Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

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Without SACD you are not playing in the top echelon. Period end of story.

Posted by Norman Tracy (M) on May 13, 2005 at 16:10:24

In Reply to: how concerned should i be about sacd? posted by yellowwwwducky on May 10, 2005 at 22:48:11:

The kind of discussion this thread sparks is worthlessly general unless placed in context of the level of system we are discussing. ‘Yellowwwwducky’ is looking to upgrade a system he describes thusly:
“My setup was very minimal - a Levinson 39 driving a Jeff Rowland 8t power amp with battery power supply onto Avalon Radian speakers.”
NICE! Color me lightly green with a touch of envy for both the gear and lovely simplicity it allows. ‘Yellowwwwducky’ in this and other threads, lists candidates for the No 39’s replacement all bearing price tags in the mid to upper four figures and even into five figures to the left of the decimal place in dollars, thus the context of our discussion is a state-of-the-art system with funding to match.

First disclaimer, I hate audio snobs as much as any other snob. Spending a ton-o-bucks on a system comprised exclusively of class AAAA recommended flavors of the month is essentially a guaranty of run from the room screaming bad sound. Using sweat equity in the form of searching out great used gear or going the DIY route even working stiffs can assemble SOTA systems for less than the snob pays for his speaker cables. I begin my contribution to this thread highlighting Yellowwwwducky’s system not because he has to spend 1/3 of the five figure investment he has in power amp and speakers to fit some equation. Rather with a Rowland + Avalon back end we can eliminate all the good budget front ends, with or without SACD. Because in this context ‘good’ is going to at the least become a self fulfilling prophecy that ‘SOTA CD sounds as good/better than SACD’ or at worst actively annoying or boring.

The reason I used the provocative title above is because that has been my experience. Personally one of the thrills of layering being an audiophile onto being a music lover are those moments when one hears deep into the performance and a previously unheard new aspect of the sound illuminates what the artist is saying to us. Holt called these ‘goose bump moments’ because they can have that physical affect on us as both our mind and body react. I tend to think of them as ‘wow, I never heard THAT before’ because what first pulled me into hi-fi was hearing how much more of the sound and performance was revealed on a hi-fi compared to the portable record player I had at home. Now over 35 years later it is easy to become jaded. In the three years I have been exploring SACD as a third primary source it has provided more of the ‘wow, I never heard THAT before’ thrills than any other recent development or readily available home source.

Online and in the print media covering high end stereo there is a trend to discount post-CD high resolution digital sources as failed record company follies. One cannot open a magazine or browser window without tripping over some old geezer bitching and moaning over lack of media availability or predicting the eminent demise of SACD. Reading between the lines of these rants what I see is a longing to return to a simpler time when there was one dominate source and it was safe to build a system around optimizing that source. For many of us those good old days were putting together LP based systems happily immersed in the arcane world of overhang, VTA, VTF, MC, MM, and 47k vs. 100 ohm loading. There was another golden age for CD through the 1990s when we developed 44k 16 bit playback to a very high level thanks to its open standards and the royalty free ‘in’ the S/PDIF link gave our little garage shop operations. Choosing to stay in these warm fuzzy places is a valid choice. What is not valid in my experience is claiming they represent the state of the art.

Wishing and hoping for a simpler time never has and never will make it happen. After all if wishes were horses beggars would have always been riding and LPs and CDs would have always sounded exactly like master tapes and live microphone feeds. To my ears the added information density of good SACDs do get them closer to this ideal. That is the ideal of a truly transparent music storage media, not the ideal of free transportation for all.

All of which is a dang long prelude to get to Yellowwwwducky’s questions.

Question #1
“So, how much should I care?”

Only you can answer that as it involves intensely personal tradeoffs. I see those who are ready to declare CD is good enough and/or persist in the belief that SOTA CD beats SOTA SACD are biased toward getting the most fi they can out of a large and diverse CD collection. Personally (there’s that word again as it is a very personal individual thing) I want max-fi out of my CDs but with an open mind that perhaps in 2005 there is something better than a format whose basic specifications were laid down in the late 1970s.

