sorry if this has been discussed hundreds of times. i was wondering if dvd audio is 24 bit? recorded and playback in 24 bit? sacd's are right? if dvd's arent 24 bit playbacks then what makes them special? i know my dvd player has the hdcd capability and i have a few hdcd disks that sound good but thats what 20 or 22 bits? also, if dvd is 24 bit, why is sacd necessary? i'll leave it at that for now, thanks for answers in advance.
Up to 24/96 PCM is used for DVD-A. DSD used for SACD is delta sigma 1 bit. DSD eliminates several digital processing steps and is said to more closely match the natural wave shape of sound than PCM. I hear that higher sampling rate PCM. something like 24/192 when heard off the mastering board sounds very close to DSD output. I don't know if there is a 24/192 consumer product, but if there were the 5.1 playback times would require a dual layerd disks at the very least. Today's DAC's seem to give the edge to DSD but I don't know if this war will be won by which approach "sounds" better. As a CD replacement the hybrid SACD has great appeal; as a supplement and outgrowth of video DVD, the DVD-A has great appeal. Now if there were a dual layered DVD-A that utilized DSD/DD/PCM and also contained a hybrid Red Book layer, that might have been the ultimate killer product. We will never know.
Hello to all. Is it likely that there will be cheap ways of copying DVD-A's using a DVD-ROM drive as it is done today with regular CDs and that copying SACDs will not be as easy? Thanks in advance.
I'm an electrical engineer with a little background in signal processing (although not a lot in audio applications). Can someone direct me to a mildly technical explanation of what is meant by "delta sigma one bit". Is this a variation on Delta PCM where instead of digital values encoding the absolute level of a signal, like PCM, they represent the incremental difference from the previous sample point? Regards,
Actually, two channel DVD-A supports sampling rates of up to 192/24. 5.1 DVD-A supports sampling rates of up to 96/24 on all six channels.
[sarcasm]Because then there would not be enough disc capacity for all of the multimedia content audiophiles crave[/sarcasm] Regards,
