A thorough review that shows SACD to be very inferior to DVD-A (1 Viewer)

[KeithH]

Ian said:

The marketing department and management of the company I work for, a leading manufaturer of DVD decoder chips. Low-end, step-up, and high end are the names usually used to refer to about the price points I just listed.

I am truly amazed. These people are in the electronics business? Unfathomable. I'm sorry, Ian, but their definitions of low-end, step-up, and high-end are may work for them, but they certainly are not accepted in the industry. If a $300 is "high-end", what is a $3000 player? There is not enough of a difference typically in the quality of a $200 or $300 component to justify such segregation. Just because the marketing and management folks at your company say it doesn't make it right.

One should not assign classifications by feature set. Progressive-scan and DVD-Audio do not make a component high-end. State-of-the-art implementation of these features makes a component high-end. The JVC XV-SA90BK/SA95GD is a progressive-scan DVD-Audio changer for around $300. Denon will be releasing the DVD-9000 progressive-scan DVD-Audio for around $3000. Are both of these components high-end? Absolutely not. I don't care what you are comparing the JVC player to. It is not a high-end component. It is not the worst out there, but it is not high-end in any sense of the word. We don't know if the Denon will be a good performer, but given its suggested retail price and the boatload of engineering going into it, it certainly should be. I am willing to bet my all of my audio components that the '9000 will fall into the high-end category. The JVC player, by comparison, doesn't make the grade.

 

[Brian-W]

Excuse me, but what are you talking about? The first consumers who bought into DVD were early adopters, videophiles, etc, a small minority willing to pay lots of money for a player

If that were true, DVD would never have been labeled "the fastest selling consumer electronic item in history"

 

[Bob McElfresh]

Guys: This thread will get closed if you keep quoting each other and making accusations. Keep it on-topic and not about each other please.

 

[John Sully]

I really have to disagree with the with the people arguing with Ian's company's definition of the various classes of consumer. They think of "high end" consumers based on the minimum amount of money they are willing to spend, not on the ultimate level of performance a component is able to provide.

Think about the price points at which you find various features. A $100 player provides the basics, DVD, CD, and possibly MP3 playback. Standard NTSC outputs -- S-video and composite, and possibly component at the $150 price point. The step up class typically provides progressive scan output and is a reasonably easy up sell especially if the customers owns or is thinking of buying a high quality NTSC display. DVD Audio is, currently, a "high end" feature and doesn't appear -- even in Apex branded players -- until the $300 price point is reached. Go up from there and DVD Audio or SACD capability becomes more common.

Now, think of the questions people ask here about which DVD player to buy. Should I get progressive scan? What's the best DVD player under $200? Face it, most people, even those on this forum, spend less than $300 on a DVD player. I think that this validates Ian's point in spades.

As far as the story of the rapid acceptance of the DVD format: Ian has the story right. I don't know how long you two have been involved in this hobby, but I've been involved in it for a long time -- I started running VHS sound through my system around 1983 and later, around 1986 or so, VHS Hifi. I paid over $600 for my first VHS Hifi VCR and used it until I was introduced to the joys of multichannel sound and Laserdiscs by a friend in 1995. At that point I got upgraditis, but didn't pull the trigger until about 1997 when I sunk the money into the extra speakers, a Dolby Digital capable receiver and a Laserdisc player. At this point Laserdisc was the established format and DVD was just starting out. There were very few titles available on DVD and DVD players were selling for about $1000. Within about 6 months of my purchase it was easy to tell that LD was the wrong horse to be riding as DVD titles began to be released with great regularity, although not in the quantities that LD titles were being released. But anyone who had half a brain could see that LD's days were numbered as stores cut back on their back catalog selections of LD's and increased the space allocated to DVD. At this time DVD players were still going for around $1000. By the time 9 months had passed I decided that I had better get a DVD player as the release rate of LD's was beginning to slow considerably and they had very little shelf space left. At this point DVD players were starting to be introduced at the $500 price point. I went out and purchased a Sony DVP S7000. Even at this point DVD was still clearly a videophile medium. You couldn't go into BB or CC and buy a DVD player. They were the province of the specialty retailer, but it was clear that DVD was catching on fast. Only in the last couple of years has DVD really become a mass market phenomenon, with players available at or slightly above the price of VHS players and broad availablity of software at most outlets which formerly rented or sold only VHS. This has been driven, as Ian asserts, by the rapid drop in cost of the basic technology. It has gotten to the point where I have seen retailers which sell and rent DVD's and VHS tapes displaying DVD players as impulse buys. Three years ago the same (perhaps lesser) level of technology was being sold for $500 or more.

