Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions SACDs and DVD-As Do sound better ?

The technicalities of it:

http://www.iar-80.com/page128.html

Sounds like it depends on your player - a good player will really sound better (as long as your speakers are good and receiver is decent).

Any comments? Sometimes I wonder. It seems the recording process is more important than the final version. But, my listening room has poor acoustics and my SACD player is an old Pioneer. I have heard people say a cheap Sony SACD player will sound better.

Any direction based on actual research?

Sorry if this link has already been posted - I haven't been around for a while.

As I search around - it seems people really like the relatively cheap oppo brand universal players.

And now there are newer formats? HD DVD and Bluray? Are they competition for audio?

Yeah Don, it's the initial recording process and the mixing and mastering that's applied to it which determines the quality of a recording, not whether it winds up on CD, DVD-A, or SACD. Other than not having the capacity for multi-channel discrete surround sound(which processing such as DPLII can at least partially substitute for), the CD format has frequency response and dynamic range capability which is more than adequate for human ears and the material which we listen to, despite claims to the contrary in the IAR article.

There is more to it than just multi-channel. Because of dynamic range limitation on a CD, studios are using dynamic compression to logarithmically reduce the highest peaks without having to reduce low levels. At this point, what you listen to becomes very important. For rock and other nearly-always-at-full-volume music, the difference would be more negligeable. For classical, the difference is HUGE. An orchestra starts sounding like an orchestra and you get the full benefits of dynamics. I don't own any SACDs, but I have about 25 DVD-Audios.

When done well, multi-channel mixes can be quite stunning. Couple that with the fact that most albums that end up in either SACD or DVD-A format ARE recorded very well. (They tend not to try polishing a turd). What that means is as far as audio quality goes, most SACD's and DVD-A's sound REAL good.

I agree, as I've stated before a great SACD vs a great CD is like going from SD TV to HD TV.