Coping in an Age of Uncertainty

Libor35 states the current condition of audio format lunacy extremely well!! I have around 500 redbook CD's; of that amount, about 80% are vastly superior to any DSD, HDCD or High Res PCM discs I have! The technology used to make a recording dwarfs in comparison to the ability of the recording engineers and how they apply their craft. Most new format discs remind me of what I refer to as the "New HI-FI"...they just don't sound natural, like reall instruments playing in a real acoustic space.

I just purchased a CAL CL-2500 DVD player with the goal of improving the quality of my CD playback. I had heard the CL-20, and was very impressed with its capabilities as a CD player.

I was at first excited about its ability to play DVD Audio discs and HDCD. It turned out I was mistaken on the HDCD -- the CL-20 and CL-10 both support it, but on the newer CL-2500, CAL seems to have rejected HDCD support. And DVD Audio appears to have changed to an incompatible 24/192ksps format in the few years since the CL-2500 was built. No matter, there were really only about 1-2 discs I was really interested in, compared to the 400-500 CDs in my collection. SACD seems more prolific, but there are still only about 3-4 that I would buy if I had a player. Even HDCD, which is more common than DVD-A or SACD, has only a handful of titles that interest me, which I of course own since HDCD is merely a special encoding on a standard CD. None of the special formats offers enough titles or enough benefit to cause me to even consider compatibility as a factor in choosing a CD player.

You should all be concerned that the "audiophile" formats may never get off the ground, because music distribution is headed towards internet distribution -- which means lossy digital compression and lower sample rates and resolution. Not only that, but the promoters of the formats are sabotaging their own efforts -- SACD because it is proprietary, DVD-A because they changed the format mid-stream to something that existing players, and DVD-Video players, cannot play.

No, unless you are comfortable letting the published catalogue of the "advanced" formats dictate what you listen to, neither format is viable yet. I don't predict them becoming viable anytime soon.

Just look at HDCD -- it's a completely compatible format, but like SACD is proprietary and requires a license to record or to decode. It's been around for years and is still in very limited use. Personally, I hope it dies a quiet death. It does not seem to offer higher potential for quality than standard CD, but sacrifices the sound quality on incompatible players.

I am very pleased with my purchase...despite the fact that the new player recognizes neither SACD nor new-format DAD, it makes CDs sound really good. For someone like me who listens to a wide variety of (sometimes really obscure or unpopular) music, improving the sound quality of all my albums is much better than making slight additional improvements on a couple of titles.

24/192 upsampling for redbook and sacd for new format seems to be the audiophile ticket... i would buy a reasonabley priced sacd with digital out to a 24/192 upsampling dac.

i would not dump alot of $$$$ into digital till the dust settles.

wether sacd will catch on as a format it is too early to say ( look what happened to BETA and S-VHS and records )

the mass market drives the final decision of format.history shows the way to cheaper/less fidelity format - sad but true.

time will tell...

mike

I have a pretty good digital set up and around 1200 cd so I will continiue to build my redbook collection. I just bought my first TT so this should keep buisy. Why should I buy into SACD when there is maybe 15 or 20 titles, and why should I rush out and buy a SACD player when my current system blows it away! I will give it a few years and the money I would have spent on the new format is going towards more cd and vinyl!
Happy Listening!

I have asked myself the same question. Having a transport or player that can play multiple formats is a partial solution and basically, that is what I'm waiting for. I'm holding off a new puchase until more mfrs come around. The new player from Musical Fidelity seems intriguing (but not at $6500!). The other problem of course, is the ever increasing obsolecence due to evolving technology, which I'm afraid a one player box with multiple format capability does not (at least sufficiently) address. My two year old Parasound sounds pretty good, but somehow I have the feeling it already is outdated.

Quite a dilemna when you think about it.