[Ryokan]

What keeps you from getting into classical music? Prejudice?

For a while I mostly listened to classical music, and will always keep a few of my favourites. It's just not my main genre and I hardly listen to it now.

Because you need to use dither when you reduce bit depth and going from 24 or 16 bit to just 1 bit is a MASSIVE reduction in bit depth! Sure, the increased sample rate helps, but for example with DSD64 only 6 bits worth of truncation is dealt with that way I believe, but the rest of the reduction needs proper dithering.

It's a world I know little about but am interested to learn about different formats and their advantages/disadvantages.

 

[bigshot]

I still buy SACDs for two reasons: multichannel mixes, and because when you put them in a player, they just play. DVDs and blu-rays always have a menu screen to navigate, which means I have to drop the screen and dim the lights in my theater to select the play all button.

I’m a format agnostic. I maintain the ability to play any audio format, and I don’t really like any format to the exclusion of others.

 

[sander99]

DVDs and blu-rays always have a menu screen to navigate, which means I have to drop the screen and dim the lights in my theater to select the play all button.

You could add a small tv/monitor screen for those situations. Of course having no menu is easier, but you do also have DVDs and blu-rays (I assume) so an extra screen could be useful.

 

[bigshot]

I already have a monitor for my computer/media server. Adding one to the player would be two.

 

[Ryokan]

Regarding formats (DSD) it was if the processing power and demands needed for upsampling in Daps is really necessary over using more traditional formats.

 

[Davesrose]

I’m not sure how “they were pushing the format”, if anything they were going backwards and even an inexpensive SACD player was still more expensive than an inexpensive CD player. Maybe some deals could be had at the end, when Sony realised SACDs were dead/dying and wanted to get rid of stock. Sony also eventually licensed the player tech to third parties (for a royalty of course) and they could take advantage of the relatively cheap production costs.

G

What is meant by expensive? I thought it meant always being more expensive than the other by a large margin. There were SACD players that were in the thousands of dollars, but Sony was also selling 5 disc SACD players under $150. I was buying SACD titles for the same price as a new CD. That was when SACDs were being released (not like how HD-DVD had a clearance after Toshiba made an announcement calling it finished). And now I see the out of production SACDs have risen in price (perhaps from a demand with audiophiles). Sony was probably eating costs for SACD as it was their medium, and they had their own players and record label.

I was never saying there was a true advantage to it as a delivery method for music: simply that people were collecting due to unique masters (or surround track). 6200 titles being produced was not a tiny niche.

 

[Davesrose]

Try buying physical copies of the new releases of BIS label without SACD being a "thing." SACD never took off as a mass market audio format nor was it ever indented to be such. SACD was always a niche format. The only question was how popular niche format? Well, it became a niche format with quite limited market with just a few labels still using it meaning on the niche markets it is still a thing even if on the mass market it has been death for a long time and never really was a "thing" to begin with.

Popular things are not automatically "relevant" and vice verse. No matter what your interests (hobbies etc.) are, you are likely to need niche markets, because most people aren't interested of the same things you are. A lot of mass market products and services are stuff to fulfil manufactured needs, things that people believe they need because of effective marketing. A few years ago nobody felt the need to buy a baby Yoda doll. Then Di$ney manufactured the need to buy one. So, baby Yoda became a popular thing, but is it relevant? No. Di$ney could have come up with something else.

I meant the time in which record labels were creating new SACDs, and a certain number of people were buying it. That was the hay day for DSD as I see it. But if we get into “relevance”, looks like there’s a tiny niche of folks downloading DSD or swearing by converting to it (whether there’s no advantage from a technical standpoint with audio reproduction)

 

[71 dB]

For a while I mostly listened to classical music, and will always keep a few of my favourites. It's just not my main genre and I hardly listen to it now.

Okay. I listen to a lot of non-classical music too and I have zero non-classical SACDs.

It's a world I know little about but am interested to learn about different formats and their advantages/disadvantages.

