Thread: CD, SACD, DVD-A Comparisions

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Post by mdt February 22, 2005 (21 of 89)
zeus said:


Here's an extract:

"The Gibbs Phenomena is the ringing effect which can be observed on transient responses of digital filters due to a finite window of points used to perform the multirate filtering. Gibbs phenomena creates a ringing distortion before and after a sharp transient. ... The pre-ringing distortion is highly audible in music passages and is the major audio difference between analog processed playback and digital playback."

What seems of interest to me is wether the Gibbs phenomena is caused by PCM recording and playback or also by the recording process alone.
1. Does the effect still occur when a PCM recording is transfered to DSD and then converted to analog ?
2. What happens with DSD recordings being transfered to PCM and back to DSD, does this introduce the Gibbs phenomena ?

These questions relate to topics often discussed on this site: 1. the release of PCM recordings on SA-CD, 2. transfering DSD to PCM for mixing/processing

any answers ?

Post by mdt February 22, 2005 (22 of 89)
Dan Popp said:

gfresh and jerwgar:
The "more natural" myth again.
Hear what you hear, folks, but don't try to enlist science (or Life Energy) to back up your subjective opinion. That's bad science, and in this case, bad superstition.

Is it really just a myth ?
Have a look at the link given by Zeus to a patent granted to Ed Meitner et al.
I dont think the US patent office would grant patents on technologys developed to solve mythical effects.

Post by Sam February 22, 2005 (23 of 89)
mdt said:

I dont think the US patent office would grant patents on technologys developed to solve mythical effects.

You can patent anything. Even obvious jokes can get through (look up "method of swinging on a swing"!)

Post by DrOctodivx February 22, 2005 (24 of 89)
Sam said:

You can patent anything. Even obvious jokes can get through (look up "method of swinging on a swing"!)

You can definitely patent all kinds of things. I have a number of patents with my name on it (among others names) that my company put through. One of the funnier ones covers thumbnailing media on the internet (Patent #5,903,892) which most internet sites, including this one, do (we managed to patent it because we submitted it pretty early, though it was not approved until 1999).

I seriously doubt such a patent would hold up in court since it is such an obvious common sense thing to do.

The most important thing is to have patent lawyers who know how to phrase them in a way to get them through the approval process (though I suspect many of the patent lawyers have little idea what they are actually documenting - especially in the software world).

Post by Dan Popp February 23, 2005 (25 of 89)
mdt said:

Is it really just a myth ?
Have a look at the link given by Zeus to a patent granted to Ed Meitner et al.
I dont think the US patent office would grant patents on technologys developed to solve mythical effects.

m,
The myth I was referring to was that "more natural" (rather a subjective standard, wouldn't you agree?) must equate in any way to "better."

If you have a ruptured appendix, do you want to take the natural approach to healing, or do you want a doctor to unnaturally anesthetize you, unnaturally cut you open, and unnaturally remove the offending organ, followed by some unnatural painkilling drugs? Natural, or effective? Your choice.

If you are trying to get from point A to point B, the natural way is shoe leather or by horse (etc.). It is unnatural to create small explosions of unnaturally refined petroleum in order to propel one unnaturally fast on an artificially-created road. Which do you choose?

If it is true, which I do not allow, that there is some kind of "natural" recording process and some other kind of "unnatural" recording process, does it matter? Don't you want what's effective, not necessarily what's natural?

It is not natural to take still photos and display them for a fraction of a second each in order to present the impression of a "moving" picture. Yet no one (I hope) writes papers about how unnatural all this is, and that everyone should run screaming from theatres because they're all discrete images and fakery.

The reason I can get so worked up over this is because this is a very dangerous thought process. Correlation is not causation. Snow does not cause cold just because whenever it snows, it's cold. This line of "reasoning" (I don't like this, so I'll find a scientific justification for why no one should like it) has been used as a weapon to kill of millions of people. I am a green person and I don't like the purple people, so I find some data that helps me feel justified in my preferences. My preferences and opinions now somehow become not subjective, but Objective Science. The purple people must be kept from polluting the gene pool; Science Says.

That's why I say, "hear what you hear," or "like what you like." If you think 8-track tapes are the pinnacle of recorded sound, great! I have no problem with that. But when people try to bolster their subjective opinions with "science" in this way, it really scares me. We've got to learn to think more clearly than that.

Post by deangeli February 23, 2005 (26 of 89)
gfresh said:

I've been bouncing back between DVD-A and SACD alot and have compared them extensively. I'm always surprised by how good DVD-As sound, but SACD usually seems better. However, what I have noticed is that both have strengths and weaknesses.

I believe that SACDs tend tobe very weak in the high frequencies which seem to get dull and smeary. They also seem to have less overall dynamic range, and less subtle dynamic variation compared to 24 bit PCM.
And yet SACD has perfect impulse response so the 3d sound staging is amazing, and the sound is always very full and realistic. You can really feel the music. DVD-A in comparison seems flat, cold and sterile. Like the music simply lacks a dimension to it.

The explanation I can figure is that DSD's perfect impulse response and high time resolution give it that realistic, airy and warm sound. But DSD seems to have a harder time capturing subtle waveforms, particularly transients, in the high frequencies. When graphing a shorter waveform the 1 bit stream has less room to move. PCM however can capture all frequencies with the same dynamic resolution.

