Continuing with CDs?

Absolutely. It really depends on the mastering, and unfortunately a lot can go “wrong” with SACD. One reason I was wishing we got SACD instead of CD as our first consumer digital format is that logically it would mean DSD digital tools instead of PCM - that’s a huge difference and unfortunately a lot of SACD’s have been compromised by 1) masters that were PCM at one point 2) mastering engineers who for whatever reason converted the signal to PCM (usually to use PCM tools) before converting it back to DSD 3) players that don’t play DSD and actually convert DSD signals to PCM.

any resource on figuring out which SACDs are highly regarded? i've a bob dylan boxset on SACD that sounds good to me but the vinyl also sounds good to me so I don't really have the golden ears

the first sony CDP looked pretty cool

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Lettore_CD_Sony_CDP-101_-_Museo_della_Scienza_e_della_Tecnologia_Leonardo_da_Vinci.jpg/1200px-Lettore_CD_Sony_CDP-101_-_Museo_della_Scienza_e_della_Tecnologia_Leonardo_da_Vinci.jpg

xp tough to say, especially because it's become a niche format. The major label branches in Japan makes a lot of SACD's, but they're so expensive, I've only bought one - the Stones' Exile on Main Street - and even that's tough to find because they've done two or three SACD's exclusively in Japan alone and only one of them is sort of worth getting.

In the U.S., it's mainly MFSL. Analogue Productions and Intervention Records do only a few titles a year - maybe even just one or two at this point - so MFSL has the lion's share easy.

Even the Redbook layers of the Pixies MFSLs sound light years better than the standard CDs

I also have that Dylan box (bought it on a clearance!) and it’s lovely, but I’d say the Mono box sounds equally great despite not being SACD. There’s pretty good evidence the extended upper range is inaudible to humans, and absolutely not 50somethings like me, but I’m all in favour of the format encouraging good mastering.

The Dead Can Dance SACDs sound amazing, but then the CD layer of them sounds equally amazing, so presumably it's just a really outstanding remastering job?

yeah i have occasionally felt a SACD might have a little something extra - better imaging or maybe some bass tone or top end magic - but it does feel like the crucial difference might just be “we paid more attention to the mastering”

i have maybe a dozen in the rock/pop area, my Japanese copy of Let It Bleed sounds pretty good - quite like the hybrid of Can’s Future Days, remember thinking Shoot Out The Lights sounded cool but not necessarily better than the vinyl

intrigued by the PiL ones, have always heard than 5.1 Avalon is very good, truly mystified as to why Hats and A Walk Across The Rooftops have never made it to SACD

SACD is a interesting thing.

It's a long time since I really paid attention to all this stuff (I think I posted about SACD here about 17 years ago!) but, as I recall... sometime in the late '90s Sony decided to archive all their analogue/first-gen digital masters. 1-bit delta-sigma at 64x CD sample rate seemed like the best/simplest method for this (very easy to decimate to PCM at various sample-rates down the line). Around the same time their patents on Redbook CD lapsed. CD ripping was taking off in a big way, a worse nightmare for the music industry than home taping ever was. So here was an opportunity to introduce a "new" format, with no digital output in hardware, uncrackable copy protection, with a swathe of marketing to persuade people that the co-inventors of CD had seen the light and realised something "better" was needed.

After that it all gets a bit fuzzy... there was a Lipshitz/Vanderkooy paper that completely debunked 1-bit delta-sigma as an archival format, and some back and forth that I didn't follow. To get any kind of useable dynamic range with "true" 1-bit multi-MHz DSD, you have to aggressively noise-shape and push a load of crap into the ultrasonic frequencies. So what you're getting with DSD/SACD is a bit more dynamic range than CD over 0-20k, and then escalating amounts of uncorrelated noise way up in the inaudibles. From an engineering PoV it seems... dubious. Especially as, very soon after Sony decided to go all-in on this as the new music format (20y ago), 24/96k PCM became quite widely available. So, if your interest was avoiding severe filtering around 20-22k, and preserving ultrasonic content - on the off-chance that some people can hear / it somehow affect our perception of the lower freqs - then hi-res PCM does that, without the noise issues.

