I wouldn’t introduce myself as an audiophile, but I do enjoy listening to high quality music. I live with a guy who’s very much into his home-comfortsl; thus underneath the 42″ plasma you’ll find a nice DVD recorder/upscaler and a Sony 2.1 DVD audio hometheatre system. It’s quite nice, but what’s nicer is that it plays both DVD audio and SACD (SuperAudio CDs).
We’ve just got Pink Floyd “The Dark Side of the Moon” on SACD, and the quality of it has completely blown me away. There is absolutely no distortion between the tracks as can be found on normal CDs, and the clarity is beautiful. It’s really something else, that even the least perceptive person could hear the difference.
I was therefore wondering if I could change my current mp3 collection to something of the same quality. (don’t hit me, I did use ogg and FLAC until I got a BOSE sounddock - and I switched back to the apple software from rockbox as it didn’t support the remote control.) SACD is 64 times the sampling rate of conventional CDs. My mp3s aren’t yet as good as my CDs (although the flac songs I own are) - but this new format would be nice.
It’s a shame that DVD-audio isn’t of the same quality (only 192Khz, to SACDs 2.8224Mhz), as it appears to have some Linux production tools available, however, the project is still in early development. (It’s still active though with the latest updates on the 14th October 2007). I’ll be taking a closer look at DVD-audio in the future if I can get the software working on ubuntustudio. I may release an ‘collection of songs’ (album sounds too professional) recorded using ubuntustudio on dvd-audio in the short to mid-term. Wouldn’t that be nice. I think I’d be complaining about the music rather than the sound quality then. Doh!
A very nice read. I enjoyed that. It is beyond me why the music industry doesn’t take the games industry approch to business…make a loss on the SACD hardware and speakers yet gain all the profit back via sales of SACDs at £20 a time…believe me, thats a price worth paying such is the jump in quality over MP3, CD or even DVD. The hardware is an essential part of the equation…you don’t by a PS3 to play PS2 games on it…Anyway, the market for SACD is huge - everyone likes music - everyone would like to hear their favourite album in mind blowing studio sound quality…so what’s the problem Mr Music Industry? (PS for the record, half the staff in HMV didn’t know what a SACD was, Virgin didn’t even stock them and they’re scattered about randomly amongst the normal CDs at HMV…only one I can find after hours of looking is the Dark Side of The Moon special edition and thats a hybrid CD / SACD)
Why the music industry doesn’t follow the razor/blade model of the games business and make a loss on the hardware to recoup with content? Because then you’d have to buy your music from the same brand X that you bought your player from, in a closed system. That may work OK for short-lifetime products like videogames but very few people would be prepared to do so with music (although Apple seems to be trying hard to tempt them).
Steven - surely though they could open the spec of the SACD to allow any manufacturer to use them. Make it an ‘open standard.’ I hate to think that just because it’s better quality companies want to use it to add copy protection.