Hello again.
I have an extensive regular CD collection, an inherited vinyl collection and a tape collection from my youth. I am running a topping DX7 Dac for interfacing my laptop to my system, my bt TV box/samsung frame TV - it switches inputs automatically, so really useful.
My current CD player is a Marantz CD 63 mkII which I recently refurbished and play through it’s own DAC chip - it sounds really good, possibly better than the topping. When I auditioned some speakers recently, I got to hear an oppo player, that seemed to handle blueray, sacd etc. It sounded better, or as good as my old marantz.
So what options are there that offer: cd, blu-ray, dvd-audio, dvd-video, sacd ? Is SACD even worth it as a format to get into?
I love my physical media, having spent a lot of time in my teens looking through the photo booklets that came with the ministry of sound ibiza annuals and dreaming of clubbing, while listening to taped radio one essential mixes. I just tend to pull a CD out of the rack and listen to the whole album and I am transported to a time and place.
With CDs being so cheap via ebay, or my local charity shops, I have been buying the albums I stole via napster/LAN sharing in university (some guy wrote a program that linked all the student’s music, so we could swap and discover at a blistering rate for the time). I am just not sure if it is worth ‘upgrading’ to the SACD versions of some of the classics.
Thanks for the input :)
As you know, the audio CD was a great success. You can’t play a CD without buying a CD player first so a brand new rapid growing market. Of course once everybody has a CD player, the grows stop and it will become a replacement market.
The wet dream of any manager is of course to repeat this success. You need something different of course forcing the people to buy new hardware. This has become known as the SACD, it contains pulse width modulation instead of pulse code modulation. Indeed you need a new player to play the SACD.
Although dubbed Super Audio CD, it is pretty questionable if DSD64 is better than Red Book PCM. Anyway the consumers simply didn’t buy it so it failed completely. As a consequence the SACD catalogue is rather small.
Although dubbed Super Audio CD, it is pretty questionable if DSD64 is better than Red Book PCM. Anyway the consumers simply didn’t buy it so it failed completely. As a consequence the SACD catalogue is rather small.
There are a couple of companies recording in DSD. You can find them here: https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/KB/DSD.htm
No idea why you are down voted? You make a lot of sense ! I need to educate myself on ‘REDbook’ as the terminology is new to me. The marketing here reminds me of minidisc; I had about four players, a deck at home and one in my car. They actually sucked, as the floppy disc style enclosure filled with dirt. They were also responsible for my best friend’s worst car accident - I had given him my collection when I moved onto the creative labs ZEN mp3 player, my handwriting was so bad that he drove straight over a roundabout trying to find a metallica album 🤣
Sorry for the jargon. When Sony and Philips developed the optical drive, each standard was published in a booklet with a color cover. Red (as you probably have guessed) is the color for the book with the standards for the audio CD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books
DSD had a kind of revival in the audiophile community. I think it started around 2010 maybe a bit later. It is claimed to have more air, smoother, more analog sounding, etc. compared with PCM. This might explain the down votes as my comments violate the audiophile faith.