But a lot of people claim DSD has some magical "analog" qualities than PCM doesn't have (in spite of, or maybe because of the crap lurking in the HF?).

As you've all said above, it's usually a badge of quality in terms of mastering/recording. And if something is genuinely "pure" DSD, then it's probably been recorded direct to 1-bit/xxxMHz, and is likely a fantastically well-engineered live performance - cos there's almost no opportunity to edit without a round-trip through PCM.

I've heard DSD64/128/256 (many years ago off disc, and more recently through software playback), and I've heard 32/768k PCM, and it was all very nice... and I seriously doubt I could tell the difference between them, or the same dithered down to 16/44.1k, or possibly even a 320k lossy version. But my audiophile credentials were revoked long ago, so that's fine :)

(FWIW, as mentioned on another thread, I've half-convinced myself that the subtle-but-tangible benefits of CD/CD+ Qobuz I heard over 320k-Spotify were down to differences in broadcast level... seemed like Qobuz maybe don't pull down to -14LUFS like Spotify? But I wasn't remotely rigorous in my testing...)

The one thing I've noticed about SACDs is that they are much more jog-resistant than normal CDs.

Michael, don't feel bad about your credentials because nobody in the world in the 40+ years of existence of high-resolution audio has proven they can hear the difference between 16bit/44.1khz and higher resolution audio (apart from test signals with ear-damaging volumes obv)

Oh, agreed... just pre-emptively excusing myself from any high-end gear or hearing acuity battle that may arise :) Solidly mid-fi, with troublesome hyperacusis in one ear, and nothing above 13.5k in either.

Lipshitz, mentioned above, was - I think - the guy who set up the famous ABX test for Ivor T of Linn back in the '80s. The one where old Ivor - emphatically anti-digital at the time - failed to reliably hear the difference between music on an LP12 through a top of the line Linn/Naim system, and the same routed through 16/44.1 ADC/DAC.

Hi-res is great for recording - I'm all for it. But as an end-product, hard to see the need.

I just looked up hyperacusis, which I'd never heard of before. I don't think I have this particular condition myself, though I've had tons of tinnitus and self-generated white noise for years.

Self-diagnosed and likely mis-diagnosed :) A stress-related sensitivity to high frequencies; audiologist found nothing physical, but that was 10-12 years ago.

I prefer SACD, but honestly if the difference was that vast, I would never play CD's. The differences are subtle, and if you want to run a test, the easiest way to hear it is through echo decay - that's probably the most noticeable observation anyone can make with resolution in audio, where redbook PCM doesn't preserve the decay as well. But again, resolution isn't everything. There's no point in capturing more information that a standard resolution format can grab when the same data that can be contained in both isn't mastered well. One of MFSL's infrequent SACD duds is Earth, Wind & Fire's That's The Way Of The World. It's got a painful top end, and to be fair it may be there on the master tape since it was reportedly engineered with a hot sound, but every mastering I DO like of that music doesn't have that (or perhaps smooths out the top end). I wound up ripping the redbook layer and re-EQ'ing it myself. Lower resolution sure, but I don't really notice much less enjoy the added resolution when I'm cringing non-stop at that painfully bright top end.

I’ve been interested in SACD. Apparently my Sony blu-ray player can play them but it only has an HDMI and coax out, and my AV receiver’s manual says it can do DSD, but I’m not sure if it can through the HDMI inputs. I’d need to get a disc and try, I suppose. Those Paul McGowan YouTube videos have had me intrigued for a while as he stans so hard for the format.

I'm in the skeptics' corner (despite owning SACDs and low-end SACD hardware) but I will say the descriptions and the marketing are extremely good at tapping into plausible-perfection territory. Is 16 bits per sample enough? 24? well how about one bit. 44kHz? 48? 96? 192? how about a million Hz, it sounds like a pure single-dimensional stream of audio. By contrast discrete multibit sampling sounds like throwing lego bricks at your eardrum. It's pure bullshit but damned if it doesn't sound like "this is what they would have done if they'd had the technology" rather than "here is a similarly flawed stab at a straightforward sampling problem, which has already been solved, but this one gives us much better DRM". As a 12 or 13 year old looking at the first CD players I imagined that the music flowed off the disc in a crystal skein of laser light which somehow went directly to my brain. I remember a friend comparing the S/N ratio of a CD player to the amp in my moderately good boombox and telling me that plugging in a CD player might destroy my system because of the extra 20dB headroom.

