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Claude said:
Why is it a bargain for two discs with the same content? Most buyers only use one of the discs, that's why they can't charge much more than for one disc.
One for my summer home and one for my main residence!
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Post by hiredfox August 20, 2009 (12 of 22)
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odiwan said:
Hi everyone
Now people are talking about blu-ray audio disc, the musical industry needs a new disc to improve sales, hardware manufactures and software labels.
The new format, could be a three inches blu-ray disc, one layer 120 minutes minimum and two layers 240 minutes, DSD codec mandatory, stereo and /or multichannel, perhaps others codec like DTS HD.
What do you think about this disc?
It took five years for me to be convinced that SACD was an improvement over RBCD and that the playback technology could be good enough to expose the differences and sound natural. This was about the same period of time it took me to buy a RBCD palyer in the 80's and migrate to CD from vinyl.
The main reason for my reluctant response to SACD was owning over 1000 Top Class Classical SACDs collected over years and costing a smallish fortune. The idea of dumping all that investment in favour of an untried new medium overcame all my natural urges as an early adopter of new technology that promised to be the next step towards audio heaven.
As it turned out even after this five year hiatus, my early player purchases proved poor and unconvincing despite good reviews; at lease two expensive SACD machines proved 'unlivable with' after a few weeks use. Luckily, I had bought only a handful of SACD's, so traded the machines and thought 'that was that'. Finally after ten years of the format, I have been convinced, found a half-decent player and built a 350 strong collection of SACDs of the main repertory - some might say unwisely, of course.
So having sidelined reluctantly 1000-odd RBCDs and a not inexpensive Reimyo CDP777 reference RBCD player, the chances of me sidelining SACD and RBCD in favour of yet another digital format is NIL.
Therein lies the rub for potential proposers of any new digital audio format. Only audiophiles will go the extra step anyway and those of us that do are certainly not looking for change anytime soon.
IMVHO as you all know by now - YAWN - PCM is PCM is PCM.
I don't need more definition of a two dimensional picture etched on my back wall, thank you very much!
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Having discovered SACD this year with about 10 albums in SACD I must say I'm blown away with hi-rez sound. I think that a lot of people are genuinely interested in hi-rez audio as well, the problem is the plethora of different formats available. However, the new universal disc players are what turned me around. Now I don't have to care what the format is, I can just put it in my player and listen. What I want is a winning format so the record companies can invest in a common hi-rez format. Be it SACD, Blu-ray audio, DVD-A etc etc.
But please, always include a stereo mix in the discs!
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hiredfox said:
The main reason for my reluctant response to SACD was owning over 1000 Top Class Classical SACDs collected over years and costing a smallish fortune. The idea of dumping all that investment in favour of an untried new medium overcame all my natural urges as an early adopter of new technology that promised to be the next step towards audio heaven.
I don't need more definition of a two dimensional picture etched on my back wall, thank you very much!
I am scratching my head. Why do you have to dump your SACD's if BR music takes off? Did you dump your vinyl for CD, your CD's for SACD?
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"I don't need more definition of a two dimensional picture etched on my back wall, thank you very much!"
Sorry, I just have no idea what you are talking about. If you are talking about multichannel, I would suggest you listen first compared to live concert hall sound, then take aim and fire.
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Post by Lochiel August 20, 2009 (15 of 22)
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hiredfox said:
It took five years for me to be convinced that SACD was an improvement over RBCD and that the playback technology could be good enough to expose the differences and sound natural. This was about the same period of time it took me to buy a RBCD palyer in the 80's and migrate to CD from vinyl.
The main reason for my reluctant response to SACD was owning over 1000 Top Class Classical SACDs collected over years and costing a smallish fortune. The idea of dumping all that investment in favour of an untried new medium overcame all my natural urges as an early adopter of new technology that promised to be the next step towards audio heaven.
As it turned out even after this five year hiatus, my early player purchases proved poor and unconvincing despite good reviews; at lease two expensive SACD machines proved 'unlivable with' after a few weeks use. Luckily, I had bought only a handful of SACD's, so traded the machines and thought 'that was that'. Finally after ten years of the format, I have been convinced, found a half-decent player and built a 350 strong collection of SACDs of the main repertory - some might say unwisely, of course.
So having sidelined reluctantly 1000-odd RBCDs and a not inexpensive Reimyo CDP777 reference RBCD player, the chances of me sidelining SACD and RBCD in favour of yet another digital format is NIL.
