Post by DBB December 13, 2004 (31 of 140)
|
|
I agree with this part:
Several high class performances have found their way on to SA-CD like that, recordings with Carlos Kleiber, Charles Munch, Fritz Reiner, Van Cliburn, Leontine Price, Placido Domingo, Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein, Herbert von Karajan together with world class orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony...
But I said not yet a library of great performances. The recent new releases of some RCA and Mercury classics is a good start, but we need hundreds more to begin to compete with what is already on vinyl. For instance, I love the Columbia recordings by Bruno Walter and the Columbia Symphony from the late fifties and early 60's: fantastic performances and fabulous sound. It is a disgrace that Sony has not put these on SACD yet. With some luck you can find these and others at your local thrift store for a dollar each in good condition. The supply of great SACD's is improving, but it will take years. I would buy much of my CD and vinyl collection again on SACD,if the quality was high and the price low, but they do not seem to be forth comming.
I was an early adopter of the SACD. In 2000 I was told that there would be 2000 titles in 2 years. I don't think we are there yet. That's why I have gone back to vinyl.
|
|
|
Post by DBB December 13, 2004 (32 of 140)
|
|
I agree with this part:
Several high class performances have found their way on to SA-CD like that, recordings with Carlos Kleiber, Charles Munch, Fritz Reiner, Van Cliburn, Leontine Price, Placido Domingo, Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein, Herbert von Karajan together with world class orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony...
But I said not yet a library of great performances. The recent new releases of some RCA and Mercury classics is a good start, but we need hundreds more to begin to compete with what is already on vinyl. For instance, I love the Columbia recordings by Bruno Walter and the Columbia Symphony from the late fifties and early 60's: fantastic performances and fabulous sound. It is a disgrace that Sony has not put these on SACD yet. With some luck you can find these and others at your local thrift store for a dollar each in good condition. The supply of great SACD's is improving, but it will take years. I would buy much of my CD and vinyl collection again on SACD in stereo,if the quality was high and the price low, but they do not seem to be forth comming.
I was an early adopter of the SACD. In 2000 I was told that there would be 10,000 titles in 2 years. I don't think we are there yet. That's why I have gone back to vinyl.
|
|
|
Post by raffells December 14, 2004 (33 of 140)
|
|
DBB said:
In terms of 2 channel sound quality, my experience is that a good SACD is slightly more realistic than vinyl, certainly more dynamic and noise free, but for now, I prefer vinyl for 2 reasons. First, on a good system, vinyl has a natural smoothness and a warm palpability that is more pleasing than anything digital. I have read that recording engineers sometimes prefer the sound of a vinyl pressing to the master tape. Obviously the tape is a more accurate rendition of the sound.
Secondly, as a classical music fan, there is simply not yet a library of distinguished classical recordings in SACD. I am usually disapointed in the performance quality of the SACD'S I have bought. It will take years to either transfer the old catelogue or create a new one of superior performances.
I resurected my vinyl collection only two years ago, hoping to archive it to a hard drive at 24/96 resolutiion. The more I played the vinyl, the more I became addicted to its superior sound, to the point that I gave up archiving and decided to get a better turntable. Yes, I am even willing to get up every 25 minutes to turn the LP over.
I must admit we are in total agreement about the small difference in vinyl being slightly smoother than digital but the problems even with my OTT vinyl regime of clicks even at very low levels made me think of re recording some rare items onto DVDA.......The sheer amount of digital space required on this process would rule out Harddrives...This is one area where digital excels in as much as you can edit and clean up scratched Lps. It is also tempting to re engineer some recording by giving certain passages the odd extra db.I think this applies mostly to classical recordings....Also the sometimes 14 minute side of Lps are really a pain...especially on longer works...My recent sacds Leningrad symphony and Mahler 5th play all 4 sides of the Lp onto one sacd...Thats realy a bonus.....perhaps one day I will get around to modifying the sacd/cd players compononts to a similair level of my disc stage...I probably wont play the Lps then?...anyone who told me that there would be several thousand sacd by any date would have been told what I think of them...The building of pressing plants was known and this is one of the limitating factors for new releases. IMO ..Dave
|
|
|
Post by mdt December 14, 2004 (34 of 140)
|
|
DBB said:
I agree with this part:
Several high class performances have found their way on to SA-CD like that, recordings with Carlos Kleiber, Charles Munch, Fritz Reiner, Van Cliburn, Leontine Price, Placido Domingo, Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein, Herbert von Karajan together with world class orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony...
