, 2004 May 8–11 Berlin, Germany

2. The PCM and DSD tracks had subtly different low level crackling when the tracks started. B & Y suggested that subjects *might* have detected this content in making discrimination choices.

Once when I was doing an ABX on 24/96 vs 16/44.1 I was able to detect a difference 13/15 times, this surprised me somewhat. Examining the waveforms the 24/96 had a low level distortion artifact at the start of the track which the 16/44.1 did not have.