Anyway, to get back to what started this all: I really haven't had a chance to listen to SACD in an appropriate atmosphere so I can't really comment on it. However tonight I did an A/B of DVD-A vs. CD. I used Steely Dan's "Two Against Nature" which I have both on CD and DVD-A. As with most Steely Dan albums this is an extremely well produced and cleanly recorded piece. I matched average playback levels using my RS SPL meter and set them to 75db. I listened to the CD in both direct and Dolby Pro Logic II music mode. I only listened to the multi channel mix of the DVD-A disc, although a stereo mix is provided. All I can say about the performance of DVD-A is "wow!".

The best way I can describe the difference between redbook and DVD-A is to say that it is roughly equivalent to the difference I noted between CD and vinyl almost 20 years ago. Important differences were that the redbook sound was "veiled" or better yet "muffled" compared to DVD-A. DVD-A transients were much sharper and better defined than CD. This is especially noticable on cymbals and, surprisingly enough, kick drums. You could hear the reedy overtones which give saxes their distinctive sound on DVD-A while this trait was much more subdued on the CD. Overall, the DVD-A had much more "life" to the sound and was much more involving than the CD. I do have to give props to Dolby Pro Logic II music mode for extracting a very good "in the band" sound from the redbook CD. Front to back and rear right to left imaging was not as stable as the DVD-A multi-channel mix, but it was pretty darn convincing -- compare "Negative Girl" for an especially good example of what PL II can do for a regular stereo recording. By no means did the CD sound bad, but the DVD-A is clearly superior. By way of refernece, I started out this test to drown out (blow away?) the kids in the downstairs apartment who were playing some "bass music" at absurdly high levels. I turned on the DVD-A just to show them what a real system could do. I began playing at a level reported on my SPL (slow response, C weighting) of 95db, a level that would normally send me running away if a redbook CD was played that loud. Even when played that loud the DVD-A was clean, clean, clean with no harshness at all and no temptation to turn it down (except the be kind to neighbors, golden rule sort of stuff).

Associated equipment:

Denon AVR-4802

Denon DVM-4800 DVD/DVD-A player

Sony CDP-CX400 CD

Boston CR-9 mains

Boston CR-2 center

Boston CR-6 surrounds

Velodyne HGS-15 sub

Behringer Feedback Destoryer Pro EQ for the sub

Outlaw ICBM-1 for DVD-A bass management

My system may not rock, but it does not suck either.

 

[Ian Montgomerie]

You people are thinking in "audiophile" terminology. You're defining low vs. high end in terms of features that matter to you, people who may pay thousands of dollars for something like a DVD player.

I work for a mass-market company. When we design a chip, we expect to sell tens of millions of copies of it. When my team enters into co-operative development with a customer to integrate a chip into their product, we may not even break even unless they buy a million chips.

We define low, medium, and high end in terms of what affects the sales of products that expect these numbers. From the perspective of our business strategy, in the realities of the consumer electronics market, there is a HUGE difference between a 100 dollar box and a 300 dollar box. 1000+ dollar DVD players don't exist for us any more. Years ago, they existed, because we dealt with higher prices and lower volumes for DVD decoders, and money-losing products could be a part of the R&D strategy for products expected to make the big money years later. These days, they are too much of a niche market to deal with. Someone putting our chip into such a player would be on their own in regard to support, and we do not implement any new features with thousand-dollar players in mind.

To put it another way, it doesn't matter to us if audiophiles/videophiles don't think 200 and 300 dollar players are much different from the perspective of their needs. It matters to us if Joe Sixpack walking into Best Buy thinks they're different.

