Gentlemen, what matters is what you hear, and I hear a difference. Some SACDs I own are from recording from the 50s -- do they 'sound' better than a CD recording from the last couple years? No, but unfortunately you can't hear Leontyne Price or Maria Callas or Thelonious Monk from a fresh recording and mastering from the last couple years. I never appreciated Bob Dylan until I bought the remasterings on SACD. This is not due to the euphonic distortion of tubes or anything, but due to the utterly involving, highly accurate sound that allows one to understand Dylan's musical choices in all their subtlety (I never thought I would say that!). In other words, as in all things audio, there is art and science, and I find you gentlemen quoting the science without addressing the art or given evidence based on careful listening--what we are all ultimately here for.
RE: SACD is just DRM. Science: what happens when you filter at 22.05 khz vs. the higher frequencies of the hi res formats? I have 3/4" ScanSpeak tweets and trust me they can reproduce the ringing and glassy grain you get from the low pass filtering of CD. SACD is by definition a DRM format because the file sizes are too large to easily copy, download, etc. unlike those wonderfully sounding compressed MP3 files. FLAC may be "lossless" in a technical sense but an easy AB test through your SB should illustrate the differences. At least they do on my system. If not on yours, then by all means go with FLAC. For those of us who have a philosophy of interfering as little as possible with sound, why compress at all, 'lossless' or otherwise? And if the issue is merely file size and frankly storage is really cheap (500gb SATA HDDs are now below $100), why on earth not just record the music that matters to you in a true 1 for 1 copy? I have never bogged down my network with SqueezeCenter. Not to mention the fact that it is a faster rip in EAC without the compression step. DSD does "chop" the waveform, but by doing it in 1 bit, 1 or 0, representing the waveform every 1/2.8 millionth of a second as ascending or descending, it follows the original analog waveform far more closely than attempting to represent it entirely by only 24 or 20 or 16 bits (a compression) at whatever sample frequency is chosen. It is NOT a simple math problem, but a fundamentally different approach. Maybe marketing hype, but one can say that for the entire history of CD, no? Our vinyl buddies would say so. "Perfect Sound Forever..." :-) My .03. B -- rhizomaticon SB3 + DIY FreeNAS server w/SlimNAS + SqueezeCenter 7.0 Sony C555ES CD/SACD Creek 0BH-12 Musical Fidelity A3CR Hafler 500 4-way DIY transmission line towers with Scan-Speak Tweets, rest Peerless (Bi-Amped) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ rhizomaticon's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15312 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=45839 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