Red book CD standard is 16 bit resolution and 44.1 kHz which by science is 96dB dynamic range in 20hz-20,000hz which encompasses human hearing range in all sane real-life scenarios. If you're skeptic you can test it yourself. Nobody in the decades of history of high resolution audio has been able to prove it is not enough.

High-res marketing plays into the plausible territory, because you can't prove someone can't hear something. It's like healing crystals and homeopathy and horse dewormers, you can't prove they don't work.

What's really ludicrous is when folks claim to hear a difference in hi-res audio made from sources where there were no frequencies above 20k recorded or created, because the audio hardware used was simply incapable of capturing these frequencies. I'd love to be able to sit down any of these folks for a nice double-blind ABX session with any audio material of their choice.

I think there’s a SACD of Brothers in Arms which was recorded on some 14 bIt PCM recorder, if I recall correctly

I think there’s a SACD of Brothers in Arms which was recorded on some 14 bIt PCM recorder, if I recall correctly

aargh sorry

There are quite a few examples of the redbook layer on hybrid SACDs being quite radically different - different mastering path, more compressed, etc; the players themselves tend to have different output levels for each source, so it becomes difficult to compare. Dark Side of the Moon is frequently cited as an example of a hybrid SACD (maybe the best selling disc of its type?) where the CD layer is worse than the commercially available CD!

There are quite a few boutique labels out there that offer hi-res samples for download, to satisfy listeners' curiosity. It's sort of interesting (sort of) to see what you get when you subtract the CD version from the ultra-hi-res. Last time I did this (a small jazz ensemble, mixing inverted 32/352k with the 16/44.1 version), what was left was a hump of LF (0-70Hz) at least -90dB down, nothing but thermal noise 70-22k (-150dB), and then the resumption of whatever ultrasonic content had been captured by the mics (or introduced as noise by the gear) around -90dB to -110dB, for the rest of the spectrum. Naturally, this sounded like complete silence, even cranked up. But if I played it through VLC (rather than Audacity), I could hear the faint shuffle of the brushed drums. I assume VLC was using the 24/44.1 Core Audio settings on the laptop, and somehow folding the ultrasonics down into the audible region. I can see how this would very undesirable with something like DSD64, cos it's not musical content up there with DSD, it's quantisation noise pushed out of band. Or, y'know, maybe not. People like vinyl ;)

it's not that hi-res magically gives you access to frequencies you wouldn't hear otherwise. it just allows you to use less abrupt filtering techniques. even the most creative filtering techniques for redbook format introduce temporal distortions in the audio spectrum (ringing, or time smear). at issue is not whether you can hear these distortions (some people can, and you can be trained to). the question is whether you can *perceive* them. do they annoy your brain, in some sense? people commonly refer to digital "fatigue," where after a while you get sick of listening. this is such a loaded topic, but there is science to back it up.

bringing up MQA is almost as combustible as bringing up mask mandates, but damn the torpedoes: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mqa-time-domain-accuracy-digital-audio-quality

There are filtering techniques that are inaudible. Yes, fatigue and other non-quantifiable effects are perceived as real. It's the same with people who are allergic to electricity or microwaves or mobile phone signals or wi-fi signals or 5G or whatever the next technology will be. The people perceive it as real, but nobody can prove it actually exists.

Yep, fair enough. There are quite a few different approaches around to stop-band attenuation (you can even select different filters on some CD players) - sharp roll-off, shallow-and-early (HF roll-off), shallow-and-flat-to-20k (but some aliasing). Again, whether one can hear the effects of these different approaches is debatable. But, yes, a higher sampling rate to begin with means that the potentially problematic effects of sharp low-pass filtering are avoided.

xxp

the higher sampling is only needed for recording, though. once the filtering is done, there is zero reason for it to be there for playback. same for bit depth, 16 bit is already excessive for safe listening but it's a sane amount of overkill.

