Super Audio CD
by Brian
A little while back I got a new DVD player that also has Super Audio CD capability. I haven't had much chance to put the SACD side to good use, since I'm usually in the car when I listen to CDs and there aren't a ton of SACD discs out there.
Yet that doesn't explain why it took until today to notice how awesome it is. The occasion was the 5.1 channel version of Peter Gabriel's Up, which isn't a great album but is a tremendous demo disc for the technological capabilities of SACD. "Growing Up" especially has sound swirling around from all directions ... very cool.
Now I'm listening to Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline, which is only SACD stereo and not 5.1, but sounds amazing all the same (a 5.1 remix would sound odd for that album anyway). I've had this disc for a while, but I guess I never listened to it close enough. Funny how that works.
But like I said, there's not a great selection available on the format yet. I would assume that this is primarily due to competition with DVD-Audio, which I have not had the opportunity to hear yet. Has anyone been able to do a comparison between the two?
Yet that doesn't explain why it took until today to notice how awesome it is. The occasion was the 5.1 channel version of Peter Gabriel's Up, which isn't a great album but is a tremendous demo disc for the technological capabilities of SACD. "Growing Up" especially has sound swirling around from all directions ... very cool.
Now I'm listening to Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline, which is only SACD stereo and not 5.1, but sounds amazing all the same (a 5.1 remix would sound odd for that album anyway). I've had this disc for a while, but I guess I never listened to it close enough. Funny how that works.
But like I said, there's not a great selection available on the format yet. I would assume that this is primarily due to competition with DVD-Audio, which I have not had the opportunity to hear yet. Has anyone been able to do a comparison between the two?
|Link|5:25 PM
2 Comments:
I was all excited about SACD and DVD-A years ago, but they just took too long to come out, the competing formats didn't help, and when it was time for me to buy a new DVD player a couple of years ago, there was exactly one that played both new audio formats and it didn't have some other features I absolutely had to have, so I cheaped out and got one without support for either format (though with infinite region setting, PAL->NTSC conversion, and Macrovision defeat). And so far I don't feel like I'm missing all that much--I have exactly one DVD-A disc that came packaged with its companion CD, and I have no SACDs. I've become too accustomed to burning my own mix CDs or just backups to use in the car, I don't have SACD or DVD-A for the car, and lately I'm getting this feeling that flash-memory-based players are on the verge of supplanting everything else audio-wise in my listening experience. I'm just waiting for the right moment to take the plunge there.
I do still enjoy my small collection of DTS CDs (though not in the car), and it looks like they're already having a much longer useful lifespan than dbx-encoded LPs ever did....
Hear, hear on the Soft Bulletin. Best album ever made.
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