But I said not yet a library of great performances. The recent new releases of some RCA and Mercury classics is a good start, but we need hundreds more to begin to compete with what is already on vinyl. For instance, I love the Columbia recordings by Bruno Walter and the Columbia Symphony from the late fifties and early 60's: fantastic performances and fabulous sound. It is a disgrace that Sony has not put these on SACD yet. With some luck you can find these and others at your local thrift store for a dollar each in good condition. The supply of great SACD's is improving, but it will take years. I would buy much of my CD and vinyl collection again on SACD in stereo,if the quality was high and the price low, but they do not seem to be forth comming.
I was an early adopter of the SACD. In 2000 I was told that there would be 10,000 titles in 2 years. I don't think we are there yet. That's why I have gone back to vinyl.
right you are, but nothing such will hapen if consumers dont show the record companys that they are interested in the re-release of high-class vintage recordings on SA-CD by buying such re-releases in considerable amounts.
At the moment record companys propagate new multichannel releases above all because they obviously think that's the only thing that will make people move over to SA-CD.(anyone can hear a BIG difference between mch and stereo but only hi-fi buffs will go for the extra sound quality of DSD, so they think)
They have to be convinced that there are many people simply into music that appreciate the added realism of DSD finally giving them beloved performances in the full quality they were originaly captured in.
The only way to do this is to support the format NOW by buying the product !
|
|
|
Post by DBB December 14, 2004 (35 of 140)
|
|
raffells said:
I must admit we are in total agreement about the small difference in vinyl being slightly smoother than digital but the problems even with my OTT vinyl regime of clicks even at very low levels made me think of re recording some rare items onto DVDA.......The sheer amount of digital space required on this process would rule out Harddrives...This is one area where digital excels in as much as you can edit and clean up scratched Lps. It is also tempting to re engineer some recording by giving certain passages the odd extra db.I think this applies mostly to classical recordings....Also the sometimes 14 minute side of Lps are really a pain...especially on longer works...My recent sacds Leningrad symphony and Mahler 5th play all 4 sides of the Lp onto one sacd...Thats realy a bonus.....perhaps one day I will get around to modifying the sacd/cd players compononts to a similair level of my disc stage...I probably wont play the Lps then?...anyone who told me that there would be several thousand sacd by any date would have been told what I think of them...The building of pressing plants was known and this is one of the limitating factors for new releases. IMO ..Dave
I would like to know if you have been successful capturing the magic of vinyl digitally. I tried with an Audigy II Platinum Pro (not pro quality), very convenient. It has a remote and lets you organize your albums nicely. I used Wavelab to record them.
At first I felt the sound coming out was just about equivalent to my LPs. I recorded at 24/96. But, as I said, the more I listened to the LPs when recording them, the more I realized the LPs were far superior to the play back of the wave file off the hard drive. Interestingly, the CDs I occasionally burned sounded better than the sound coming off the hard drive at 24/96, but still not nearly as palpable as vinyl. Probably the DAC in the Audigy card was inferior to the one in the CD player.
Ok, this is the issue. Is it worth upgrading to UBS recording and getting better a/d and d/a converter? (like the mini me) or is there some other solution. Should I just give up trying to capture the beautiful sound of vinyl on a hard drive or even on a dvd?
|
|
|
|
|
|
They have to be convinced that there are many people simply into music that appreciate the added realism of DSD finally giving them beloved performances in the full quality they were originaly captured in.
The only way to do this is to support the format NOW by buying the product !
I think this goes both ways, as more consumers purchase these more "commercial" releases, paving the way for SACD to take up more than a niche market share, then the studios will also start porting more of the classic great performances as well.
