Bits is bits? In the December 1990 issue, John Atkinson explored in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/reference/1290jitter">"Jitter, Bits, & Sound Quality"</A> why digital audio turns out to be a complicated process. He writes, "As my violin teacher used to say, 'The right note in the wrong place is the wrong note.'" And so it is with digital data, as JA explains in this groundbreaking report.
Electronics retailers may be bouncing back from a long slump, according to a couple of recent reports.
As <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/011904roundup/index.html">promised</A> earlier in January, <A HREF="http://www.wmg.com">Warner Music Group</A> has announced a major restructuring that it hopes will put it in better shape to compete in the "challenging business environment of today's music industry." The move comes after the recent closing of WMG's $2.6 billion acquisition by Edgar Bronfman, Jr. and a group of investors.
Recorded music as a packaged-goods commodity continues to decline, according to figures released March 4 by the <A HREF="http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/030404.asp">Recording Industry Association of America</A> (RIAA).
Four short years ago, rock band Metallica angered part of its fan base by <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10746/index.html">going after</A> downloaders who used the online file-trading service Napster. At that time, the band provided Napster with the screen names of 335,000 users reputed to be pirating Metallica's music, and demanded they be removed from the service. The group was also the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10725/">first to sue</A> the fledgling company.
One of my mentors, John Crabbe—my predecessor as editor of the English magazine <I>Hi-Fi News</I>—used to insist that a magazine's soul is its "Letters" column. If a magazine was able to publish a lively collection of readers' letters, said John, it would enjoy a lengthy life. Conversely, if its letters column was dull or nonexistent, then no matter how much advertising it had or how many readers it could boast, it was just a matter of time before it had the lid shut on it. In the 28 years since John told me this, I have not found an exception. The kicker, of course, is that there's no easy way of ensuring that a magazine has lively letters to publish.
Over time I've successfully used a variety of tuning devices to refine the acoustics in Kathleen's and my listening room. But I've always suspected that <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/accessoryreviews/215">Acoustic Science's Tube Traps</A> might be a good way to finish it off. I've occasionally asked visitors to stand in one spot or another behind the speakers as I listened for tergiversation (<I>ie</I>, "to change one's tune"; Hoo-hah!). I found several locations where a nice, dense audiophile body made an improvement to the sound.
The search for signal transparency has led to much experiment and debate concerning losses in fidelity that can be traced to the preamplifier or—as it's more often and awkwardly called these days when the phono stage is omitted—the "line controller."
Jitter is not what digital sound quality induces in the listener; rather it is the instability in the clock signal that controls exactly <I>when</I> the analog waveform is sampled in the original A/D conversion, or when the digital word input into a DAC results in an analog voltage being produced at the chip's output. "So what?" is the response of digital advocates, "As long as a digital one is recognized as a one and a digital zero as a zero, then how can there be any difference in sound?" goes their argument, normally culminating in a fervently expressed "Bits is bits!"
Its future as a format may be debatable, but does SACD have the sonic goods? Have you been able to spend much time with SACD? If so, what do you think about the way it sounds?