Post by raffells March 10, 2005 (31 of 69)
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soundboy said:
Sony, as far as I know, always press its own SACD. In the US, Sony's SACD plant is at Terre Haute, Indiana and that plant also press SACDs for other labels. It's interesting that all of the single-layer SACDs released by Hong Kong Warner Music were pressed by Sony in Indiana. The issue was always the production capacity of hybrid SACDs around the world. The SACD plant of Viva Magnetics in Hong Kong was the newest one I heard of going into production....I believe it pressed some of the Elton John SACDs (certainly the Universal/Sony Elton John sampler). I have been told by Brian Moura of highfidelityreview.com that Hong Kong Sony is looking into building its own SACD manufacturing facilities.
Really pleased to hear this....I suppose that the dual layer plant shortage problem would still have an effect on single layer production..ie if you you were a producer and had to wait for dual layer surround ..hence the rather confusing mixed issues of some sacds...in both versions...what about europe?...I believe theres something in Germany....I wont hold the fact that they have done an Elton John sacd against the Hong Kong people../.yet......Dave
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Post by soundboy March 10, 2005 (32 of 69)
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raffells said:
Really pleased to hear this....I suppose that the dual layer plant shortage problem would still have an effect on single layer production..ie if you you were a producer and had to wait for dual layer surround ..hence the rather confusing mixed issues of some sacds...in both versions...what about europe?...I believe theres something in Germany....I wont hold the fact that they have done an Elton John sacd against the Hong Kong people../.yet......Dave
Single-layer SACD, IMHO, is going the way of the dodo bird.
Sonopress operates a plant(or two) in Europe. Sony also runs a SACD pressing plant in Japan. Crest National operates a SACD plant in Southern California....you may have heard about the "cracking SACD" problem with their products (i.e. Pink Floyd's DSOTM and Norah Jones).
Hybrid SACD always seems to be the preferred SACD type outside of the US....Peter Gabriel and Police titles are available as hybrids. Same with a number of Sony titles such as Dave Brubeck's "Time Out".
Vast majority of all Hong Kong/Chinese SACD titles are pressed either in Japan or Europe. So far, I can only identify Hong Kong Universal as an user of the Viva Magnetics plant in HK....and only for its more recent releases.
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zeus said:
Have you bought many? If not, the answer is probably no. SA-CDs will be around for as long as people buy them. DualDisc is after a somewhat different market, where absolute sound quality is secondary to "features". There are also technical tradeoffs involved so there's no guarantee it will even be around for long.
I do see Dual-Disc as being yet another nail in the SACD coffin.
First SACD has stalled hard. The number of titles coming out per month is a joke. The titles are a joke. It's one old fart title after the next, classical or something Jazz. Dual disc to the mainstream consumer has much more value than say SACD. Saying that SACD will be around as long as people buy them isn't totally true because what does that mean? Does that mean SACD will be around in this broken state so long as a small number of titles trickle out? Which is what I believe to be true. Or does SACD grow and really take off?
Too many great titles sit on the Sony shelf and not on SACD to help the format explode. I thought 2004/05 things would get big, but it's just the same old thing.
Dual disc has the mainstream titles coming out of the gate instead of sitting around waiting like the SACD camp.
The ideas thrown about that Dual Disc are aimed at a different audience doesn't matter. Number of units moved is the bottom line. Yes dualdisc is new, yes it could fade away next year, but at the moment, it has a better chance of taking off than SACD.
SACD should it remain nothing more than an audiophile niche will in my opinion be dead to me, barely a hair below the Sony Mini Disc which got more support from Sony as blank media than SACD has as a new format.
Where's Philips in this whole thing?
MIA
With Dual Disc out (even with the technical issues) and Blue Ray, and HD DVD on the way with the capacity to deliver sound just as good or better than SACD with new codecs, higher bit rates than SACD and higher rez PCM possible, things don't look good for SACD being that the format still hasn't made a dent in the big picture. 99.99% of consumers still have no clue what SACD is. It hurts typing all that being that I've been the biggest fan of the format and what it could bring me as a music lover. But if the rest of 2005 continues to be the same old story, I'll just forget about looking or worrying about new SACD titles, and look to another format, or just enjoy what's coming out on CD, or even dual disc and leave it at that. I haven't purchased an SACD in months. There is nothing out there that I care about. Dual disc is starting to look good to me, and that's kind of sad really.
