[Gluegun]

Lessee here....what has the most potential for quality sound?

From most to least, in POTENTIAL sound! THIS IS HEARSAY, PLEASE CORRECT ME.

*live performance
*(The master recording tapes, before anything is done to them)
*LP (and you DON'T need to be an extreme audiophile to get quality LP sound! You just gotta get nice used stuff!)
*(there's a big gap here where there isn't anything)
*SACD (two channel)
*DVD-A (two channel)
*SACD (6 Channel)
*DVD-A (6 Channel)
*HDCD
*XRCD
*DTS CD ??
*Dolby Digital CD ??
*CD
*MP3
*FM broadcast
*Cassette
*AM Stereo Broadcast (I forget how long ago they figured out how to do that)
*AM broadcast (mono)
*8-Track

 

[ByteSchlepper]

Hey Gluegun,
Unless you're talking about sound you can hold in your hand, add to the top:

*The original performance, live.

Add in the middle (before MP3? before CD?)
* FM broadcast

Add to the bottom:

* AM radio broadcast
* 8-Track

 

[Gluegun]

ByteSchlepper, thanks for the tips. Well, there we go. Any errors?

 

[Holy Zoo]

Quote:

Originally posted by Paradigm Not a chance CD is much better than DAT, i have comapred both side by side, plus dat can wear out

*not* *a* *chance*???

They're the same word size and sampling rate! Indeed, until recently most cds where mastered from DAT.

I think it likely that the differences you heard were caused by differences in the particular brand of DAT and CD player you used in your comparison.

 

[Paradigm]

could be!

 

[DanG]

Actually, Glue, 2-channel DVD-A is far worse than 6-channel. A DVD-A disc only stores its sound in 6-channel sound. When you listen using a stereo set-up, the 6 channels are downmixed into two; in other words, compressed. SACD, however, stores 2-channel sound and 6-channel sound in separate parallel layers, so when you listen to music on a multi-channel SACD you never have to hear compressed sound.

 

[Gluegun]

I was under the impression that they just did 2 channel DVD-A in a higher bitrate to fill up the extra space....uh, how do I know which way it really works?

 

[bootman]

DVD audio comes in two formats.
One I call DVD-V audio is what the majority of "audio" DVDs are.
They have 2-6 chs of 24bit/96k sound.

DVD-A on the other hand is the new format. Unless they also include a DD5.1 track they cannot be played on a conventional DVD player. (like dvd-v audio disk can)
They can be 2 ch 24bit/192k or 24bit/96k multi channel audio.

 

[monk]

In addition to bootman's comment's,...

DVD-A can not have a 2 channel track and a 6 channel track, all at the desirable 24bit/192k . If they want to put a dedicated stereo track on the disc, they must lower the sampling rate (probably 24/96).

SACD has room for a full blown , top quality multi-channel ...and a dedicated stereo track, all on the same disc.

Since DVD-A seems marketed at the DVD-V market ...and at multi-channel sound ,...it follows that they will have comprimised stereo sound (24/96 or worse, + the horrible watermarks ,...start to get closer and closer to the CD quality they're trying to imrove upon)

DVD-A has the theoretical potential to do stunning stereo sound (at 24/192 ) , but it really looks like such discs are not in the cards (except for rare exceptions) . With SACD, top quality discs will be (are) the rule rather than the exception.

Martin.

 

[Gluegun]

Okay, why is it hard to put high quality, uncompromised (how do they compromise it?) two channel, 24/192 DVD-A tracks on the same disk as good quality, six channel 24/96 DVD-A tracks?

 

[mc whak]

Actually, the Stone Temple Pilots DVD-A that I own claims to have the DVD-V audio, DVD-A 5.1 and DVD-A 2ch. All on the same disc.

 

[DanG]

The 2-channel audio, mc whak, is actually a downmixed version of the 5.1-channel audio. I believe that to hear the regular DVD audio that you can play in a regular DVD player the sound is simply compressed.

 

[mc whak]

If that's the case, that pisses me off.

 

[DanG]

Glue, it's impossible to put both a 24/192 stereo track and a 24/96 multichannel track, I believe, because it would use up too much room. A dual-layered DVD can hold about 7 gigabytes of information. A 24/192 track takes up 4608 kilobits, or 576 kilobytes, per second. A 24/96 track takes up 2304 kilobits, or 288 kilobytes, per second. That's 864 total kilobytes per second of music.

Now, divide 7 gigabytes, or billion bytes, by 864 kilobytes. You get about 135 minutes, or 2 hours and 15 minutes. That's plenty, right? But the 7 gigabytes we have cannot be totally dedicated to music. We need to spend a (relatively) large portion of the space for overhead, such as the table of contents (TOC) and the extra bits per byte for error correction. Second, not all DVDs are dual-layered. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the backers of DVD-A want the higher-quality audio data still to be a suplement to visual data. If we use more space for video data, it will not be possible to use up so much information just for the audio.

Part of this is speculation; if I'm wrong, please correct me.

Dan

 

[bootman]

The math seems right.
I own a DVD-A player (Panasonic DVD-A7) but have yet to buy a DVD-A disk. I really bought the player because of the video performance and built in DTS decoding.

I'm really on the fence between DVD-a and SACDs. I hear pretty good sounds out of a red book CD that has been recorded well. ie. chesky, telarc, MF etc. I don't think the format is dead yet and I won't make any investments in a new format until I'm forced to.