SACD WINS!

Try Music Direct www.amusicdirect.com and Elusive disk http://elusivedisc.com/ And get there mail order catalogs. They update four times per year so you can stay current. Also if you subscribe to Elusive Disks e-mail news letter they update the newest releases weekly. Try Jacintha "Autumn leaves" (female jazz vocal), Natures Realm (classical all tube recorded) and Duke Elington "Blues Orbit" (Big band/Jazz) to start with. All three are amazing! I would also recommend the disks from Chesky, All of them are far better than the standard cd. One last thought BE SURE YOUR PLAYER HAS A MINIMUM OF 250 HOURS BURN IN TIME PER LASER!!!!!!!! The brightness will go away!

Music Direct, Acoustic Sounds, are two good sources. SACD is so much better then CD that even if no other music was made, i would still keep my Sony sacd1. And this is coming from a guy who has a highend vinyl rig. And a former owner of a highend megabuck dac, transport, player.

I agree. I can't see the industry giving up a 2.8 million/second sampling system, for a 96K/192K per second system. DVD-audio will survive, just like DTS is surviving, but it's not for audiophiles or master recordings. It is an improvement over CDs. DVD-audio is only showing up in midfi equipment, and for those who think SACD has no software, where's the DVD-audio software? The $400 (list) Sony CD/SACD multichannel player should lead to an explosion in SACD demand.

SACD does not have more resolution than 24/96 material or even a CD at 16 bit/44.1k. SACD is a pulse averaging system that is IDENTICAL to a 1 bit Delta Sigma DAC at 64X oversampling (44100Hz * 64 = 2,822,400Hz.) The problem with 1 bit DACs, or SACD, is that they are capable of high resolution but only at low frequencys. A 1 bit sampling system running at 2.8 MHz reaches 24 bit resolution at .175Hz, 16 bit resolution at 43Hz, 12 bit resolution at 1Khz, and 7 bit resolution at 20Khz. As you can see there is decreasing resolution with frequency, in order to have full 16 bit resolution at 20Khz a 1 bit system would need to run at 2.8Ghz, 1000 times faster. In contrast a PCM digital system (like CDs or DVD audio) has full resolution from DC to the nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate). The ONLY advantage that SACD has over conventional PCM digital system is that almost all music now is recorded using a 64X oversampling A/D converter, converted to PCM in a DSP (a lossy step) and when it is played back it is converted to a 1 bit signal once again in a Delta Sigma DAC. SACD simply puts the raw information from the A/D converter on a disk so that there is no conversion loss. DVD audio has a much higher POTENTIAL resolution than SACD but today even CDs are not used to their fullest potential.

Dustin, Sounds like SACD puts up back to the days of 78's and AM radio. In the couple instances where there's both 24/96 and SACD versions of the same master recording, why have the reviewers preferred SACD? Why does everyone prefer SACD over CD. Why is SACD getting almost universal praise? Why does SACD sound great on my system--superior to LPs, CDs, and 24/96? Why does Sony claim that SACD is capable of 100K HZ, while CDs claim 20K, and DVD-Aduio 24K? Your 1 bit explanation is interesting, and I do not understand the engineering, but it seems difficult to believe that SACD has 7 bit resolution at 20K. It would appear to me that at higher frequencies, a detailed resolution would be much more critical.