SACD/DVD-Audio Player... Who Makes it?

[noname]

Ive heard of it before, but i forgot who made it. Im pretty sure it was one of the consumer electronics conglomerates. anyways any help is appreciated. oh and by the way, which do you guys think will win, if either?

[videoguy79]

Yes, such a thing exists--one example I can think of is the Pioneer DV-747A DVD Video , SACD & DVD Audio Player, and I might have seen a model by Marantz and maybe JVC too. I personally would not recommend buying a SACD/DVD audio only player; rather a DVD video player with those capabilities as extra features would probably be a better choice.
Even as a musician and semi-audophile, I don't see what all the hype over these "new" formats are. A). SACD uses a sampling rate of 2.8Mhz (yes, Mhz!) and direct stream digital (DSD) instead of PCM for 2-channel audio. This is overkill!! The (young) human ear cannot hear anything over ~20Khz (I'm 23 and can't hear even above ~17.8Khz). In addition, combinations of ultrasonic frequencies that result in "beats" and other harmonic effects are rarely discrenable above the low 20's, and most instruments' harmonics are very weak if even present at that range. B.)Even though a higher sampling rate will "mimic" the analog wave with more precision, studies have shown that most people will not hear a difference once you get past about a 55,000hz sampling rate. Thus, CD sounds perfect to most people, though going to 20 or 24-bits and upping the sampling rate to 64Khz would marginally improve the sound. DVD-audio is a bit more practical than SACD at 192Khz, 24-bit PCM, but this still is a waste of disc space. C.) Also take into account that 99.999999% of all recordings ever made hit 24Khz ceilings, tops (that's assuming a 48Khz sampling frequency, such as that used for DAT). Digital recording has only been around for 20 years--anything from 1880-1980 is not going to benefit much from extra resolution.
DVD-audio and SACD, other than being for multichannel audio, are to appease the tiny minority of addled people that still think analog is better than digital. In most analog recordings, the missing "warmth" that one does not hear in digital recordings is from distortion! Does crackly vinyl with a s/n ratio of 45dB really sound better than a CD? Maybe if you have coclear implants! Another example--tube amps have a natural roll-off that results in the supression and "fuzzy" sound on high frequencies that some people prefer. Yeecchh. I own many vinyl recodings and compared to CD they suck anyday, cleaned off or not, new styli or old.
One of the supposed benefits of these two formats is a 140dB dynamic range. This is as loud as a jet engine--who has analog equiptment that will handle that? Most of today's recordings are compressed and have very little dynamic range to begin with. I could go on and on. . .the moral of the story is, how many people are going to buy expensive equiptment for slightly better (if even discrenable) sound? How many people downloading shitty 128kbps mp3's encoded with a Xing encoder from 1998 are going to care about sound quality?
Stick to CD for now, and go for something that supports HDCD decoding--it's a process that piggybacks 4 bits of extra resolution on the bottom 4 bits of a 16-bit wordlength (normally vacant)--the soundstage is a little better than on plain CD recordings. DVD-audio probably has the best chance of surviving--Sony (SACD) has this thing with putting out proprietary products that never truly catch on and are no better, if not actually worse than other available technologies (Elcassette, Betamax, MiniDisc, Memory stick).

[Greg12]

I beg to differ on the Mini-Disk

they are really popular at my school cause they fit into purses and pockets and it's hard to the admin to see them.

[videoguy79]

Ok, so MiniDisc is a decent product--I even own a MD deck, though I will be getting rid of it soon. MiniDisc caught on too late--if Sony had not rushed to put it out in 1992 when it sounded like shit and wasn't ready for release, it wouldn't have recieved such a bad rap in the media and might have done better. Since audio compression is no longer taboo to most people (due to the growing popularity of mp3 and other lossy schemes), the fact that MD is compressed doesn't matter to people anymore, though audiophiles steer clear of it. However, if I can fit 2-3 times as much skip-free music at almost the same sound quality using a Lame 3.91 VBR r3-mix stream in the same amount of space, what's the point in MD? The MD disc itself is obsolete. . .it only holds 160MB whereas other technologies are being developed that could fit several GB's in the same amount of space. Let's also not forget that MD's real-time encoding takes forever!! Though NetMD (to be released in the US in the next few weeks) will allow high-speed uploading of music to MD, it is only for Sony's crappy ATRAC3 compression and will only be "fast" at LP4, which sounds like an AM radio sitting in a shitter. Add to that Sony's annoying MagicGate SMDI bullshit and you have yet another losing product. Of course, for hiding music at school, I guess it serves its purpose, right?

[vitualis]

Higher sampling rates sound better not because of the higher frequencies. The human ear cannot physiologically hear anything much past 20 kHz.

However, higher sampling rates lead to much better (for the lack of a better term) "temporal precision" of the audio. We can hear this difference (though it is mostly at a subconscious level) and it is the basis of our sense of directionality of audio when we only have 2 ears. This is really quite profound -- for example, our sense of whether audio is coming from above or below us determined by the aural reflections/echos of the external ear. Needless to say, the timings for such things is extremely small.

This is presumably why audio sampled at a higher frequency seem to relatively have more "presence".

As for the 55 kHz thing you mentioned, do you have a link to that? I had never heard that before...

After all, have any of us (with normal hearing) ever been fooled into thinking that the recording of any audio actually sounded like "we were actually there"?

As for MD, you have to take it in the context that they are supposed to replace the analogue cassette tape -- to which they have done in many parts of Asia. There is at present no other popular technology that replaces and improves on all the features of analogue cassette. MD has real-time encoding/recording for an obvious reason, though I fully agree that if faster than real-time transfer of audio was possible, it would go a long way.

Regards.