Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Feb. 23 2008, 11:21 |
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I'll try and keep this straightforward, so the only things that are glazed around here by the end of it are the tubular bell cookies that we keep the tubular.net cookie jar stocked up with.
SACD stands for Super Audio CD and is a format developed by Sony and Philips, intended to replace the familiar Audio CD format.
It uses a way of storing the music as digital data that's totally different to that used for CDs (called DSD - I could explain what that means, but I'd fear eye glazing would occur...), which is designed to address some of the problems associated with the format used for CD. The resolution is very high and was designed to offer a similar level of quality to 1/2" analogue tape (the kind of thing that would have been used to master your favourite albums from the past, and some from the present too - not to be confused with the smaller tape formats which you may have grown to hate in the past! ).
It offers both stereo and surround (basically 5.1, though there's a technical difference...but again...eye glaze avoidance mode is currently operational). It's possible for a disc to include both a stereo, a surround and a CD-compatible version (straight SACDs won't play on a normal CD player) of the album. The Tubular Bells SACD is like that - it contains a high quality version of the original mix, the Boxed mix in 4 channel surround (the centre and sub channels are unused), then an extra layer which you can play in a normal CD player (working much like a dual layer DVD).
"But CDs sound great to me, why do we need something better?" you might ask...well there's the problem - almost everyone else has asked the same question and answered "we don't need something better". I personally think they sound very good and would be happy to pay a premium for albums released at that level of quality, but I don't think the format really fits with the way the majority of people listen to music. It suits classical listeners rather better, actually - it seems more of them buy their music to listen to as an activity on its own, rather than to listen to while doing something else, which MP3 and similar formats seem better suited to (easy transfer between devices, small players that can be taken everywhere), and classical recordings often make more use of the extended dynamic range offered.
Surround systems are becoming more common in homes as part of home cinema setups, but I'm not certain that people really want to listen to music on them. People like all the whizz-bang effects in films, but I think with music, a lot of people seem to ask "Why would I want that coming out of 6 speakers?".
Now don't get me wrong - I think music mixed in surround is a brilliant thing, and I'd love to see more of it. I think even purist classical recordings benefit from the extra sense of immersion that the use of surround can give (in those cases, the rear speakers would tend to be fed simply with the signal from microphones picking up the ambience of the space the recording was made in. When the recording is made somewhere with really nice acoustics, the effect can be fantastic).
I'd love to see Music of the Spheres come out on SACD, but I somehow doubt it's going to happen. Perhaps they can be persuaded to do it if the CD sells well.
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