Is there a consensus as to blu ray sound quality?

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.

Thanks, Kijanki,
So, in talking to some of the digital 'masters',(people not tapes), their confusion is real in deciding for many years, how to try to improve digital, as it has or had nothing to do with read potential. Some companies in years gone by, using three lasers had to do with external factors such as mechanical issues maybe, say vibrationally induced error read? Was it just hype in your opinion?
When you say "That's what I think", does this mean that the 'jury' is still out?
Reflections on the disc internally, causing, I suspect read error, and interpolation all degrade the sound, but we're working with all known data; so converting to analog is the issue of most 'chance' and degradation?
Years ago I was speaking to Mike (God, what's his name) one of the first at Theta, if not it's founder. He was in his lab when I called, and he was shaking his head trying, in his words, 'to understand why a 22bit dac sounded less like music than a 18bit dac'.

I never at any time in the twenty odd years of reading about digital, thought that we were extracting, correctly, all the data, in time domain, without error. And to that point, have forever wanted to eliminate the mechanical aspects of a cd player, thinking that we were only 'slightly' ahead of a turntable (not from an audio standpoint, but technical standpoint), in that we still had a read mechanism, and a spinning device, which could be (and is) acted on by external, and frankly it's own internal energies. So, to me the question became one of proper time domain sequencing of data through clocking, rather than reading from a spinning device.
This digital mess is as bad as the 'weather' or stock market. It seems that we all know 'something' but none of us really has an answer to how to make a digital disc sound like a SOTA table with a Zeta Arm, and a Koetsu Rosewood cartridge of 24 years ago, or today, for that matter. Viva, la ticks and pops, no Kijanki? HA!

Lrsky - Better laser might provide better results with less than perfect disks if its optimized for that (blue ray might not be). Shortcomings of digital comes not only from resolution but mostly from unfortunate sampling rate of 44.1kHz. Just imagine one period of 10kHz sinewave estimated with only 4 points. With ratio of 2:1 (44.1kHz/20kHz) it is impossible to filter out in digital filter frequency components above 22.05kHz (and keep 20kHz bandwidth) that can "fold" over from zero (Nyquist/Shannon) 22.1kHz becoming 50Hz. Using brickwall digital filters gives more attenuation but creates uneven group delays (improper summing of harmonics) and ripples in the passband. Sampling frequency has to be higher and that's why we have different oversampling schemes where artificial samples are created just to increase rate.

Better sounding schemes like SACD are not very popular and probably created only to promote scheme with absolute copy protection (pit width modulation) - nobody cares about us audiophiles. We don't represent any buying power and the most of people are happy with MP3.

Digital sounds less than perfect but record mixing is even worse.

One could say that digital recreation is not analogous to the sound represented though other less manipulated efforts?

Lrsky - there is nothing wrong with digital (just look at HDTV)and the most of LPs pressed now are made from digital masters. My friend who works in recording studio says that they have in "junk room" multitrack tape recorders that costed an arm and a leg when they acquired them many years ago (Apex if I remember correctly) - now everything is digital. Digital master tapes on high end gear sound incredible (so I've heard). The problem is media format and quality of electronics. SACD should be much better, providing more resolution and easing D/A conversion, and it is (according to reviews) but amount of available records is still very low. Everybody is hoping, including you, that new media like Blue Ray will bring some solution. I don't know.

I would think that person has to be a little older to appreciate fine things and long time ago older people were driving the market. Everybody wanted to be older - just look at names like "Oldsmobile". You wouldn't name car company like that today. Oldsmobile closed factories and everything is oriented toward teenagers or recently even children and children don't buy SACDs.