My point being, that more than just buying the classic performances to send a message, buying ANY of the newer releases will also help further SACDs market share and thus ensure that eventually the older works will get ported as well...
|
|
|
|
|
|
I've been interested in the idea of recording vinyl in high-res LPCM on a computer then creating a DVD-A for a few months now, but the problem is, the sound quality of vinyl is dependent on the quality of the turntable, and without a high-end $1000+ turntable, your recordings would not be as great as possible (possibly poor). Plus, I think 96/24 is to low a resolution to capture the sound off of vinyl acurately. I'd rather use 192/24 (or 32, if that's even possible) or 176.4/16 for down-conversion to 44.1/16 for CD. I have no idea if that's even feasable in the home consumer range. I wish I could use DSD...all you can do is convert PCM to DSD via Pro Tools, though, and you can't even play it back.
|
|
|
Post by Dan Popp December 16, 2004 (38 of 140)
|
|
crazyhayashi said:
I'd rather use 192/24 (or 32, if that's even possible)
It's not. Neither is 24. But 22 usable bits out of 24 ain't bad.
We are in a situation now where we cannot realize the full potential of what we have, yet some of us are pushing for more. Only a handful of people have heard, for example, how good a CD can really sound. I'm not one of them, in case you were wondering. But does it make sense to demand higher resolution/data formats when 99.99% of us aren't even aware of the capabilities of what we have?
The clocks, filters and converters in these digital systems are the quality bottleneck right now - not (I over-generalize for effect) the quantity of data.
|
|
|
Post by Chris December 16, 2004 (39 of 140)
|
|
Dan Popp said:
It's not. Neither is 24. But 22 usable bits out of 24 ain't bad.
We are in a situation now where we cannot realize the full potential of what we have, yet some of us are pushing for more. Only a handful of people have heard, for example, how good a CD can really sound. I'm not one of them, in case you were wondering. But does it make sense to demand higher resolution/data formats when 99.99% of us aren't even aware of the capabilities of what we have?
The clocks, filters and converters in these digital systems are the quality bottleneck right now - not (I over-generalize for effect) the quantity of data.
How on earth do you know we're not realizing the full potential of RBCD If you haven't heard how good RBCD can sound for yourself? As you say? How can you be so sure it can sound any better than it does? Which by the way, to me at least, simply isn't good enough, for complex symphonic music!!!
Both SACD and what little I've heard of DVD Audio sounds better than RBCD.
And the very very best LPs sound even better than either.
Of course it makes sense to want better sound when CD sound sucks !!!
If CDs could deliver better sound than they do, why don't they do so already???
They've had more than 20 years to approach the best of analogue but still haven't!!!
|
|
|
Post by Dan Popp December 16, 2004 (40 of 140)
|
|
Chris said:
How on earth do you know we're not realizing the full potential of RBCD If you haven't heard how good RBCD can sound for yourself? As you say? How can you be so sure it can sound any better than it does? Which by the way, to me at least, simply isn't good enough, for complex symphonic music!!!
Both SACD and what little I've heard of DVD Audio sounds better than RBCD.
And the very very best LPs sound even better than either.
Of course it makes sense to want better sound when CD sound sucks !!!
If CDs could deliver better sound than they do, why don't they do so already???
They've had more than 20 years to approach the best of analogue but still haven't!!!
Chris,
Sorry if I've caused you any consternation with my remarks. The reason I can believe that CD can sound better than what I've experienced is that I've heard that statement from several people in the industry, independently of each other, with nothing to sell, whose opinions I trust.
Of course SACD can sound better than CD. That wasn't my point. My point was that it took us 20+ years to figure out some of the things we now understand about CD. If we take the position now that we are not going to wait around for anyone to figure out anything about making the current hi-rez formats better, but we want more data throughput NOW (because that's all we know - More Data is More Gooder), there will be no such development and increased understanding but only thrashing about.
Man is the only creature that runs faster when he's lost.
It's not about not wanting better sound, Chris. It's about wanting better sound the smart way, not the expensive and wasteful way. Let's make all 24 bits wiggle before we ask for 32. For example.
|
|
