Sterophile Article

[Sundog]

There are a couple of interesting paragraphs about dual layer disc technology and it's inherent problems buried in this short article.

Article

[Leeway]

Aside from the main point of the article, this was also interesting:

At the San Francisco AES conference, a famed recording engineer and equipment manufacturer summed up the impact of SACD over the last five years thusly: "Sales did not happen." Note the past tense.

[Jim Alfredson]

Interesting article. I agree that the technology companies don't have a clue and I am not surprised SACD and DVD-audio are dying. The general public does not care about fidelity as is evidenced by the quick adoption of DVD movies, people's non-complaints about radio (squashing the life out of recordings), and the rise of the mp3 culture.

Surround sound is gimicky, even for movies. Who has the space, the time, or the interest in setting up five to seven speakers just so you an hear birds chirping behind you? A buddy of mine has a very expensive surround sound system set up (not optimally... most living rooms are not designed with 5.1 or 7.1 sound in mind) and when I watch movies with him I prefer to have it turned off.

[neveronfriday]

Interesting article. I agree that the technology companies don't have a clue and I am not surprised SACD and DVD-audio are dying. The general public does not care about fidelity as is evidenced by the quick adoption of DVD movies, people's non-complaints about radio (squashing the life out of recordings), and the rise of the mp3 culture.

Surround sound is gimicky, even for movies. Who has the space, the time, or the interest in setting up five to seven speakers just so you an hear birds chirping behind you? A buddy of mine has a very expensive surround sound system set up (not optimally... most living rooms are not designed with 5.1 or 7.1 sound in mind) and when I watch movies with him I prefer to have it turned off.

Yep.

Just my thoughts.

Surround sound can bug the hell out of you if the room isn't suited to it. On top of that, if you don't have a super-huge screen, I often have problems aligning the smaller (TV) picture with the huge sound.

I'm thinking of surround sound headphones (currently I use Sennheiser 590s stereo cans which give quite a movie punch). But they're to darn expensive if you really want the good stuff.

And, to sit in the sweet spot, you have to basically rearrange your living room in such a way that it becomes virtually useless.

Besides, who the hell wants to live in a speaker-storage living room?

Cheers!

[Jim Alfredson]

Indeed. I find it actually lessens my ability to get involved in the movie. First, because all the dialog comes out of this tiny center channel speaker and seems very disconnected from the screen, and secondly because once you manage to actually immerse yourself in the movie for a few seconds, some stupid sound effect goes whizzin' around your head!

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!?!

Oh, it was a mosquito that flew by the camera lens.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I love my home theater set-up. The sounds affects add to the realism of most scenes. When something on the screen goes around and the sound goes around, it makes feel like I'm there rather than watching as an observer.

As for multi-channel audio, I have some great sounding SACDs and DVD-Audio discs. One of the most incredible I have is Aerosmith's "Toys in the Attic". The intro to "Sweet Emotion" is amazing. To my ears, I can't believe how good this disc sounds. I feel like I'm in the studio with the band. Sounds are audible that disappear in the stereo mix. A triangle here, a rumble there... all kinds of sounds that I'd miss in stereo. Of course, to hear multi-channel audio the right way, you have to have very good speakers all around. You can't use flimsy little "surround speakers" in back or you will not get good audio. Done right, multi-channel audio is a aural treat.

Yeah SACD and DVD-Audio seem to be dying out. That's too bad. I blame the buying public. They voted with their wallets and our audio will suffer for it. IMHO, as of right now, there is no better way to play back recorded music than these high resolution formats.

If mp3 becomes the way we get music in the future, people will never know what good audio sounds like.

Later,

Kevin

[Leeway]

Interesting article. I agree that the technology companies don't have a clue and I am not surprised SACD and DVD-audio are dying. The general public does not care about fidelity as is evidenced by the quick adoption of DVD movies, people's non-complaints about radio (squashing the life out of recordings), and the rise of the mp3 culture.

Surround sound is gimicky, even for movies. Who has the space, the time, or the interest in setting up five to seven speakers just so you an hear birds chirping behind you? A buddy of mine has a very expensive surround sound system set up (not optimally... most living rooms are not designed with 5.1 or 7.1 sound in mind) and when I watch movies with him I prefer to have it turned off.

The home theater/surround sound thing seems to be for movies that have some , or all, of the following: Car crashes, Dinosaurs, Explosions, shoot-outs.

I can't see how my appreciation of Godard, or Truffaut, to name a couple of favorites, would benefit from surround sound.

OTOH, the growth of DVD jazz performances might create a marekt demand.

[DrJ]

Leeway beat me to it - I was just going to say, for the type of movies my wife and I generally watch, surround sound is useless (but hey, if you really want to hear those wine glasses in the European cafe clinking behind you it's neato!).

