Yes, I feel SACD has won the high-resolution battle. But it is a Pyhrric victory. SACD has the high ground, but the war is elsewhere these days. What we have to worry about now is not when SACD is laid to rest, but when CD will follow it.
By having the hi-fi industry turn in on itself, obsessing over relatively unattainable formats like SACD, we have made hi-fi a clique within a clique. In the process, we have managed to seemingly dismiss the one disc format that had a chance of having a sustained life - CD.
An 'audiophile's format' has for the longest time struck me as a bad idea for that reason. It is a flawed position to take because too many people respond with "Well, I'm not an audiophile" and reject the format out of hand. And entailed in that statement is the formula for the end of CD, too. "if you are prepared to accept the compromises of CD over SACD, then the compromises of MP3 aren't too much of a reach." Logicians might rightly spot this as a Slippery Slope fallacy, but when did logic have anything to do with sales techniques?
To suggest that the dramatic downturn in CD sales is due to the failure of SACD is overstating things. But, by focusing on SACD when the hi-fi business should have been demonstrating why CD still has an important place in 21st Century systems, we have done nothing to help CD keep going.
I am concerned that a decade from now, we will look back wistfully on audiophile formats like uncompressed 16-bit PCM. Because what we have for tomorrow makes today's CD seem like high-resolution.
The problem is that it competes with vinyl & vinyl still sounds preferable and the repertoire is better.
I've heard SACD on many occasions & indeed own an SACD player. I've found that the amount of money that you've got to spend to really get it working is too high. Under £1k you're better going dedicated red book and concentrating elsewhere in the audio chain. The new high def formats look more promising but we have little or no software yet.
No, Alan I don't believe the problem is our collective failure to support red book CD, and no, Christopher, I cannot accept that vinyl is a serious competitor for SACD or other hi-res formats.
SACD is a good format - my ears tell me that. DVD-A, when it was possible to find the odd disc at a true hi-res sample rate, could be good too, but there has never been a particularly tempting repertoire available.
The market could not support both formats. With the benefit of hindsight, it probably couldn't support even one. In my view, there was simply too much competition for the pound in the public's pocket. The real competition came not from other music formats but from weekend breaks to Riga and patio heaters!
The reason why - as an audiophile - I'm optimistic is that the mode of delivery is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Linn's hi-res download experiment seems hugely significant to me. Without the cost of physically pressing a disc for a market numbering hundreds rather than thousands, there is no reason why we can't get our music from online databases at whatever bitrate we desire, be that 16/44.1, 24/192 or 128k mp3.
And can we finally scotch the myth that, in the absence of a £1k (£2k? £3k?) turntable, regular use of an alignment protractor and the ready availabilty of a Keith Monks record cleaning machine, vinyl sounds better than CD (let alone SACD)?
I think its a shame that SACD hasn't really taken off.
I've not heard DVD-A so can't comment on the comparison but, whenever I fancy a sonic treat (or am showing off) I'll stick Pink Floyd 's Dark Side of the Moon or Telarc's production of Tchaikovsky's 1812 on & revel in the multi-channel entertainment.
I've got a few disks now & several on my Amazon wishlist but do wish there were more contemporary title available as it might encourage further growth in the market.
The main problem with any hi res format is although better than cd in theory, most recording engineers don't use the full dynamic range or capability of 16 bit cd .To most non audiophiles sacd or dvda sound no better,and there are not enough audiophiles buying discs of either format to support them. 16 bit cd can sound absolutely astonishing with the right equipment and we should be thankfull we still have that !
New rock music is so distorted that it makes no sense to listen to anything better than 44 thousand samples per second. Which by the way is roughly 2 samples on a 20 khz tone. I prefer to let the data do the talking instead of an algorithm. Classical listeners have historically been the cutting edge and driving force of the audio world and they seem to be choosing SACD. Just look at the titles being released. Over the next few years and you'll see a gradual shift to this improved format. It is not going away, just looming in the background waiting for gradual acceptance. The same thing happened when the CD was introduced. A large percentage of the titles on CD at that time were classical also.