Question #2
“If worst case came to pass and I played a sacd thru a more mass market player into a top notch preamp/amp via analog inputs, would it ever compare to the top notch cd/d2a on the other 'side' of the system going into that same preamp?”

Finally an easy one. No, not ever. Not even on a good day running downhill with a tail wind. That does not mean the “more mass market player” will not reveal the greater information density of SACD compared to “top notch CD/D2A” playing 16 bit 44k sources. Rather with Rowland + Avalon in the chain the compromises in the mass market player’s analog stage, power supply, DACs, and packaging will sooner or later be revealed. The way I experienced this was that from the start SACD provided thrilling moments and then as time wore on I noticed those Nth degree details we audiophiles chase after were missing. For me that meant the player in question (a $1k Sony DVP-NS900) was getting modified. Several rounds of mods brought it close to parity with the external DACs used for CD. Given Yellowwwwducky’s stated intent to upgrade from a Levinson No 39 the only way to give SACD a fair shake is to use a similarly SOTA SACD playback deck or system.

Implied Question #3
“I have got somewhat comforting comments from one manufacturer that should it be feasible it* would be done but that is it.” (*If I read him correctly “it” is the question of upgrading an external DAC to accept SACD source data.)

The amount of smoke being blown you know where on this issue is simply amazing. The proverbial elephants in the room being ignored here are licensing and development costs. For many of us part of the romance of the high-end audio scene is that the individual designer or small team working alone can still advance the state of the art, or at least produce a cool product which sounds great. (And as a second disclaimer I wrote ‘us’ because I am one of those one man operations.) What SACD, DVD-A, DTS, DTS-ES and the rest of the alphabet soup of formats did to our little niche is by and large lock out all but the biggest and deepest pocketed players from the new game. Some of the resentment being shown toward SACD comes from those who always pull for the little David against the corporate Goliaths. It is very likely that “should it be feasible it would be done” is actually translated:
“I would love to if I had $100k to license the standard, $10k to hire an engineer to get ILink/IEEE-1394 hardware working and a final $10k to hire a software consultant to get the encryption protocols programmed and debugged”. As a professional design and production engineer I can assure you upgrades are a royal pain to install and support. They rarely happen because for the manufacturer it is a no win situation. If I charge you what it costs to pay to develop, build, and install it will be very expensive. So my customers (audiophiles by nature apparently being a whining lot) will accuse me of ripping them off. Do it as a loss leader writing it off to “we give great customer support” and very soon the whining will be I sold a bunch of expensive boxes then had the nerve to go bankrupt. The short version is I would strongly suggest deciding SACD yes/no before the fact and buying accordingly.

In summary my personal experience is the finest sounding sources for home hi-fi are SACD on the digital side and open reel tape on the analog side. Neither of these formats will become dominate music delivery formats for the mass market as CD and LP did. Just as top echelon audiophiles in the 1960s & 1970s had both open reel and LP today we find top echelon systems support both SACD and CD. Being too young to have participated in that brief instant when one could purchase prerecorded open reel tapes I see it as a second chance to participate in SACD. I am buying them as fast as I can pick and choose among the 3000 titles currently available. Should this be my small vote to keep the format going, great. Should SACD disappear without a trace tomorrow I have a nice library of disks to enjoy for years to come. I am realistic that this being the 21st century we will never again return to a time when one music delivery format dominates.

Were I suddenly gifted with Yellowwwwducky’s system and upgrade budget I would be looking at adding a Rowland preamp and a universal player from Classe, Linn, Esoteric, or Marantz. Actually above we see the new dCS P8i all-in-one universal player just shown at the recent THE show which to my eye even makes a nice styling match to Rowland gear.

happy listening

Norman Tracy

• dCS P8i   (Open in New Window)

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