technology wise, they got everything right the first time with CDs but upper management thnakfully were too clueless to anticipate the eventual ease of making backup copies so ever since the late 90's it's been a never ending cycle of forcing not only useless but technically inferior DRM formats down consumer's throats under the guise of "better quality"

braised cod otm

the filtering i'm talking about is done on playback.

i was referring to the LPF to remove frequencies above nyquist prior to ADC, that's the only place where the higher sampling rate makes sense. there's no need for sampling rates higher than 44.1/48 khz during playback, as the aliasing has already been prevented with the LPF before digitisation

the "time smearing" FUD is MQA marketing bullshit, citing MQA propaganda as evidence for redbook's inadequacies isn't going to fly.
at least DSD, hi-rez PCM and other DRM'd nonsense formats, despite the bloat and higher risk of lower fidelity playback, actually can (under ideal circumstances) work as well as redbook audio. MQA is a 100% certified scam

This is a decent article about filter choices in DACs and why sharp filtering is nothing to be worried about:

https://addictedtoaudio.com.au/blogs/how-to/how-to-pick-the-best-filter-setting-for-your-dac

here is an article that shows that MQA does very well in the time domain, with supporting test data. but as i said, MQA, and hi-res sound quality in general, are things that simply cannot be discussed on the internet. the conversations always devolve into "listen to whatever makes you happy." and so shall this one. https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-tested-part-1

i suppose i wasn't clear enough: MQA is objectively a scam, no ifs and buts about it. it is pure snake oil

unlike SACD and the like where there's still the "you can't prove other people can't hear things just because you can't" angle braised cod mentioned, where reproducible, rigourous scientific testing of the supposed benefits of hi-res with a large number of listeners is hard to do without bias (individual testing is trivial)* , MQA has already been thouroughly falsified.
it's a lower-fidelity, lossy scheme, as much of a DRM cash grab as any other "alternatives" to redbook except this time there's zero chance of it even being as good, let alone *better* than an already perfect delivery format

* take your hi-rez/DSD file, convert it to 16/44.1 PCM, then convert it back to the original format (exact same specs), then ABX test the original and the double-converted files.
of course, the issue with individual testing is 1) anyone can cheat and post logs to the internet claiming they can hear a difference, and 2) even honest testers might make accidental mistakes and not be aware of it

When I was a kid I had a Walkman with MEGA BASS switch that made low frequencies louder. MQA is like that, but you can't turn it off because it's lossy.

Re: SACD's from pre-DSD digital masters, I was surprised how many SACD's were being done for albums widely known to have digital masters. To be fair, the regular CD's weren't necessarily done from the same masters, especially if they were originally released in the vinyl era - in those cases, rather than accessing the digital master (which may have been too difficult to play back due to obsolescence), they might have played back the vinyl cutting master. (When the Beat remastered their catalog, they had a tough time finding someone who could play back the

But as mentioned, Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms was remastered by MFSL for SACD (all-digital recording) and they even remastered Richard Thompson's Rumour and Sigh, Los Lobos' Kiko and Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy, all of which were recorded in analog but ultimately mixed down into PCM digital masters. IIRC if you can read the DSD files on the Kiko SACD, the data clearly goes off a cliff right when it hits 20 kHz. MFSL hasn't told anyone what they did, but I'm guessing it's not dissimilar to what others do, which is feed the digital master back into the analog domain, then back to SACD. Greg Calbi actually talked about this when he did the 2003 Dylan remasters for SACD - he mastered the original CD for Oh Mercy which was a straight transfer from the PCM master, but it made no sense to him to do that again for the SACD. Feeding it back to analog made sense because he got the idea to use unique analog tools as a way of coloring the sound and getting something that was not only different but also desirable in its own way. You could say this degrades the sound, but arguably ANYTHING done in analog or really mastering "degrades" the sound, it's really more about shaping the sound into something pleasing. So I'm guessing that's what MFSL probably did with their SACD's as well - bring it into the analog realm for mastering and then outputting it again into an SACD master. It doesn't restore info that was never captured by the recording to begin with, but it does add some data that could be preserved better if the master is outputted into high resolution.