But we do enjoy surround when we watch the occasional "big Hollywood job." Having a child, it's pretty often we do that now - FINDING NEMO does sound pretty spectacular in surround, I must say.

I've come 180 degrees on the SACD issue. A couple years ago I was convinced it might fill a niche, but now I'm firmly in the "get stuff to make your regular old CDs sound as good as possible" camp.

[Leeway]

I don't think SACD will die out. I think it will remain a niche product. In fact, it could help smaller record labels. For example, as the majors drop out of the SACD- DVD/A race, smaller labels could use it as a selling point for their more specialized audience-- an audience more likely to appreciate higher rez formats.

[Sundog]

I have a fairly nice 5.1 surround setup and I've enjoyed it for a number of years. But lately I find that I rarely use it. I'm going to dismantle it and start more or less from scratch building a really nice 2-channel system. My interest has waned in surround sound and hi-Rez. formats. At this point I'm all about maximizing CD sound and having a good analog rig.

[marcoliv]

i fully agree with Kevin B.

marcus

[Jim Alfredson]

Yeah SACD and DVD-Audio seem to be dying out. That's too bad. I blame the buying public. They voted with their wallets and our audio will suffer for it. IMHO, as of right now, there is no better way to play back recorded music than these high resolution formats.

It's hard to blame the buying public when the industry offers up a standard that is incompatable with the millions of CD players, CD-ROMs, car stereos, etc. and offers no objective improvement from the medium it's meant to replace. And after that, it was expensive as all get-out, both the medium and the players. Now, of course, they are relatively inexpensive, but when they came out they were ridiculous.

Now, you and I can hear the difference but the average public cannot. Or maybe they can but they don't think it's worth the extra money for "better" sound (like myself, when it first came out). It's the industry fault for releasing something badly thought out in the first place.

[DrJ]

As a corollary to what B-3er says (which I agree with):

It's also ridiculous that the mass-produced CD playback stuff out there is so crappy. They've up and oversampled themselves into oblivion. Just design a nice simple 1x oversampling unit that has quality electronics throughout the whole chain, thank you.

[mikeweil]

Aside from the main point of the article, this was also interesting:

At the San Francisco AES conference, a famed recording engineer and equipment manufacturer summed up the impact of SACD over the last five years thusly: "Sales did not happen." Note the past tense.

... and this was another interesting sentence:

.... as a Warner Special Products producer noted during one of the panel discussions, "DVD-Audio will disappear."

No wonder these things don't sell, if one has to face problems in getting adequate playback equipment.

But basically this is not new, we were complaining about crappy musicassette sound back then, and it nevertheless became a dominant medium in large parts of the world. Same now with MP3 - most people care less for detailed sound. Consider the trashy playback equipment most people have ... compared to this suuround sounds like heaven.

[porcy62]

I have to say that surround system has no interest for me, nor the hi res digital disc, (long live to vinyl! )

Consider another thing: if you blame "common people" for not caring audio quality, you should do it for visual quality too, infact there aren't any home screen, of any technology, that could compete with a good cinema's screen.

A surround system is useless if you like Truffaut or Fellini, and if you like "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Star Wars" or Kubrick you should have a real big screen.

I worked and still work in movie's and broadcasting industry and I can assure you that every movie's director did his movies for big screen. With a home screen you lost half of the movie!

I think the point is that usually "common people" chose things because they are cheap and user friendly. I couldn't blame people for it. I blame industry for not being able to produce cheap and user friendly stuff.

[Claude]

I am not surprised SACD and DVD-audio are dying. The general public does not care about fidelity as is evidenced by the quick adoption of DVD movies, people's non-complaints about radio (squashing the life out of recordings), and the rise of the mp3 culture.

The MP3 phenomenon and the decreasing awareness for sound quality is one thing.

But also a majority of those music fans who care about sound quality were satisfied with what CD sound can deliver. I'm speaking about those with a $2000-3000 hifi system, not the freaks with $3000 cables If CD sounded as bad as some high-rez freaks now say (why did this PCM-allergy only appear in 1999, when SACD was introduced?), the hifi community wouldn't have adopted the format in the 80's and stayed with vinyl. Just as they refused the data-reduced formats Minidisc and mp3. CD is capable of audiophile sound, and that is the biggest problem for SACD.

The second advantage of SACD and DVD-A over CD is multichannel sound. Many music lovers are not convinced by surround, or they don't want to invest into the additional hardware, only to be able to hear "Kind of Blue" on the original 3-track recording. For jazz fans especially it makes no sense, given the small number of multichannel discs.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I keep reading here and elsewhere on 'net about how today's CDs sound just as good as SACDs. Then I go over to Steve Hoffman's forum and see all these waveforms from modern remastered CDs and it looks like they're all getting clipped. Most of the threads over there talk about which version of a recording to get, and almost 100% of time, it's an old CD version because most of the new remasters suck.