I think part of the problem may have been that reasonably priced SACD players, were not necessarily very good CD players. People don't want to replace their collections with a new format every five years, if early SACD players had been good CD players it may have encouaged more people to buy SACD players as replacement CD players and add SACDs to their existing CD collection.
I have just purchased an ex-demo Linn Ikemi as my replacement CD player and I can't decide whether it is worth the effort of searching out some HDCDs to play on it, searching for an SACD player that would have been as good at playing CD's as the Ikemi was just too much trouble as far as I'm concerned, any player I buy has to be good at playing the 600 CDs I already have before I consider adding any other formats.
Maybe the answer is to try and push HDCD again, there must be plenty of older HDCD compatible players in circulation, I know that my Denon DVD2800MKII DVD player, Arcam CD82T CD player and the Ikemi play them, and I didn't buy any of them specifically to play HDCDs.
80% of my listening is classical, so I should be a good candiate for SACD but...I rip all my CDs for use with a Slim Devices Transporter. This can play 24bit/96Khz files fine, but with Sony's greed for licensing and obsession with DRM there's no way I can rip SACD to that quality. What's the point of a hi-res digital format that can never leave the player? Madness.
Linn Records are on the mark with 'studio master' downloads at 24bit and 48 or 96Khz sampling.
I've just discovered AVReview by accident, having taken an interest in Ian Shaw's Joni Mitchell Album and found that it is recorded by Linn in SACD format. I Googled 'SACD' to find out what SACD is and discovered Alvin Gold's Article !
Many people in the audio industry will know me from the 'Rogers' days of manufacturing the LS3/5a BBC loudspeakers 25 years ago, so you may be surprised that I am sufficiently unworldly as to be unaware of SACD. My interest in the hardware is simply to enjoy the music and hifi enthusiasts may be surprised to hear that the man in the street is not enjoying their degree of knowledge/obsession with novel hardware, other than MP3 / PC / i-Pod products.
My point in writing is to endorse the views expressed by Alan Sircom and add my own observations. For me the great tragedy is that the specialist audio industry is so busy maintaining its niche market that it has allowed MP3 reproduction to become the accepted everyday maximum quality. Nothing has been done to promote the benefits of old-fashioned high quality CD reproduction to the present younger generation - Apple Rules OK ? Similarly most listening is through in-ear phones of unbelievably poor quality or PC speakers, but who cares? - the public don't, simply because they don't realise the difference in reproduction that is possible. Why should the specialist audio industry spend money educating the general public on the huge improvement in reproduction that can be achieved by decent CD equipment ? It has to focus on esoteric products for a tiny number of esoteric customers and meanwhile MP3 +i-Pod is all that the man in the street desires, because he never hears anything better or is informed of why MP3 is a modification of reality. Why has the 'Music' industry not countered downloading by educating the public as to the fact that CDs sound better and the way in which MP3 or other forms of modification give a less satisfying listening experience ?
How amazing that music in the home has now degenerated to the state where music is played on a crummy i-Pod dock and the radio comes through the TV on the digi-box - I never envisaged such a deterioration in musical understanding, education, reproduction and enjoyment when I 'retired' 25 years ago!
I feel better, having got that off my chest! Sorry for the rant, but I hope that this can encourage debate.
I don't think I completely agree. In the 70's most people were listening to single driver mono, in the 80's they were listening in stereo to nasty Amstrad tower systems. I'm told that there are actually more hifi valve amps are actually made today than in the 60's. The only thing that we've lost is stereo vinyl as a really high quality source.
I had a saturday job selling hifi in a department store in the 80's and a lot of the stereos that the mass of people were buying didn't even have more than one driver in each speaker. Metallic paint was used in circles under the grilles to give the impression that there were multiple drivers. I saw several transistor amps that barely made it to 2.5 watts per channel. From time to time, we had something decent in stock but we despaired because the customers wouldn't buy it.
Granted for the lucky few, there has been a deterioration in the quality of source material but I would argue that what the majority of people listen to today is no worse than the BSR decks with plastic arms and 5 watt transistor amps etc. that they listened to in the past.
Even towards the end of the vinyl period, we were having quality problems because record companies were trying to save money by putting out lightweight pressings.
