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In Reply to: Re: Your opinions are contrary to scientific evidence posted by minimumphase on July 15, 2006 at 09:10:21:
HowdyYep I've compared them many times and there's quite a difference. It obviously depends on the equipment involved, experience and what's important to you when you listen.
Yep I know a little about DSD and I question you characterization that there are noise artifacts, there is more noise up where we can't hear well: There is more noise above 22.05KHz but there is signal there too and in the best of circumstances Redbook doesn't have anything there, signal or noise, in less than ideal cases there is aliasing there. Below 20kHz SACD has a noise floor about 24dB lower than redbook. (Depending on your player obviously, but no Redbook player or SACD player can do better than the format allows.)
Looking at it a little more simply, SACD has about four times as much info available than redbook, so it's no surprise that it can sound better.
Actually after listening to SACD for a while on my old equipment there was pain in my (and my daughter's) ears when we went back to Redbook. BUT SACD showed us how much better things could sound so we improved the system over all and the "pain of Redbook" went away. Now it's just an annoyance :)
If DSD is counterintuitive, perhaps a little more exposure will fix it and you'll see that the filters in PCM and their effects are actually the more counterintuitive. If they were that intuitive people would be able to implement them more reliably and there would be less arguing about the sampling theorem and also less arguing about no output filter DACs vs. slow roll off filters vs. oversampling, etc.
-Ted
Follow Ups:
I agree there's usually a difference, but zeroing on that when there are usually large deviations in amplitude response (not to mention phase) in most people's real world systems does not seem to me to be that important. Certaintly I believe saying that good CDs give you a headache is preposterous! Having said that, I have experienced listener fatigue with all mediums, and early CD was a big culprit, but it has gotten much much better.Not to beat a dead horse, but I am convinced you cab get very satisfactory sound out of CD. All you need is a good DAC and good recordings.
It gets to a point where additional resolution will not be perceived. I think that point is probably very close to where hi-rez is now, although different tests may indicate that even additional resolution is audible. but for most people, in most systems, even good ones, CD is a perfectly respectable audiophile medium.
With regards to the intuitiveness of DSD, I was expressing a personal opinion, of course. I agree that time will likely result in noise management improvements, much the way it has with redbook and PCM in general. You are right that if PCM had been so simple they would have gotten the filters right in the first place. And they didn't. But I think digital was something very new back then, and we did not have the body of psycoacoustic knowledge that we have now. Redbook's higher resolution (regardless of what T. thinks) brough about new experiments and new data. This allowed us to focus better on what types and levels of distortion are important and which are less so. I admit that I am biased in my distrust of the logic of DSD. But the good SACDs are a dream on a good system, so why care?
HowdyThe differences between them aren't (usually?) as you describe to my ears. It's more a question of "density" or "ghostliness". On good setups after vinyl or SACD CD may sound quite the same in the sense of freq-response, macro dynamics, sound stage, etc. but CDs just seem more ephemeral, the image of realism just isn't as convincing. Also (not surprising to me at least) they miss a little micro dynamics. I guess I just don't agree that we've reached the limits of resolution that are audible yet. Heck my system keeps getting better with small tweaks most of which are allowing small increases in resolution. Never mind the excellent surround sound that you can get on SACD (and DVD-A I presume :)
Yep good music is what it's all about. If you're ever in the Seattle area look me up.
-Ted
I think hi-rez has audibly a blacker background. Perhaps that is what you are describing. I also thought that hi-rez was far superior to CD when DADs came out five or six years ago. Particulalrly by Chesky and Classic Records. But then I heard newer CD recordings done well, and some XRCDs, and I realized that the differences were not as large as I had thought.All of this may be audible, but in my experience less audible when you try it out on a blind basis! That makes me think... But really I think people need to focus more on their room acoustics and loudspeakers and fight less over electronics and media. Too many emotions spent in the wrong arena... Rooms and speakers is where the big problems are. But interestingly, thanks to psycoacoustics it is not so easy to become aware of them unless your system allows you to A/B different set ups. Anyone can more or less A/B CD and SACD with a dual layer. Not necessarily valid but easily doable. But few people can play around with in-room amplitude and phase! So they do not know what they are missing. For instance playing judiciously with in-room equalization. Pretty much conquered territory at this point. And the next big frontier is getting phase done right. Some people are working on computer programs to do that and claim the results are amazing.
I would love to visit Seattle. Thanks for the invite!
HowdyYep, there's a lot to be had by being careful with the room.
It was a pleasure when we were looking for a new house to find one that had space we could convert to a good audio room. Here's a link to a description of some of the things we did: An update
-Ted
nt
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