 

[Ian Montgomerie]

You're right about the old days John, but "videophile" is, on recollection, a polite way to put it in some cases. In the early days of DVD, a very large portion of the titles available were porn. There was so much of it (proportionally) that, once upon a time, people interviewing for jobs in our QA department would be asked point-blank in the interview how they felt about watching lots of porn on the job. There was apparently a windowless room dedicated specifically to porn testing, which was important because pornos had the worst authoring and the most violations of spec, and it was the QA department's job to track those things so the decoder microcode team could make them play correctly.

These days, we still have to sign a waiver about watching objectionable content, but I haven't actually watched any porn on the job.

 

[Lewis Besze]

Many recording engineers and musicians like Ed Meitner, Mark Levinson and Michael Bishop were impressed enough to go Super Audio only.

You might wanna "scratch" Michael Bishop's name from the list as his name is on Telarc's DVD-A version of the "Celebrating the Music of Weather Report".

 

[JaleelK]

Jaleel, did you even read the article? This is a direct quote from the first page:

Yes I did, but in order to understand what he's saying you must read the entire article. Here are excerpts from the article:

1) In IAR's 1998 Master Guide, we discussed a serious (we think fatal) sonic flaw in the Sony-Philips DSD standard, also proposed as a standard for their Super Audio CD format. That discussion was based on the evidence of one demonstration, a well executed A-B-R comparison conducted by Sony themselves at AES.

2) This gross distortion heard from the Super Audio CD version was identical to the sonic flaw we observed during Sony's earlier A-B-R demo using master tapes and studio processors, and occurred on the same types of musical notes. As we discussed in our 1998 Master Guide, this seems to be a slew related distortion, like a digital version of TIM.

So you can see, A-B-R test was conducted, even by Sony themselves.

As far DBT goes, I trying to contact him so that I can ask him myself. I think a DBT is necessary to control the potential of bias creeping into test results, but when it comes to distortion being measured at 8000hz, it either exist or it doesn't, measuring distortion in SACD has nothing to do with prejudice or bias.

 

[Robert Elliott]

Guys,

This just goes round and round. What are we trying to accomplish?

Which format is better? We all agree they sound better than CD. No one has demonstrated the higher noise level (within human hearing range) on SACD vs. CD is audible. DVD-A contains digital watermarks which increase the noise level and I don't believe it has been demonstrated that 'normal' hears can hear that. All three formats have their pros and cons and all provide a far superior sound than the alternative; which is no sound.

Frankly, my choice in most matters, all things being near equal, is which choice seems to have the most 'big brother' involvement and select the alternative.

Then there are the constant ABR and DBT discussions which I believe are completely irrelevant. Finding something enjoyable while listening to it is fundamentally biased in nature. Who freaking cares about the results of a DBT? I don't need a DBT to tell me what sounds good. I feel it and no matter what a DBT says and regardless of how biased I may be, I intuitively know which I find more enjoyable and a DBT can not measure that.

 

[ReggieW]

Well said Robert. I have always been confused by both camps insistence that one is clearly FAR superior to the other. If you ever visited the audio asylum board, you would be shocked at the level of arrogance and gross exagerrations regarding the two formats (especially the favored SACD)on that forum. I find both formats superior to redbook CD, and I say it's about the music. It would be great to simply have both formats and buy the titles you like. This fighting between which format is better is simply wasteful.

Reg

 

[Dzung Pham]

Jaleel, I don't have the IAR 1998 Master's Guide. If you do, perhaps you could give a description of the experiment. There are not enough details about the experiment in the on-line articles to evaluate its design. But I hope you will admit that most of the evidence actually provided within the web article itself on actual sound quality is subjective (A-B comparisons only). The author does not seem to be very rigorous in terms of describing the experiments, in either the design or analysis of results.

 

[StaceyS]

Now, think of the questions people ask here about which DVD player to buy. Should I get progressive scan? What's the best DVD player under $200?

