Video Asylum

Posted by Roland on April 07, 2001 at 12:58:57

In Reply to: No, you've missed the point posted by Rob Doorack on April 05, 2001 at 13:34:15:

I hate to say this, but to my knowledge Sony get a royalty payment on DVD-A anyway! The arguements for SACD are really negated by the source material. Its ok to select source material that is well recorded, or remaster material that was badly mastered. But having been privy to equipement that vastly outperforms CD and SACD on a technical level, all I can say is any difference you are hearing is not really down to these players. 16 bit recording can quite easily outperform a lot of equipement in the studio chain, and almost anything available to the home listener. During a recording sesion, air noise of -60db onto tape is considered to be very, very good. Indeed I record in some very good accoustics that are considered to be some of the finest venues for recording and we often are working with background noise in excess of this. I often transfer material recorded on many different formats to CD, and I can tell you that what you get on the CD is exceedingly close to the original masters.
The bigest difference in the sound is usually the DA conversion in the CD player itself, together with the amplification and speakers. In actual fact I saw a CD from a well known record company where they claimed a 24bit recording which was covered with artificial 16bit reverb. How did I know the reverb was artificial? I record in the same venue, with the same band and it has very little ambience. Consequently my recording also had more detail and was definately 16bit.

Roland