[theaudiohobby]

Quote:

Originally posted by Music Fanatic Well, if you are going to say that we may as well point out that as a simple matter of marketing, SACDs tend to be more numerous and have a much more diverse set of content than DVD-A. I have little doubt that as of today, SACD is winning the marketing battle (although, perhaps losing the war, since I'm not sure either format has enough traction to last.)

Well, that's your take, having witnessed tussles for supremacy between industrial interests and academic interests on research ventures, my take is rather more symphatic to the corporate interests and the very real issues of long term profitability that they face. Credit to Sony/Philips that they had the guts to go market with a technology that is against the grain of current thinking.

 

[Music Fanatic]

Quote:

Originally posted by theaudiohobby Well, that's your take, having witnessed tussles for supremacy between industrial interests and academic interests on research ventures, my take is rather more symphatic to the corporate interests and the very real issues of long term profitability that they face. Credit to Sony/Philips that they had the guts to go market with a technology that is against the grain of current thinking.

Maybe it is just as simple as: the CD patents were expiring, and they wanted to continue their royalty stream income.

 

[Zanth]

Quote:

Originally posted by Music Fanatic Maybe it is just as simple as: the CD patents were expiring, and they wanted to continue their royalty stream income.

Bingo!

 

[theaudiohobby]

Quote:

Originally posted by Music Fanatic Maybe it is just as simple as: the CD patents were expiring, and they wanted to continue their royalty stream income.

How naive!!! Why is DVDA not royalty free, since they want to provide a charitable service to the recording industry!!!

EVERY CORPORATE in this struggle, SONY, PHILIPS, MATSU****A, TOSHIBA, WARNER, UNIVERSAL, IBM, PIONEER, BOOTHROYD-STUART are in this business for the money. To paraphrase George Lucas "If only the world were not about money" unfortunately it is. Get a grip, that's life!!!!

PS- If either technology fails, they will fail not on technical merit but on account of their viability as a successful business proposition that is they did/did not generate a sufficient income stream to justify their viability in the market.

 

[Music Fanatic]

Quote:

Originally posted by theaudiohobby PS- If either technology fails, they will fail not on technical merit but on account of their viability as a successful business proposition that is they did/did not generate a sufficient income stream to justify their viability in the market.

The could fail on technical merit as well. Consider the case of quadrophonic LPs.

These format wars are especially maddening, since there are two types of vendors involved: hardware and software. I think for DVD-A, the hardware vendors have been pulling their weight. But the software vendors have been sadly lagging.

 

[theaudiohobby]

Quote:

Originally posted by Music Fanatic These format wars are especially maddening, since there are two types of vendors involved: hardware and software. I think for DVD-A, the hardware vendors have been pulling their weight. But the software vendors have been sadly lagging.

Why???

 

[Music Fanatic]

Quote:

Originally posted by theaudiohobby Why???

Well, the recording industry seems to have lost it way for the last five years. Their marketing has been awful, and their customer relations (which ultimately have settled in on the "sue the customer" model) are equally bad. I wonder if CD sales will ever recover.

 

[Wodgy]

Quote:

Originally posted by Music Fanatic Well, the recording industry seems to have lost it way for the last five years. Their marketing has been awful, and their customer relations (which ultimately have settled in on the "sue the customer" model) are equally bad. I wonder if CD sales will ever recover.

Amen to that! I think it's still in keeping with the original topic of this thread to mention that the recording industry has been working diligently to kill off the good points of CDs that Czilla9000 mentioned in his original post (freedom, portability, etc.). Concrete recent example: I do some volunteer work on a regular basis with nursing students (overwhelmingly female) and among them the iPod is hugely popular; most simply don't have any other way to listen to music except in the car. Yet, Arista chose to release the new Sarah McLachlan album, oriented primarily to a female audience, with a copy protection scheme that makes it impossible to transfer to an iPod. (Yes, bypassable using EAC, but the audience I'm talking about wouldn't touch EAC with a ten foot pole.) It makes no sense. Once someone gets burned buying one CD like this, it just makes them more reluctant to buy CDs in the future.

 

[theaudiohobby]

Music Fanatic,

I see that you coyly avoided answering my question as to why on DVDA, the software vendors are not playing ball. Oh well..., I suppose I already answered it myself, after taking into account all the issues, it did not make financial sense for the software vendors to invest in it.

 

[Douglas256]

If anyone wants to do a test to see if they can hear a difference between something recorded at 24bit/96kHz verse 16bit/44.1kHz, I would be more than happy to record samples at any bit/hHz combination you want using a very expensive mic-preamp/ADC (Grace Lunatec V3). My thought being, that every recording CD/DVD-A/LP has undergone some form of dynamic-compression, hard-/soft-limiting, etc. So, if you want some raw samples to compare (before any sort of processing), I'm more than happy to help out.

 

[theaudiohobby]

Quote:

Originally posted by Douglas256 If anyone wants to do a test to see if they can hear a difference between something recorded at 24bit/96kHz verse 16bit/44.1kHz, I would be more than happy to record samples at any bit/hHz combination you want using a very expensive mic-preamp/ADC (Grace Lunatec V3). My thought being, that every recording CD/DVD-A/LP has undergone some form of dynamic-compression, hard-/soft-limiting, etc. So, if you want some raw samples to compare (before any sort of processing), I'm more than happy to help out.

Count me in..

 

[Douglas256]

I'll see what I can do this evening when I get home from the office.

 

[Glassman]

me interested much, do whatever you can and bring us 24/96 or even better 24/192 acoustic or if you can, some A/Ded analog master tape

oh and you don't have to record at anything else than the best you can - the whole purpose is to get hi-res data to computer, then resample them to 16/44 in order to loose information and then resample it back to the original bit depth and sample rate and make a comparison.. than we'll see if there's really such a big difference between possible CD quality vs. current DVD-A quality..

 

[Douglas256]

The raw sounds below were recorded this evening at 24bit-96kHz. Since I have no musical talent (I mostly record spoken word on location), I recorded some sounds that you can probably reproduce at your home.

Since I record on location, I don't have a specially treated room at my house to record in . . . so, you can hear my computer's fan at around -72dB. I used an AT 3035 large-diameter condensor microphone 4-6 inches from the sound source. This was fed to the Grace Lunatec V3 with the gain set at 35 dB on the first recording and 50 dB on the rest of the recordings. The V3 was then fed into the computer via S/PDIF and saved using Cool Edit Pro as a 24bit/96kHz PCM wav files.

Snapping my fingers (164KB)

Pouring a glass of water (592 KB)

Typing on a IBM 42H1292 keyboard (1.1 MB)

Taking pictures with a Nikkromat and a Nikon F5 (1.1 MB)

I had no problem playing them with foobar2000; since they are 24bit/96kHz, they are not playable through Windows Media Player.

It might interest you to know that the analog noise on channel 1 was tested at -130.94 dB, while the AD's dynamic range is -109.16dBFS at 24bit/96kHz.

EDIT: Changed files from WAV to Monkey Audio to save on webspace and bandwidth.

 

[fewtch]

I listened to the "glass of water" file, first at 24/96 and then dithered down (in realtime) to 44.1/16 using a high quality WinAMP resampling plugin. Both played back through Senn HD-600s and a Headsave Ultra hooked to an M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 sound card.

Didn't do any ABX testing or anything, but the difference seems obvious to my ears... more perceived "realness" at 24/96. Particularly at the end of the sound it's very noticeable -- at 44.1/16 it sounds like some undefined crackling noise, but at 24/96 it sounds like a trickle of water droplets.