- Tony
http://www.StrangerSoundLabs.com
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Post by zeus March 10, 2005 (34 of 69)
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sound_labs said:
First SACD has stalled hard. The number of titles coming out per month is a joke.
The number of titles has been steady at around 80 per month for at least a year, so I don't know where you come up with this "stalled hard" stuff. Whether they're titles you personally want to buy is another matter. There's nothing to stop you buying DualDisc instead or as well if the titles interest you more. But it would be a mistake to think that your preferences are universal and govern the future of the format.
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Post by gfresh March 10, 2005 (35 of 69)
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Sound_Labs, DualDisc really sucks. Seriously. I did a comparison between the SACD of Nine Inch Nails: Downward Spiral and the Dual Disc. It was a joke. The 'DVD' side of the disc didn't sound better than CD quality. I have BETTER sounding cds. I checked and found it is only 48k, and nowhere did it say it was using lossless compression. I wonder if it is even 24 bit. If so the data compression must be awful. Just for this one release the difference in sound quality was so profound it makes me really sad to to think DualDisc, or even DoubleDisc is for real.
Sure, the HD-DVD stuff sounds enticing, but the music industry knows that they can sell mp3s and cds with zero dynamic range much easier than SACDs or DVD-As. They won't bother with higher resolution music discs. What we have now is already TOO high res, and the industry has decided that give up on it. As we can see, they are already trying to make the high res stuff out there lower resolution and more data compression to make way for more gimmicks and bullshit, which apparently sell better than sound quality.
Also, as far as PCM goes the only way to beat SACD at its own game would to have better filtering and you would have to sample and 705khz to do this! Subjectively, PCM already is better, and can be better at dynamic subtleties and even frequency response, but to even near SACD quality they would have to have a sampling rate 8 times DVD-A. From the recording industry standpoint, it's pretty rare to find people even recording at 192khz, and at present if you REALLY wanted to, the highest they can do is 384khz on a few rare devices. As far as analog to digital conversion goes, even though we have 24 bit audio, they can't make converters that actually go above 20 bit. So really, with present technology we can't increase the bit resolution, and to get SACD quality sound they would have to increase sampling by 8x, and thus 8 time more data to be stored. This won't happen.
YOu can pray for a lossless compressed 24/384 6.1 disc, and that would be great, but chances are VERY slim.
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Post by monotone March 10, 2005 (36 of 69)
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zeus said:
The number of titles has been steady at around 80 per month for at least a year, so I don't know where you come up with this "stalled hard" stuff. Whether they're titles you personally want to buy is another matter. There's nothing to stop you buying DualDisc instead or as well if the titles interest you more. But it would be a mistake to think that your preferences are universal and govern the future of the format.
Major player like Universal & SonyBMG is pretty much down to zero since December 2004 though.
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Post by zeus March 10, 2005 (37 of 69)
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gfresh said:
I checked and found it is only 48k, and nowhere did it say it was using lossless compression. I wonder if it is even 24 bit. If so the data compression must be awful. Just for this one release the difference in sound quality was so profound it makes me really sad to to think DualDisc, or even DoubleDisc is for real.
Lossless compression shouldn't make any difference. I'm not sure if this has kicked in already but the "DVD Single Thin Layer Specification" relaxes the thickness of the DVD side which could be contributing to increased error correction activity on such discs. A format with a comprised CD *and* DVD side doesn't sound like something I'd invest in! But the discs were never intended for people after the highest sound quality anyway, more an attractive package with video etc.
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Post by zeus March 10, 2005 (38 of 69)
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monotone said:
Major player like Universal & SonyBMG is pretty much down to zero since December 2004 though.
No. All the titles are listed here. Check for yourself.
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Post by monotone March 10, 2005 (39 of 69)
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Post by zeus March 10, 2005 (40 of 69)
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monotone said:
The Universal update has been dead since December 2004...
http://consumers.umusic.com/sacd/future.html
This is for UMG in the US only. They released their backlog of 2004 titles in January. The first US releases aren't until April ... some are available for pre-order now. There's been a fair bit of activity by Universal in Europe.
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