Is there a consensus as to blu ray sound quality?

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?

That's what I think. If error correction works and there is no jitter I don't see what else can be improved in reading process.

Higher resolution can be obtained in digital filtering (think averaging)but it stops short of 20-bits because of DACs. In case of traditional DACs better resolution is not possible because of components' tolerance while in case of delta-sigma DACs better resolution is limited by timing accuracy. There are some DACs from TI that are combination of both but without any apparent benefits. DCS introduced long time ago RING DACs that bypass resistors tolerance resolution limit by shuffling constantly many (I think 5)different resitors (of the same value) to get accurate average value of given division.

SACD is a recorded byproduct od delta Sigma modulation before filtering (PWM at 2.8MHz) if I understand it correctly. It supposed be equivalent to 20bit performance at 96kHz. Notice that traditional DAC ICs got eliminated and substituted by one bit DAC (switch) and filtering.