Advantages are usually much smaller than marketing says.

 

[bigshot]

Okay. I listen to a lot of non-classical music too and I have zero non-classical SACDs.

I have dozens and dozens or rock and jazz and country SACDs. SACD was primarily a format for people with multichannel speaker setups. The reason that many releases were classical was because several classical labels started recording everything in 5.1. But there were still lots of other kinds of music on the format too.

There was also DVD and DVD-A. DVD-A is probably the most esoteric format of all of them, but there are still releases being put out in DVD-A. The advantage is that you can play multichannel like a standard DVD too. All of Steven Wilson's multichannel remixes (Jethro Tull, Marillion, Yes, XTC, etc.) are in DVD-A. King Crimson does DVD-A too, and they put out lots of multichannel collections.

Advantages of various formats:

CD: ubiquitous, audibly transparent, stereo
Dolby CD: multichannel (matrixed), compatible with regular CD players in stereo
SACD: HD audio, same footprint as CD, multichannel, compatible with CD in stereo
DVD: multichannel, lossy audio, video, fully compatible with all DVD players
DVD-A: Lossless/HD audio, multichannel, same footprint as video DVDs, SD video, compatible in lossy with DVD players
Blu-Ray: HD-MA audio, HD video, Atmos, same footprint as DVDs and video blu-rays, fully compatible with all Blu-ray Players
4K: Same as blu-ray except with 4k video, not compatible with blu-ray but most come with a Blu-ray Disc.

 

[Davesrose]

With audio for the video disks, I would say that blu-ray introduced lossless surround (DTS-MA or Dolby TrueHD). After 4K home standards were formalized is when we also saw blu-rays with Dolby Atmos (since it's positional metadata on top of TrueHD or Dolby Digital+). A 4K disc is incompatible with a blu-ray player that doesn't include its specs (which while having the same disc type, has a newer, incompatible, video codec). Now also there's more people listening to surround sound music from streaming services.

 

[bigshot]

DVD-A is lossless surround too. DTS-MA is the HD audio equivalent for multichannel.

 

[Davesrose]

TrueHD is Dolby's "HD audio" equivalent. I was including it as comparison with video discs. And how Atmos has TrueHD/DD+ core that can be read by devices that don't recognize Atmos.

 

[Ryokan]

Just wondering how many on the science forum who say cables make no difference listen mainly with iem's?

 

[castleofargh]

Just wondering how many on the science forum who say cables make no difference listen mainly with iem's?

IMO, it is never about difference or no difference. Not with cables, not with ultrasounds, amps, burn in, DSD, etc. What I always contest and reject is poor testing resulting in absolute certainty. That's an absurd way of looking at the world.
Anybody who knows the first thing about testing would reject some dude swapping cables slowly by himself and then claiming conclusive sound results based on his feelings. People who do that anyway are always wrong for doing it! Then among them, we have some who claim audible change, and some who claim no change. Both meaningless to me.
I'm more interested in people who make some efforts to test things in a conclusive way. I'm ready to accept any conclusive outcome as a fact about the thing being tested. I'm basic like that.

 

[Ryokan]

IMO, it is never about difference or no difference. Not with cables, not with ultrasounds, amps, burn in, DSD, etc. What I always contest and reject is poor testing resulting in absolute certainty. That's an absurd way of looking at the world.
Anybody who knows the first thing about testing would reject some dude swapping cables slowly by himself and then claiming conclusive sound results based on his feelings. People who do that anyway are always wrong for doing it! Then among them, we have some who claim audible change, and some who claim no change. Both meaningless to me.
I'm more interested in people who make some efforts to test things in a conclusive way. I'm ready to accept any conclusive outcome as a fact about the thing being tested. I'm basic like that.

I bought an aftermarket cable for my HD800's, for portability, and listened to them for around a month but had to admit the sound was flat. Put on the supplied cable which for me is too big for a portable player and the music was more dynamic and layered. I've noticed other small changes swopping cables, but like you say, nothing provable.