Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Set on Axiom speakers, need avice

While there's not as much musical content in the subwoofer range as what you'll find in a blockbuster film, there are still some frequencies which may be better handled by a sub rather than running the M22s in full-range. Some receivers make switching between stereo with a cross-over for the sub, and a pure direct to the pair of speakers as easy as changing a listening mode. That way you can pick which sounds best for the current music.

SACD is basically a dead format. There may be a few releases here and there, but expect more and more high-res audio content to start showing up on BD. Sony's use of DSD encoding on the SACD format created more problems than it solved. Sure it was high resolution, but made it impossible to do anything more complex than buffering channels for a bit of delay for time alignment. There was no way to process the stream for setting a crossover point, let alone any fancy room correction. Later came a way to convert DSD into PCM which could be manipulated easily, but lost the point of using the more "analog-like" DSD.

Sony seems to have little use for their own encoding formats, and let them fall to the side rather easily. They also came up with a lossy compression scheme, ATRAC (and later added a lossless extension), but it never got use outside of MiniDisc and some studio gear. A derivative became SDDS which Sony uses in some theathers. But again Sony didn't push for its inclusion in DVD or BD.

Anyway, where I was headed, SACD while presenting single bits at rate of 2.8 MHz, in reality it can only reproduce audio information up to about a frequency double that of conventional CDs. Where as BD can have stereo or 5.1 tracks encoded at 192 kHz, which yeilds a Nyquist limit 4 times that of CD.

To answer your question. BD has the ability to grow to be a better format for music than SACD.