I plan to wait another five years or even ten, or better yet until the CD's and SA-CD's I have either no longer work or are no longer viable in terms of finding a player for them. Who can tell where technology will be in 10 years? Is there a marginal benefit of BD Audio that is worth the cost of the upgrade?
I have asked myself the same question in terms of BD video - in many cases, the BD video is not significantly better enough than a remastered DVD (when played on a good player) to justify an upgrade. In fact, BD has actually worked in favor of people like me - BD discs have resulted in reduced prices for regular DVD's, even those in special "Collector's Edition" boxes with great liner notes, commentary, and remastered video. I recently bought "Master & Commander" collector's disc for $12 - a year ago, it was $30.
It appears that you learned a hard financial lesson out of your SA-CD experience. I hope to avoid this re: BD Audio for the reasons outlined above.
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Lochiel said:
I plan to wait another five years or even ten, or better yet until the CD's and SA-CD's I have either no longer work or are no longer viable in terms of finding a player for them. Who can tell where technology will be in 10 years? Is there a marginal benefit of BD Audio that is worth the cost of the upgrade?
I have asked myself the same question in terms of BD video - in many cases, the BD video is not significantly better enough than a remastered DVD (when played on a good player) to justify an upgrade. In fact, BD has actually worked in favor of people like me - BD discs have resulted in reduced prices for regular DVD's, even those in special "Collector's Edition" boxes with great liner notes, commentary, and remastered video. I recently bought "Master & Commander" collector's disc for $12 - a year ago, it was $30.
It appears that you learned a hard financial lesson out of your SA-CD experience. I hope to avoid this re: BD Audio for the reasons outlined above.
I think what you have now will work just fine for a very long time. Some people still play Edison cylinders. Very few of them question the marginal benefit of more recent developments in audio reproduction, however. And, even fewer of them are not going to get something new because technology might only change again in 10 years.
There is currently no compelling reason to consider BR for music only. The number of releases is smaller than miniscule, although I find the sound quality quite good on the few I have gotten out of curiousity. But, this thread is pure speculation about a future market or lack thereof.
The potential exists for even better sound via 192K PCM and 7.1 channel sound (I find 7.1 somewhat superior to 5.1 in my limited listening). Better sounding than SACD? Maybe, maybe not. But, the thing I and many others would like to see is a robust growing market for hi rez music. DVD-A flopped and we have not gotten that from SACD, nor are we likely to. Could it possibly be Blu-ray? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. The robust growing market, by the way, will not be driven by audiophiles like you, me or others in this forum. If it happens, it will be a mass-market thing. We will just be on the coattails of it.
If you have a hi-def, 1080p/24 capable monitor or projection system of decent size, BR video is overwhelmingly better than DVD, which has only 480i resolution. I find the difference to be stunning, even though my Oppo player does a superb job of upscaling DVD to higher resolutions. Note that on a 35" set 10 feet away, not much difference will be apparent.
There is also absolutely no comparison in sonics between lossy, low-bit-rate sound from DVD and lossless hi rez audio from Blu-ray. It's night and day to anyone who has good ears.
Opera videos on DVD are just not tolerable to me anymore. Blu-ray is truly breathtaking for this genre, and I expect will also become the medium of choice for rock concert videos, for those so inclined. (Mass market appeal is important in building a viable market.) These are audio/video niches, of course, but could they spill over into the music-only arena? We shall see.
Like it or not, Blu-ray is charging ahead right now by virtue of its video prowess. Come this Christmas, it is doubtful you will even be able to buy a plain DVD machine at all but the lowest of low end stores. Some mass-market electronics retailers like Crutchfield no longer offer DVD machines. BR machine prices now start below $200. Can under $100 be far behind? You will likely see Blu-ray in cars within a year or two also. So, I believe Blu-ray is on its way to becoming the prevailing medium for distribution of movies. Will that extend to music, as well? Time, not you or I , will tell.
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Poster Lochiel states that BD video is NO better than upsampled DVD...This is where I draw the line. A simple OPPO BDP-83 hooked up to a well calibrated monitor absolutely, unequivocally BLOWS AWAY STANDARD DVD BY A SIGNIFICANT MARGIN. While the OPPO may not be the universal player panacea in terms of sacd/dvd-a playback, the picture is brilliant. I suspect that your video monitor is not state of the art because as a former photographer who projected tons of Kodachrome/Ektachrome onto a screen I can attest that anyone currently buying standard DVDs in lieu of Blu-ray is throwing his or her money away unless the material is not yet available in that format. And if one checks the various websites, in many instances, the price of a blu-ray is actually lower than the standard DVD. Have your eyes checked, invest in a different monitor, use a quality HDMI cable to carry the signal but stop spreading TRASH on this thread.
