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It is very good! Not as good as vinyl, but by far the best digital I have heard.
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?
New material recorded in DSD sounds wonderful. Older recordings transfered to DSD generally sound less wonderful. I am impressed enough with SACD that I have two machines that are SACD capable. Trouble is, though, that there is little new material that interests me, SACD or otherwise.
I really can't get into the technical details, because I am not an engineer. That argument is moot, anyway. Who really cares about sampling rates and so on? It's the sound, stupid! And so, I have been listening to SACD a lot, and I really love what I'm hearing. SACD has the sonic goods! I have done a lot of comparing from SACD to CD, and I much prefer the SACD sound. I prefer not compare to SACD sound to vinyl, because I do not listen to vinyl very much, and I acknowledge that my turntable and cartridge are nowhere near state of the art. But I love my SACD.
Though I have not heard it, I expect it sounds great. But I don't see the support there from the record companies and therefore have not bought a player yet. If they dump this and go off chasing some other technology, I am giving up. Content delivery is too ephemeral these days. Standards don't last long enough to be worth the large investment in content I am anxious to make. I will just listen to satellite radio.
SACD sounds almost as good as LPs, inother words it sounds more like an Analog format than a Digital one and this is a high compliment indeed! If you don't want to fiddle with LPs then SACDs are the next best thing. And remember Music is analog.
I bought a shanling tube sacd player, and sacd sounds fantastic, it sounds so natural, and one simply get the sense that you are listening to the real thing, however the Shanling's cd replay is so good that I dont feel I am missing anything when listening to RED BOOK, so there is not a concerted effort to seek out SACD'S.
I have tried both a regular CD players and one of the newer combo players in my system. The combo player sounded drier more distilled in its sonic character than my antiquated CD Player. Something I noticed before at a demonstration of a combo rig and dedicated player. I also have listened to dedicated units too; that did sound good but not so good that it justifies the exhortative cost to upgrade just yet. This multi channel stuff is a joke. Very little of it is mixed by some body who understands that the orchestra and the performer is usually in front of the listener. Until things kind of flesh things out between formats where attention can be made toward a machine that does not cost a small fortune; I think I will be sticking with the CD for a while, in spite of its sonic limitations. Not to mention there is good old vinyl.
Still not as good as my Ultra-Analog D/A, and not even close to my analog LP setup. By the way, while Sony and others are archiving their masters sampled at 5.6 MHz, why are consumers being shortchanged with SACDs sampled only at 2.8 Mhz ? The big record companies are looking for ways to watermark their crappy sounding CDs and not-so-great-sounding SACDs. Music Industry are you listening ? First, give us -consumers- all the resolution you've got of the recording, then think of watermarking. Otherwise, don't complaint when people aren't willing to pay inflated prices for CDs, and instead choose to download the same -poor sounding- music at the price it deserves (free?).
Better than CD, worse than LP. And most of the good music (quality recordings and/or performances) are available on LP. So if my DVD/SACD player didn't have DVD, it would be in the garage with the Beta/SQ receiver/memory stick 1 reader.
You still have to look long and hard for software. Not enough reasonably priced discs around yet to make the jump. Inexplicably, not even the Sony stores in the Toronto area have SACD players on display. Last year they had a few DVD/SACD combo players available at somewhat reasonable prices. This year, nothing. Whoever is in charge of marketing at Sony Canada is asleep at the wheel. I thought this was supposed to be a new format launch, yet it doesn't look like one. Very strange.