Not a week goes buy that I don't see a couple of new threads on one of the many AV newsgroups asking this very question. Or there is the popular alternate, "What is the best progressives can player I can get for under $300?"
DVD players have become a commodity
There are just over 25,000 registered users on this forum. How many DVD players are out there today? (Over 28 million) We represent but a small portion of the market.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

You might wanna "scratch" Michael Bishop's name from the list as his name is on Telarc's DVD-A version of the "Celebrating the Music of Weather Report".

No sir. I checked - he is still a big SACD fan.
Telarc is just covering the bases with DVDA. I will try to ask Michael if they convert down from DSD to DVDA for releases.

Lee

 

[John Kotches]

Wow,

Take a couple of days off, and miss a few things.

Lee -- To date, the highest tested human has been at 25K, and that was a male.

No one has ever been tested that successfully passed anything above that point.

As has been pointed out in other studies, ultrasonic content needs more studying, as they are a long way from having anything conclusive in either direction.

The catch is you can't have it both ways. On one hand you say that the noise is pushed to >50K, then you talk about the use of a supertweeter with flat response right out into that range.

Pardon me, but that's a little bit inconsistent.

Regards,

 

[John Kotches]

To have sufficient data to go from DSD to 24/96, you have to upsample 5x, then do a data reduction. Read up on Super Bitmapping direct, which shows some of what's required, and it isn't pretty.

Regards,

 

[Justin Doring]

"To put it another way, it doesn't matter to us if audiophiles/videophiles don't think 200 and 300 dollar players are much different from the perspective of their needs. It matters to us if Joe Sixpack walking into Best Buy thinks they're different."

I understand that. You care about what 99.9% of the people buy, and that's fine. It's far more lucrative than getting into the business that caters to the .1% of people, kind of like Britney Spears v. Malcolm Arnold...guess who is making more money? It is dead wrong (there is no "think" about it), however, to call a $300 DVD player high-end; there is no debate on this issue, just as there is no debate that John Grisham writes great literature (99.9% of the population may think so, but that does not make it so). The fact that you think "high-end" is about "features" says a lot about your knowledge of it.

 

[Ian Montgomerie]

It is dead wrong (there is no "think" about it), however, to call a $300 DVD player high-end; there is no debate on this issue, just as there is no debate that John Grisham writes great literature (99.9% of the population may think so, but that does not make it so). The fact that you think "high-end" is about "features" says a lot about your knowledge of it.

You are in a similar position to an African pygmy telling an American "it is dead wrong to say that 4'6" is short, there is no 'think' about it". (Or an NBA basketball star saying that 6'4" is not tall).

 

[Lee Scoggins]

John,
You need to read my posts and reply posts more carefully...

Quote:

This is also incorrect. One can downconnvert from DSD to 24/96 with ease due to the higher sampling rate.
In a subsequent post, I will be discussing DVD Audio's big flaw - zero crossing distortion.
I'm really tired of all this back and forth - it does not seem like we are moving forward in the discussion.
I think I will drop out for a while and listen to my glorious sounding Super Audio CDs.
Lee

 

[Robert Elliott]

Guys,

It is simple, put down the verbal jousts. Ian's frame of reference is the specific market 'his' company is targeting. For WalMart consumers, $300 is high-end. Many of us on this forum have an entirely different viewpoint and much more interest in AV than Joe Sixpack. Frankly, many of the folks I know wouldn't or couldn't spend more the $750 for an entire system. We discuss $750 as a starting point for a component in that system. Know your audience.

 

[John Kotches]

Lee,
You can't do a strict data reduction on the information.
Let's see....
24bit/96K == 2,304,000 bits/second
1bit/2.8224mHz == 2,822,400 bits/second
No matter how hard I try, I can't do it. I can't divide 96,000 evenly... I get 29.4.
However when I do a 5x oversampling, I get 147. This allows for a linear reduction (1/147).
To get to 192K you have to do a 5x followed by a 2x oversample.
If you want to SBM direct to 16/44.1, that's another story.
Here, take a look at this page: http://www.daisy-laser.com/tech3g.htm which has a flowchart of the process.
Regards,