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Post by wolf359 August 21, 2009 (18 of 22)
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Lochiel said:
I plan to wait another five years or even ten, or better yet until the CD's and SA-CD's I have either no longer work or are no longer viable in terms of finding a player for them. Who can tell where technology will be in 10 years? Is there a marginal benefit of BD Audio that is worth the cost of the upgrade?
I have asked myself the same question in terms of BD video - in many cases, the BD video is not significantly better enough than a remastered DVD (when played on a good player) to justify an upgrade. In fact, BD has actually worked in favor of people like me - BD discs have resulted in reduced prices for regular DVD's, even those in special "Collector's Edition" boxes with great liner notes, commentary, and remastered video. I recently bought "Master & Commander" collector's disc for $12 - a year ago, it was $30.
It appears that you learned a hard financial lesson out of your SA-CD experience. I hope to avoid this re: BD Audio for the reasons outlined above.
All purchasers of software are in effect making a decision to back a format. Many people who are early adopters have to weigh up the implications of wether a new format will succeed or not. If it fails they could be left with a hunk of useless electronics and obsolete discs (HD-DVD comes to mind). SACD is not quite in that catagory yet in that both discs and players are being produced. I have got several defunct formats around the house DCC/Minidisc/Laserdisc (I am a sucker for new technology). At the time I was thinking about going into SACD one of the questions that I had learned the hard way was about backwards compatability. If SACD production of disc and machines died were the discs still useable. The answer of course is yes (for hybrids).Based on that the decision was that I went into purchasing SACDS. The fact that combined Blu-ray/SACD players (apart from the PS3) are appearing I find appealing. It may be true that in the USA prices of Blu-Ray machines and discs are dropping, here in the UK in my very limited expericence disc sales of Blu-ray movies are growing slowly. They are still very expensive compared to the often cheap almost giveaway price of the equivalent DVD. Until the Blu-ray market is well established with a large consumer base of players only then would BD-audio maybe become viable. The reason that I say maybe is based on the fact tha SACD which offers similar attributes to BD-Audio such as Hi rez sound,multichannel has not exactly caught on as a mass market product. While BD-audio may have an attraction as a suppliment/successor to SACD in the medium to long term. I cannot see it becoming a mass market product in the long run. Cheap CD's and downloads are what will cause it to remain a niche.
Slightly off the topic as far as comparing DVD to BD-video is concerned I conducted an experiment myself just to address that very question. I fed the output from my PS3 straight into a HDMI input on my TV. I then fed the the HDMI output from my marantz Dv7001 into a second HDMI on the same TV. I used the PS3 with the blu-ray disc and the Marantz with the same disc but in its DVD version after having synched the two together I was able to directly compare merely by switching the inputs. The results were intresting in that the larger the screen size the better the blu-ray performed,The marantz was excellent at upscaling but as in the audio world if the detail is not there to start with even the best system cannot put in what is absent. So my conclusion is that for smaller screen sizes a good upscaling DVD player will satisfy many but as the screensize increases the blu-ray player begins to show its pedigree. I realise that there are many out there who will decry my unscientific approach. In every instance I could tell the difference and I do not have especially good eyesight. (I wear glasses). this is not set in stone there are many badly remastered BD-video discs whose DVD counterpart is better than expected so its not set in stone. Bringing this back to SACD/Blu ray audio how many PS3 owners use the PS3 (early generation owners of course) for SACD replay. I suspect the answer is very few otherwise SACD sales would be higher.I also belive that for combined BD/SACD players the market will be for films ,with diehards like the people on this site using it for SACD and BD-audio if available to satisfy the Hi-rez fix. This is of course just my personal opinion
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Post by hiredfox August 21, 2009 (19 of 22)
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Fitzcaraldo215 said:
I am scratching my head. Why do you have to dump your SACD's if BR music takes off? Did you dump your vinyl for CD, your CD's for SACD?
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"I don't need more definition of a two dimensional picture etched on my back wall, thank you very much!"
Sorry, I just have no idea what you are talking about. If you are talking about multichannel, I would suggest you listen first compared to live concert hall sound, then take aim and fire.
First point: Figuratively speaking.
Second point: My set-up is high quality stereo only.
Hope that clears up your concerns.
John
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Post by mbash August 27, 2009 (20 of 22)
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And then there's PS Audio.
Go and read up on the Perfect Wave Transport and the Perfect Wave Dac.
And re-think everything.
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