FWIW, I came across this interview with Dave Wakeling about the English Beat remasters, which shows the difficulties of remastering early digital. (Their second and third albums were digitally recorded.)

https://www.popmatters.com/162069-special-beat-service-an-interview-with-english-beat-2495824800.html

"One of the nice things about this whole process was it forced us to go back on the master tapes and check on their health. A lot of them were starting to shed if they were on analogue tapes and a lot of had been recorded on the first digital systems to come out, which was a 3M system. Which kind of ended up to be the Betamax, you know it never really made it. So we had to take the tapes to France where there was one 3M machine still operating. So we had to take them there and get them transferred to another format. At least now as part of the process of doing the box set, we have all the masters preserved and if we hadn’t gone through that process in another few years we may have lost some of those songs forever."

I'm just glad that I haven't heard anything lately about Neil Young's feline hearing and his porno player but instead just about how much he hates Joe Rogan. Maybe getting married has exacerbated his selective hearing loss.

i happened to notice this paragraph in the cover article of the new stereophile. it's written by editor jim austin and expresses the thought i was trying to convey above better than i did. it's in reference to a $46,000 transport, but still. Early digital focused largely on the frequency domain. As a result, mistakes were made. The “Red Book” standard for CDs settled on a sampling frequency of 44.1kHz because that was the minimum rate needed to cover the full audible range (you must sample at twice the bandwidth in order to allow “perfect” recovery of the original time series, which gets us up to a sampling frequency of 40kHz) plus a narrow transition band to allow for bandwidth-limiting. But the folks who defined the “Red Book” spec didn’t allow enough room for optimal filters—just sharp, fast ones. Sharp and fast in the frequency domain equal broad and slow in the time domain. At CD resolution, you can get near-perfect frequency response or good time-domain performance, but you can’t have both.
https://www.ch-precision.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Stereophile-March-Issue-2022-CHP.pdf

Too bad they still can't prove it in a listening test.

depends who "they" are and what the test is. trained/professional listeners do much better in blind tests, and blind tests aren't a great way to pick up these kinds of effects, which for most listeners register as fatigue over long intervals of listening.

"They" are everyone who claim to hear a difference without doing a proper double-blind test. Trained and professional listeners do better for the obvious reasons, they know what to listen for. Double-blind tests are the most reliable method to hear audible differences and that's why they're rigorously used in every field of audio industry.

Most of the sounds people hear are compressed audio, whether it's TV, radio, phones or streaming media, the codecs are developed and tested with double-blind tests to make sure they're as transparent as possible. And yes, you can't test fatigue or other non-measurable effects, that's how healing crystals work.

i dunno, i am glad i don't have to do a double-blind test every time i claim to hear a difference. but basically that sounds tautological. you develop a test that you know untrained listeners will fail, then they fail it, and the conclusion is: aha! proof positive that cds are perfect!

whatever, the grateful dead guys use 24/96 as their standard, and they're always at the forefront of everything.

if there's anyone to trust about a fatiguing listen

haha well since their concerts are 4 hours long, they would be the ones to know.

> you develop a test that you know untrained listeners will fail

no trained listeners ever passed a properly designed ABX test comparing redbook against hi-rez. it's not only untrained listeners that fail, everyone fails

you claim to hear a difference because you're expecting one, that's why blind tests exist

I've never encountered a self-professed audiophile who seemed to care much about or have heard very much music. Certainly not who had wide and deep listening interests.

Results showed a small but statistically significant ability of test subjects to discriminate high resolution content, and this effect increased dramatically when test subjects received extensive training. This result was verified by a sensitivity analysis exploring different choices for the chosen studies and different analysis approaches.
https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18296

i really don't get why people are dead-set against exploring other digital options that provide a better listening experience. why does science have to stop in 1985?

might as well ask why do people still believe in gravity or why the earth is flat, why stop indeed? why not post sales brochures as evidence of scientific progress?

re: the AES meta-analysis, what a shocker that a review would include results from improperly conducted studies, then discover there's a difference after all

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=112204.0

hey now that's just not playing fair. if you mean by "sales brochures" the stereophile review of the ch precision transport, i happened to grab it from the vendor site because they were proud of the review and posted it in full, and it is not available as free content on stereophile's site. but if you want to read it in stereophile you can go buy it off the newsstand. and yeah what a shocker that the aes, the largest professional organization of audio experts, would post an analysis and people would then snark about it on some internet forum?