Whats the Worst thing about SACDs?

Of course it's all about resolution, but I said 'push the boundaries', I never commented on the inherent resolution of either format. IMO, analogue tape cannot push the boundaries of Redbook. Of course, you're entitled to your own opinion.

 

But, how do you know the flaw lies in PCM and not the DACs or some other part of the chain? Things can get lost transferring from tape to tape as well. The moment you set out to make a copy, something is going to get lost or added, wouldn't you say? That is why we need mastering engineers such as yourself, to ensure that the least amount of information goes missing or is changed. I don't see this as an inherent flaw, or as pushing the boundaries.

 

There's more than twenty years of solid engineering experience in the ADCs and DACs used by studios. I think they've managed to sort out most of the problems. And yet we have an experienced mastering engineer telling us in this thread that analogue pushes the boundaries of Redbook. I believe the limitations are in the standard.

Ask yourself this question - if the CD was invented today, with the modern computing power we are used to, would it sample at 44.1 kHz and use 16-bit word length?

Regards,
Geoff

 

I may not be a mastering engineer, but I am experienced in the studio as a recording engineer for over ten years, and I have to respectfully disagree.

That argument is irrelevant. Business is driven by dollars, and in order to make the dollars companies have to push product. In order to push product that has already saturated the market, one has to convince the customer that the current product is better, 'new and improved' if you will. There are many on these boards that maintain vinyl is better than CD's, but, if they were to set out to create an audio carrier today, ask yourself this question: would they make it a piece of round wax that is read through direct contact with a stylus? Well, we already know the answer to that question, don't we?

 

Exactly right.

The answer to this question, as we know, is simply this: no.

 

I'd love to know your source on this. My studies have indicated that the theoretical advantages are clear. Whether or not they are audible can well be questioned, but I've run across no mathematical "disproof" of the preference for using dither over simple truncation.

 

If you can't hear the difference between analogue and digital then maybe you can see it.

Just compare a fine grained emulsion in photography to a digital photograph. After a point there is NO comparison, period.
You can manipulate a digital photograph far more easily but, if you compose and expose properly with a film camera the result still is far superior.

 

Steve Hoffman said:

Thank goodness somebody in authority finally said this!

I've been trying to explain on several forums that high sampling rates aren't better because we need to reproduce frequencies up to 96kHz ; it 's because all those extra samples can detect--and upon playback-- reproduce all those fine details that make something sound REAL.

I've also posted this next link numerous times and no one ever seems to look at it. It has an excellent animated graph of a 44.1khz sampled analog wave vs. a wave sampled at 192kHz--the differences are very large as far as resolution goes (someone correct me if I'm wrong, but that sampled wave is a 20kHz wave).

Dvd-audio explained (from the people who build a huge amount of dvd-audio playback hardware.)

After picking a language, click on "About dvd-audio", then "How it works", then "sampling and quantization". Please!!!

I didn't just blow 200 bucks on a dvd-audio player simply to fill up an empty shelf in my rack! And no, it's not a Panasonic.

[T]