Re: [microsound] audio formats

[ian stewart <artsonics@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I haven't heard SACD, but the following comments from Dominique Bassal's 
paper on mastering in electroacoustic music might be of interest (published 
on the CEC webpage, in the original French:
cec.concordia.ca/ftp/La_pratique_du_Mastering.pdf
and in English translation:
cec.concordia.ca/ftp/The_Practice_of_Mastering.pdf):


"[SACD] consists of an extension of the oversampling technique called DSD, 
capable of offering, due to a sampling rate of 2.8224 mHz at 1 bit, a 
frequency response ranging from direct current
to 100 kHz and a dynamic range of 120 dB. This said, the lack of timeliness 
of Super Audio CD is dismaying:

-it is based on a technology completely at odds with LPCM, used in
all digital systems to this day. No current recording system, program,
plug-in, etc can be adapted to it, and the specific sound recording
and treatment tools are very rare and exorbitantly expensive;

- even if largely considered, from the point of view of sound quality, as
equal to or marginally superior to LPCM 24 bit/96 kHz and 24 bit/192
kHz, SACD, like CD-Audio before it- but unlike its high-density
LPCM competitors- is a closed format, offering few possibilities of
integration with eventual improvements;

- unlike DVD-Audio readers, for which a FireWire digital output is
foreseen, offering at least the possibility of a D/A conversion by a
specialized external device, all SACD readers, with one exception,
are equipped only with analog outputs. An aberrant contradiction
with the audiophile vocation of the format;

- and of course, it is out of the question for an SACD reader to read
DVD-A, and vice-versa. As for the possibility of reading an SACD on
a CD-Audio player, it is illusory: for a much higher price than CD, we
get a performance exactly the same, since all that?s happening is
that an entirely separate layer is being read from the SACD, at the
Red Book standard! "


best,
Ian

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