Fly in the SACD Ointment?

CW, you are on to something here. Take Carole King's Tapestry as an example. Her voice was not recorded too well to begin with. On the album and CD that was audible. On the SACD, well, it becomes sort of the new characteristic of the record I wish I'd never heard. Take New World Symphony (Dvorzak) by New York Philharmonic, conducted by Bernstein... There IS more detail I can hear in the SACD version, but the tape hissssssssssssssss never seems to end througout the disc. Somehow, it is more engaging musically but the hisssssssssssss puts a damper on it. This seems to be the case with many of the re-releases Sony has done. I bought Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell... I never liked it sonically on vinyl or CD, cause I always felt it was missing something. Well let me tell you, it misses something on SACD too. Still a cool album, but still misses something sonically.

On a brighter note, Mozart's Piano Concierto No. 20, also on Sony, in my opinion just is plain great. It has also got it's issues, but the performance on SACD is just so much more engaging! De piano IS THERE!! My favorite disc right this minute is Dave Bruebeck's 40th Anniversary Tour of the UK, a Telarc live recording in DSD. It is open, dynamic, full and has one of the lowest noise floors I have heard yet on SACD. The dynamics, IMO a trademark of Telarc discs, the nice balanced soundstage and the musicality are amazing. As this is a disc that will play in normal and SACD machines, it makes for a good test and comparison disc when checking out new stuff.

Look, stuff that was poorly recorded will always sound bad. I am just hoping that telarc and co will push SACD to the limit and make the best of it. It has potential.

Niels.

I remember searching for good vinyl and CD recordings, and today I search for good SACD recordings.

In almost every case the Sony SACDs sound better than their CD counterparts.

However, to truly experience the benefit of SACD, the master should be in DSD. Telarc, FIM, GrooveNote, Red Rose, and a handful of record labels are selling DSD/SACD recordings and sonically are superior to the Sony releases. However, some of the performances fall short. For example, Jacintha's Autumn Leaves is great sonically, but I listen to Carole King or the Bangles Greatest Hits more.

Sony is beginning to release new DSD/SACD material. I'm not sure if the master is DSD, but this week I understand that Sony is released CD and SACD versions of Train's Drops of Jupiter. Soon to follow is something new from Offspring and Aerosmith's most recent recording.

Like the move from 78 to 33, 33 to CD, VHS to DVD, etc. it takes time to build a library.

I've had my SACD player for 3 months. Today, I listened one of my favorate DVD-videos, Fleetwood Mac's The Dance. It was the first time I listened to it since I bought my SACD player. It sounded flat, fuzzy and grainy. SACD has spoiled me.

Perhaps we need to rethink where a new technology might go and (maybe opening a can of worms) how to measure it..(from a music lover point of view)..
If we expect to have current music we love that was recorded quite a while ago to sound way better just to a new technology that was not available when the music was recorded, it might be our wish but the source material puts a cap on what could be achieved....
On the other hand if the material is taken with new technology all the way, there´s the chance that we might get the best performance achievable by present day technologies.....
the issue might be that we might be looking for something that is not already there and we do praise and like better reproduction of our favorite music time and consumers judgment will eventually define the long term fate..
So it's a tricky situation how to make a new thing being favoured by us the customers based on old source material?
This is not a statement but an opening of thought that has wandered in my mind for quite a time...
What do you think?

Makes sense to me Sol: I have been listening to some recordings tonight on CD "The Tiny Powell Gospel Collection" that were originaly recorded in 1949 and 1950 and had to take it to the mini system to make it listenable.

Guessing the future of SACD has about the same positive predictive value as picking the Stanley Cup winner in the first round of the playoffs. Too many variables and entropy to make anything but an educated guess. In real estate, it's location, location, location. In audiophilia, it seems to be source, source,source. High level, highly resolving systems and front ends are a double edged sword, bringing out the best in a good source and revealing a poor source for what it is.We spend a lot of money and effort to essentially put together a system that stays out of the way as much as possible, and let the recording through as unencumbered as possible. This has proven rewarding and painful. Some 50 y/o recordings on vinyl sound spectacular, some brand new CD's sound like crap. SACD is an attempt to get the listener a step closer to the source, and it stands to reason that, well, garbage in/garbage out. I hope, as noted above, that Sony, Telarc et al put out DSD recorded SACD's, they do indeed seem to sound better than many of the PCM based recordings. But some of the older recordings, obviously done right, re-released on SACD, such as the Walter Columbia recordings mentioned by Rcprince, are astounding sonically, as are many others. Much better than CD (IMOP), and arguably as good/better than vinyl. The fly in the ointment is real, and appears to have been hatched from the original source, and to somehow blame and discount the technology is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If the goal is to get closer to the live recording, SACD is perhaps a step in the right direction of building a better fly trap.