Is there a consensus as to blu ray sound quality?


I have no doubt missed it...as it's probably been discussed ad nauseum on these electronic pages, but I still wonder...is there a consensus of the sound quality differential between regular players and the new blu ray?
Of course the video qualities and disc qualities are apparently much upgraded into the blu ray tech, but does this mean the sound is as consistently better? Has anyone played one of Winston Ma's incredible FIM remakes on a blu ray, if so tell us about what you're hearing.
Also, am wondering if any of the CD mfgrs are planning audiophile versions of blu ray??
lrsky
Lrsky - Redbook is fixed at 16 bit and the only thing that better transport provides is lower jitter. Better laser resolution does nothing if overall quality doesn't follow. Many factors affect player's performance and SACD players, for example, are not the best redbook CD players. They have separate laser assemblies for each format but designer probably concentrated on SACD part more. Same might be true with Blue Ray. If you plan to use it as a transport than it might be better to get cheap DVD player and jitter suppressing DAC like Benchmark DAC1 or Bel Canto DAC3.

Such DACs have resolution of 24bits but redbook is defined as 16-bit (as well as HDCD and SACD).
Regarding your assumption that more is better: this further assumes that the blue laser is accurately pulling more 1's and 0's off the CD than the red laser. So it doesn't have to use error correction or interpolate missing data. So it's more accurate and this is reflected in sound quality. This seems to be the essence of what you're asking.

Well, "I don't know" is the only answer I can give. I'm following the thread to see what others say who are more knowledgeable than me on the technical issues.
Thanks Mark, and Kijank, (and everyone)
Let me give one more lame brained, and half assed analogy.
If we're scanning a photo and we have a scanning potential of 'X', then technology changes and we have a scanning potential of 'y' which represents a magnitude of information gathering which is (arbitrarily) 25% greater; the question is, would the picture in the second example look clearer, and more accurate? More data, is more data. The gathering mechanism is the key--of course read error, a nasty thing effects it, but in a linear way--jitter, etc, let's call both of those factors a wash. Let's say that our D/A's are up to the task (at least the same for both, and adequate to the additional information presented by the better read), would this not give us a more realistic presentation of all that is music?
The distance, (if single miked) that exists between the drummer and the bass player, over to the piano, or in an orchestra, the extraordinary amount of complex harmonic structure that exists when multiple violins pay in harmony.

Converting that musical information into a visual medium for the sake of example may be the best way for me to imagine the difference.
Lrsky - You assume that picture that you scan has unlimited resolution. That is not the case here - CD has fixed resolution of 16 bits. Time spacing between bits is fixed and has nothing to do with spacing between players. If the player plays CD without errors and jitter than there is nothing else that can be improved. Jitter itself has nothing to do with harmonic structure or distance but is simply a noise. If you play any singular frequency with jitter you'll get sidebands at very very low level - still audible since not harmonically related to root frequency. Jitter applied to music converts to noise.

In addition Blue Ray players might use separate traditional laser (like SACD do) since their blue laser is optimized for certain depth and other factors.
So,
We're reading every last bit of information that exists on a cd at this moment? I know you say 'fixed at 16 bits'. Realizing that the picture analogy is inaccurate, but just for example, I use that to make the larger point of potentially more data which was not extracted. You're saying emperically that there is no more information to be had from a disc, that that which can be read by a regular, red laser? So the only improvments not in the read domain?