PCM also a larger dynamic range and a more constant bit resolution. DSD could be 32 bit 88k, or 16/174. From it's alleged dynamic range and my own listening DSD seems to about in the equivalent 18-20 bit range, which is better than CD, but not as good as DVD-A.

Part of this may also be as result of mastering or processing. You simply can't do the things on DSD you can on PCM. I've heard some pure DSD recordings (Telarcs and Alison Krauss) and they further reinforce my feelings about DSD.

I do think that SACDs are far better than CD. What often happens is that cheap record labels make their stereo SACD layer from the 16/44.1 PCM master (like with Norah Jones) and so all you are hearing IS the same as the CD. Also, since the CD layer on alot of hybrid discs is a Bit Stream transfer from the DSD it actually sounds pretty close to the real thing.

My overall opinion: Both formats beat CD by far, DVD-A is dead, I like SACD a little better, but DVD-A does excell in other ways it does not. I wish they would come out with a 256f DSD disc, or a 24/384 PCM disk, that way there would be no compromises.

This month's issue of (I believe) Absolute Sound has a quick little piece from Robert Harley, who has not been a friend of SACD. Harley felt that SACDs were weak at the top (as you note) and "grainy" (to use his word). The point of Harley's piece was to say that he had just heard the new Meitner transport, that the top two octaves were restored, that the graininess was gone, and that SACD was much better than he had ever thought. I gather Harley's full review comes later.

The bad news is that the Meitner transport is in such demand that there is a long wait and that, if you can get one, it's ca. $7,000. Then, of course, you need the DAC...

In my case I had stopped listening to music (classical). My wife said it was because I was too lazy to go to the cabinet to get a CD. That didn't sound right, but I knew something was wrong. I had been listening to classical music all my life, had come to hate the self-abuse required to play vinyl, had rushed to the CD when they came out in the 80's, and had somehow just stopped being interested in listening any more.

The SACD has been a resurection for me. My system is stereo (Vandersteen 2's, an ARC integrated tube amp, cables that are probably way too expensive (cost more than the speakers), and a Sony player (the discontinued really heavy one) modified by Warren Gregoire). The difference between SACDs and CDs is so palpable on my system that even the "unwashed" (e.g. my children and their R&B freinds) can hear it. Now my wife says we listen to too much music.

This website has been a godsend, I must say. The reviews on it are by and large remarkably professional and musically advanced.

Post by zeus February 23, 2005 (27 of 89)
deangeli said:

The point of Harley's piece was to say that he had just heard the new Meitner transport, that the top two octaves were restored, that the graininess was gone, and that SACD was much better than he had ever thought.

You don't find many Meitner owners pining for 128FS or 256FS. Odd that.

Post by mdt February 24, 2005 (28 of 89)
zeus said:

You don't find many Meitner owners pining for 128FS or 256FS. Odd that.

It comes no surprise to me that the use of a Meitner transport yealds such results. I dont know the machine but i have also invested into a high end transport/converter system (Accuphase DP-100/DC-330) to realize the full potential of SA-CD.
It seems obvious to me that the much higher amount of information as oposed to RBCD, much more densly packed, brings greater demands to the transport as well, not only to the converter as one might think at first.
The industry should stop advertising SA-CD as better per se, no matter what the equipment.They made the same mistake when introducing RBCD "perfect sound for ever", "with digital the player has no influence on the sound", we have all seen these statements prooven wrong.
Unnecessary negative judgements like the one by Robert Harley are really not needed in propagating this fine new format.

Post by vonwegen February 25, 2005 (29 of 89)
eesau said:

Hi,

some 18 months ago I invested in Denon DVD-2900 + equipment to listen to multi-channel audio. Then I started to make format comparisons:
to my surprise I WAS NOT ABLE TO TELL A STEREO CD FROM A STEREO SACD RELIABLY. I carried out this test also using separate CD and SACD with assistance but the results stayed the same.

For me the difference was obvious from the very start. My first SA-CD was "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis. I listened to both the SACD and CD versions back to back. With the SA-CD version, I could hear the recording engineer opening up the reverb chambers part way during the actual recording (a mixing engineer would _not_ do this, BTW), and the saxophones felt like they were breathing in my right and left ears, respectively. The cymbals on the drum kit no longer sounded thin and dull --the sustain was so much more apparent than before.

Conversely, when I went back to the redbook CD version, it sounded shrill and tinny by comparison, like switching back to your old transister radio after a week with a new hi-fi set.

As for DVD-A, it is also worlds better than CD, but I find it not as "warm sounding" as SA-CD. My main reference source is R.E.M.'s "Automatic For The People" album--in both the stereo & MC formats, the DVD makes the original CD version sound _very_ transistorized (and not very well mixed, esp. "Ignoreland" and "Star Me Kitten"), but the new mixes still don't have that tube amplifier warmth that the best DSD recordings offer.

My 2 cents' worth, anyway.

Post by dvda-sacd August 23, 2005 (30 of 89)
I think there are too many SACD/DSD enemies. I can hear the difference between DSD and PCM 44.1 kHz/24 bit, and SACD really sounds better than CD.

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