Oliver :)
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Apr 14, 2002
- Posts
- 2,885
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- 16
Aye well, you guys are having fun, eh?
Here's my 2 cents. I do not regret buying a universal player. I think I could have been smarter by putting the same money in a SACD-only unit, since it turned out DVD-A is not taking off. Anyway, it also makes a more than decent video source.
Generally I love high-rez, to my ears it ususally is a worthy improvement.
But DVD-A sucks. I am not the type who wants to replace his library with all high-rez, I want new listening experiences. So I have quite a bit of stuff by say Queen, but mostly their samplers & live acts. Their regular albums are available on DVD-A only, but not on SACD-Hybrid, so if I actually wanted to listen to them on the go (chances are high, it's *Queen*) I would have to equip my Mac with some nice & expensive recording equipment, hook it up to the Denon & record in real-time, encode to ALAC, manually set ID3s & sync my iPod. How convenient. Okay, with MD I would do that for each & every album, +manually put in titles, but that was, well, in the 20th century.
The only serious problem I have with SACD is the lack of titles, and sometimes the price. Limited titles made me explore new fields in music, which is a good thing. It turned out I love Creedence Clearwater Revival, but their (excellent) SACDs are €29,99 each. €!
I found you can't go much wrong by picking whatever Chesky or Telarc have on offer, but at some point I get bored with just another hour of high-res Jazz. There somehow is this gap in the SACD catalogue that includes rock from the 80s & 90s (which is all there on sucky DVD-A). And Hip-Hop? I think there is... one DVD-A by Missy E., but that's about it. Regarding recent music SACD currently is graced only by ultra-mainstream (Celine Dion, anyone?) and ultra-exotic content (I am leaving out classical, since I don't listen to much classical music at the moment), but not much in-between, and that is *not enough*.
Here's my 2 cents. I do not regret buying a universal player. I think I could have been smarter by putting the same money in a SACD-only unit, since it turned out DVD-A is not taking off. Anyway, it also makes a more than decent video source.
Generally I love high-rez, to my ears it ususally is a worthy improvement.
But DVD-A sucks. I am not the type who wants to replace his library with all high-rez, I want new listening experiences. So I have quite a bit of stuff by say Queen, but mostly their samplers & live acts. Their regular albums are available on DVD-A only, but not on SACD-Hybrid, so if I actually wanted to listen to them on the go (chances are high, it's *Queen*) I would have to equip my Mac with some nice & expensive recording equipment, hook it up to the Denon & record in real-time, encode to ALAC, manually set ID3s & sync my iPod. How convenient. Okay, with MD I would do that for each & every album, +manually put in titles, but that was, well, in the 20th century.
The only serious problem I have with SACD is the lack of titles, and sometimes the price. Limited titles made me explore new fields in music, which is a good thing. It turned out I love Creedence Clearwater Revival, but their (excellent) SACDs are €29,99 each. €!