I'm optimistic. I think things are slowly getting better. Derivations of Blu Ray and HD DVD as well as high resolution downloads look really hopeful and I hope will sound good on my LS3/5a.
Thanks for taking the trouble to respond . I understand what you're saying and I think that the average person enjoys average reproduction that is better then the average sound enjoyed in the 70's and 80's. My beef is that MP3 / i-Pod is now the listening standard for Joe Public and he has no aspiration for anything better in terms of musical quality partly because the possible improvements have not been adequately promoted in the modern commercial way.
Oh dear, I now have to find out what is meant by Ian Shaw on 24/48 !
Oh Dear, I'm getting in deeper and may become a blogging anorak ! I've never done this sort of thing before, a genuine blogging virgin. I've clicked on the LS3/5a link to the Yahoo LS3/5a site and will transfer my brief enthusiasm to there. ( I've just retired and have a bit more spare time ! )
A fascinating discussion. I agree that Joe Public now uses iPods as his/her main listening experience. The point is, that flash memory at the moment allows many MP3 files to be stored - with more memory, larger files (such as WAVs) could be stored. iPods' allow music on the go, in every environment. Folks don't have much time nowadays to sit down in a sweet spot and listen to music.
The march of technology gives us hope. Blu-ray and HD DVD will provide excellent media for live concert reproduction, with lossless audio in hi-res. Hi-Def discs offer a fantastic opportunity for rock concerts, classical concerts, jazz, ballet, opera, and so on - not just where visuals are concerned. Ideally such concert discs could be played with or without the visuals. Or even streamed real-time as the event happens in Osaka, London, New York, etc.
The massive success of home cinema - and the march to Hi-Def in both vision and sound, with lossless audio codecs - will provide us with a product far superior to red-book 16bit CD.
With many (younger) people embracing home cinema and 5 or 7.1 surround sound - the task now is to push maufacturers to embrace the standards set by Meridian, Krell, Linn, et al and produce truly musical kit.
Perhaps Media Servers and network storage devices are the way forward, rather than physical media. No expensive manufacturing plants, no costly distribution, no reliance on oil-based product to make optical discs. Oh dear, no cables, tweaking, etc....
A future with the choice of lossless audio and hi-res pictures by either physical disc or by faster than current (slow) broadband speeds looks enticing. Of course, copyright holders would, sensibly, allow low-res copies to be made if wanted for music on the go.
I'm fairly optimistic - but it does depend on "education" and a more positive approach by copyright holders. There is too much competition now: 24 hour TV, PS3/Wii games, DVD, music in different formats, pubs/clubs, gigs, cars - the time and money customers handed to the music industry in the 1960s and 1970s are no longer available to them. It's not downloading that's killing the music industry, it's a combination of its greed and a refusal to embrace new business models. Live music has never been so well supported.
I guess the vision for the future looks good, its just the now that's a disheartening mess.
I was replaying this week's gadget show and if you watched the article on DAB radio you could be forgiven for thinking that we're running backwards in the name of technological progress !
Lossless audio in hi-res - that would be a live concert, perhaps? It certainly is not a lossless codec, nor what Blue Ray or HD DVD promise. Any form of compression or attenuating of frequency response means no hi-res.
Musical kit - stereo, I presume? Any form of multi-channel processing alters the audio signal significantly, leading to a performance perhaps that is lossy in purely musical terms.Try matching your expensive 4 figure louspeakers with a 4 figure home cinema amplifier, then compare that with a stereo setup, same speakers, but with an amplifier costing under a grand.
The point has nothing to do with greed, at least not initially. People like convenience, and 50+ tracks on a DVD, CD or hard disk is massively that. It is convenience, purely and simple. Oh, and great marketing.
So is there hope? Depends - if you like high resolution bullets exploding around your room, or spacecraft crossing your ceiling, there is lots. If you like any other sort of film, then the "high-res" amplifiers aren't going to be of any use: just check how much of the sound from a non-action film comes out of the front three speakers. The hi-res, lossless, downloadable has more to do with marketing than sonic abilities.
The future is black. The so-called improvements largely add up to a giant step backwards. There'll always be a market, albeit small, for us dinosaurs. But the march of technology by itself offers no hope...
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