Blu-Spec CDs

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Blu-spec CD is a specification for an improved version of a conventional Audio CD, introduced by Sony Music Entertainment. Instead of a traditional infra-red laser, a blue laser is used for recording the pits on the CD master that is needed for disc replication. The blue laser creates more precise pits, causing less distortion in the optical read-out process and supposedly resulting in higher-quality audio. [1]. However, and despite marketing claims, there is no published proof or evidence that this technology actually leads to any improvement in the final audio reproduced, since CIRC, the built-in redundancy and error correction system that is part of the CD standard, already takes care of occasional misread bits.

A Blu-spec CD can be played on all CD players and does not require a blue laser to be read. It is not a Blu-ray Disc.

The Blu-spec CD approach competes with other variants of the CD format, even though the improvements promised by them target different stages of the production process:

* DSD-CD (Sony)
* SHM-CD (Universal Music)
* XRCD (JVC)
* HQCD (Memory-Tech)
* HDCD (Pacific Microsonics/Microsoft)

I've had the TrondheimSolistene "Divertimenti" for a couple of weeks now.

This music comes in a half dozen formats on two discs: CD, stereo/multichannel SACD, stereo/multichannel Blu-Ray (Dolby True HD, DTS-Master, Dolby Digital, et al.

The music, of course, sounds wonderful but is hard to gauge because the entire program (Benjamin Britten, Grazyna Bacewicz, Terje Bjorklund and Bela Bartok) consists of strings only.

NO tympani, brass or woodwinds.

The package took two months to acquire from Amazon.

Dweller,

I bought it when it first came out directly from the maker, I think it's E2? They sent it to me in less than five days. The openess of the uncompressed tracks (Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD MA) is amazing, far better than even the SACD version, I like to use it as a demo disc as it comes with all formats so it's very easy to show the differences between them.