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Discussion: Billy Joel: 52nd Street

Posts: 4

Post by Jed February 28, 2005 (1 of 4)
I've had my SACD player less than two weeks. Last week I got a shipment of eight SACDs (in addition to the three I already had.) I was enjoying them, but when I got to Billy Joel's "52nd Street", it seemed to be quite a let down compared to the discs I had played before it, in terms of sound quality.

I have the original LP, the 8 track tape, the first CD, and the 1998 remastered CD (which is quite an improvement over the original CD.) Today I did an A/B comparison of the remastered CD on my old CD player and the SACD stereo mix (level matched as best as I could, etc). I could tell a little difference between the two, and that may be due to different players. (If anything, I thought the remastered CD sounded slightly better than the SACD.)


Can anyone comment on the sound quality of the SACD stereo compared to the remastered CD? Are other Billy Joel albums (The Stranger, Innocent Man) the same way?

Post by tomtb March 5, 2005 (2 of 4)
Jed said:

I've had my SACD player less than two weeks. Last week I got a shipment of eight SACDs (in addition to the three I already had.) I was enjoying them, but when I got to Billy Joel's "52nd Street", it seemed to be quite a let down compared to the discs I had played before it, in terms of sound quality.

I have the original LP, the 8 track tape, the first CD, and the 1998 remastered CD (which is quite an improvement over the original CD.) Today I did an A/B comparison of the remastered CD on my old CD player and the SACD stereo mix (level matched as best as I could, etc). I could tell a little difference between the two, and that may be due to different players. (If anything, I thought the remastered CD sounded slightly better than the SACD.)


Can anyone comment on the sound quality of the SACD stereo compared to the remastered CD? Are other Billy Joel albums (The Stranger, Innocent Man) the same way?

The Stranger is one of my favorite multi-channel SACDs. The sound quality is very good. I do not have the Innocent Man SACD.

Post by Jed March 5, 2005 (3 of 4)
tomtb said:

The Stranger is one of my favorite multi-channel SACDs. The sound quality is very good. I do not have the Innocent Man SACD.

I like the album a lot too - you can see all of the formats I've bought it in. But I don't have multichannel and I don't expect to anytime soon. My point is that the stereo SACD layer doesn't seem to sound any better than the remastered CD from a few years ago.

Post by Jed March 5, 2005 (4 of 4)
Can anyone comment on the sound quality of the SACD stereo compared to the remastered CD?
Another thought: the 2-channel portion of the SACD can be made from 44.1kHz PCM. For old analog recordings (particulary rock), how common is it for them to do the SACD stereo from the 44.1 PCM instead of DSD from the analog tape?

Closed