Jazz seems to be a bit more immune to this phenonema, but rock, forget about it. Almost every new release is "maxed out". U2's latest CD is so compressed it's almost painful to listen to. The latest Paul Simon remasters? All compressed. The same for the Jimi Hendrix remasters. Don't even look at the latest pop artist releases. My daughter's Simple Plan CD is painful to listen to even at low volumes. One look at the waveform and it's obvious as to why this is. Clipped to death. "But ours go to 11".

While I agree that CD plaback can be stunning, I've gotten a lot more "dogs" on CD than I get with SACD or DVD-Audio. If the studios and remastering engineers continue to make CDs "at 11" on the dial, we will get more & more of these crappy-sounding CDs. It's going to get worse before it gets better. I feel that SACD and DVD-Audio as currently being issued, are better. Now, there's nothing saying that some clown can't remaster his next SACD all maxed out either.

Later,

Kevin

[Bluerein]

Don't know about DVD-A but I can't believe SACD is on the way out. In classical music more and more is being (re) issued on SACD. Maybe that's the way it's going to be.....classical music only on SACD Hybrids.

[Jim Alfredson]

The trend in modern pop/rock towards the "loudness wars" is really sad. One of the last pop/rock CDs I bought was a Seal CD and I loved the music but could not listen to the disc because it had absolutely no dynamic range and caused extreme fatique to my ears. This was back in '98 or so. It's only gotten worse.

Why record companies make engineers do this is beyond me. And trust me, it is not the engineers' choice... it is the producers and the record company that demand it. They think if people have to touch the volume on their radio, they'll change the channel, not realizing or not caring that the radio stations already compress this shit out of the audio before it goes out anyway.

It is especially disheartening that they are now applying this technique to remasters. I haven't bought any remasters lately (as I have been actively trying to buy new releases only.... especially jazz) but to squash all the life out of Hendrix is nothing short of a crime.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I haven't bought any remasters lately (as I have been actively trying to buy new releases only.... especially jazz) but to squash all the life out of Hendrix is nothing short of a crime.

Wanna know the funniest thing B3-er... these overly compressed CDs make the absolute crappiest mp3s you ever want to hear! If you think the CD sounds bad, rip it to mp3. I tried ripping my Hendrix remasters onto my PC at work. I can't listen to more than 1 tune and my head is pulsing, and not in a good way.

Maybe this is why the record labels are doing this?

Later,

Kevin

[Soul Stream]

I think the way we are going to "hear" music in the future is going to be shaped more by the music of video games and movies than by the music industry itself.

Video game and movie music is LOUD. Therefore ALL music consumed will be that way. We are becoming increasingly used to very, very, very loud undynamic music (oh, I take that back. Dynamics are now "whisper soft" to "VERY VERY LOUD"). Just like rock arrangements where it's become so cliche' to play softly and then stomp on your fuzz box and everyone in the band scream on the microphone )

I've seen my own family become deaf. Loud DVD Movies and video games blaring through the speakers only seem to bother me in our house.

[JSngry]

"They" are doing to sound what "they" did to food.

There's got to be a reason for this, and I'm skeptical that it's benevolent in nature...

"Surrounds sound"? Hell take a walk (without headphones). That's the real "surround sound"!

[porcy62]

"They" are doing to sound what "they" did to food.

There's got to be a reason for this, and I'm skeptical that it's benevolent in nature...

"Surrounds sound"? Hell take a walk (without headphones). That's the real "surround sound"!

[Kevin Bresnahan]

"Surrounds sound"? Hell take a walk (without headphones). That's the real "surround sound"!

Please say you've heard surround sound on a good system and that you're not just riffing on a topic here, Jim. Truly, surround sound in a good system with good source material is simply phenomenal. If you've heard and disagree, I don't understand why. It's more "live" than stereo. As you say here, the world is not in stereo. Therefore, it makes sense that hearing a movie or music in surround would be more lifelike.

I was skeptical, to say the least, when I first heard surround sound. The early movie soundtracks with surround used it purely for effects and many were simply gimmics. It's much more integrated with the movie today.

As for "surround" music, it's really just the engineer working with the multi-track masters trying to plunk the listener down inside the recording session. In some cases, particualrly rock sessions, it works. In others, it might not. In either case, it's a lot more like being in the studio than two-track stereo. Even a "bad" multi-channel SACD of DVD-Audio disc sounds more like "you're there" than any stereo mix of the same session.

Later,

Kevin

[Chuck Nessa]

Kevin, I have lived through the conversions to stereo, 4 tracks, 8 tracks, quad (various formats), cds, sad cds, etc. The original idea was reproduction of "sound".

I think I have been through at least 4 (maybe 5) surround systems. The only recording/show/movie/film that impressed me was one of those stupid Star Trek spinnoffs.

All it adds up to is big corps wanting my money. The notes don't change, nomatter how much money you have to spend.