Does the Transporter outperform SACD (2ch)?

[siriuslycold]

a good system for protecting copywrites, and preventing piracy. Not to mention selling unique recording & playback gear, with the associated royalties....

they're not making that much money on this, compared to redbook CD sales and now downloads. it's also an expensive medium to work in, in terms of the hardware and software required

Can you point out any links or sources to support this?

http://www.audioholics.com/education...d-vs-cd-page-2

The potential for abuse further down the line is a real possibility and a very questionable practice to many of us with extensive analog backgrounds. SACD uses an entirely different way of moving data through the digital domain, which Sony has called DSD. This was invented by Sony as an archival format because just about any of the present sampling rates used can be ãmovedä out of DSD and into a PCM format.

also at SA-CD.net

What is DSD?

DSD is short for Direct Stream Digital, the way in which the analog sound signal is described in the digital domain. It was originally invented by Sony for archiving studios' master tapes with the idea that they shouldn't be left wondering ten years later why they hadn't used a better encoding scheme before transferring and discarding these masters.

[DCtoDaylight]

They're not making much money, which is why it's in the death spiral, but it was Sony's hope that they would make the kind of money CD's earned them....

Interesting idea that DSD was invented as an archival format. Both your links seem to originate from the same source (or one copied from the other), it would be interesting to find what that original source was, probably a Sony press release.

Cheers, Dave

[siriuslycold]

They're not making much money, which is why it's in the death spiral, but it was Sony's hope that they would make the kind of money CD's earned them....

Interesting idea that DSD was invented as an archival format. Both your links seem to originate from the same source (or one copied from the other), it would be interesting to find what that original source was, probably a Sony press release.

Cheers, Dave

Dave,

there is a Sony/Philips Introduction to SACD document in PDF format
http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer/dsd/dsd.pdf

[Wombat]

Reads like promotional stuff, not more.
For example the fact DSD uses 4x the amount of data than CD. Nothing special i think, PCM 24/96 does also.

[jt25741]

I think everything is converted to basically single bit DSDish quasi Delta-Sigma format by the AKM and just about any other non-R2R ladder based DAC on the market these days. This seems to be the modern approach. D/A conversion of such 1 bit non PCM streams has some linearity advantages over the older and sometimes preferred approaches of the earlier DACs (venerable BB PCM1704 and other much more expensive chips). There are trade-offs as well. Numerous posts have been on this subject to learn much more. So when we listen to PCM sources through most modern chips, we are really listening through a streaming quasi 1-bit conversion anyways through the SB and TP.

[sfraser]

darrenyeats wrote:
> Music companies should focus on mastering all their music better rather
> than putting effort into quality only for the unadmirable reason of
> pushing unnecessary DRM-ridden new formats.

But that would be hard. The PHB at the labels would have to tell the
Mastering Engineer: "Make it sound as great as you can, screw loudness
wars" And the Mastering Engineer would say "Thank you, thank you" and do so.

But it will never happen until all the labels replace their idiot
lawyers/bosses


--
Pat Farrell
http://www.pfarrell.com/

Amen to that!

[Eric Seaberg]

None of the 2" machine had much frequency response above 20kHz. Most didn't have any, but it hard to generalize. Most used Dolby or something like it, long before Dolby became popular in the mass market.

If the tracking was done on a typical Struder 2" machine with Dolby, there isn't much pure signal about the 20kHz that red book can cover. And Dolby processing is audible if you pay attention and have good gear.

Gothca there, Pat. I had a 2" Studer A800 24-track and consistently measured its response at ±2dB 42Hz-23kHz. It would be about -6dB @ 25kHz. The reason for the weird low-end @ 42Hz was due to the AES curve for 30-inches-per-second tape speed. Vinyl wasn't real keen on a lot of activity below 50Hz, so the AES (Audio Engineering Society) decided to roll it off slowly below that.

Most of the time we didn't use Dolby Noise Reduction on the multi-track tape since the console had dynamic automation. This allowed us to turn tracks off, or volume down, when nothing was playing on that track. With some 'smart' mixing, you could all but lose the tape hiss. Also, at 30IPS the octave of the tape hiss 'shifted' upwards in the spectrum as opposed to 15IPS, making it not so obvious to hear. We would use Dolby SR on our 1/2" 2-track mixdown masters since you didn't have the option of 'losing the hiss with a fade-out' like you did on the multi-track.

BTW, Dolby 'A' or 'SR', which was designed for professional use, is TOTALLY inaudible when setup properly. Dolby 'B', the consumer 'cassette' noise reduction scheme, is VERY audible because the record/playback levels were never matched for proper compansion. The 'other' system you may have been thinking of was DBX, which didn't have the 'level-setting' requirements that Dolby did.

I did a LOT of vinyl (lacquer) mastering in the late 70s and early 80s. It was an INCREDIBLE time for the music industry back then.


----- sorry for the extended history lesson, guys.

[pfarrell]

Eric Seaberg wrote:
> Gothca there, Pat. I had a 2" Studer A800 24-track and consistently
> measured its response at ±2dB 42Hz-23kHz. It would be about -6dB @
> 25kHz.

OK, so I was off a bit on the high end. Did you measure the fall off
over 25kHz? I assume it kept falling off at 6 or maybe 12 dB/octave


> The reason for the weird low-end @ 42Hz was due to the AES
> curve for 30-inches-per-second tape speed. Vinyl wasn't real keen on a
> lot of activity below 50Hz, so the AES (Audio Engineering Society)
> decided to roll it off slowly below that.

You had to, or the needle would literally jump out of the groove.

And the mastering folks would EQ it again at least per the RIAA specs.
Often they'd do more.

--
Pat Farrell
http://www.pfarrell.com/

[cliveb]

Most of the time we didn't use Dolby Noise Reduction on the multi-track tape since the console had dynamic automation. This allowed us to turn tracks off, or volume down, when nothing was playing on that track. With some 'smart' mixing, you could all but lose the tape hiss.

Eric, thanks for these insights from someone in the business. As someone who *isn't* in the business, I may have misunderstood what you're saying here, but it sounds like you're saying that during mixdown you tended to fade out tracks during the times when there was no signal present.

As a music *consumer*, I think I detect some consequences of that which I personally feel are undesirable. As an example, take the track "Private Investigations" from Dire Straits' "Love Over Gold". (My understanding is that this album was recorded at 30ips without noise reduction). During the introduction, there is a nice low background hiss level, except that when a pair of isolated piano chords are played, the hiss level increases very noticably. I presume this may be because they were doing precisely what you describe: only fading in the piano track when it was playing something. The effect wasn't that noticable on vinyl, but as soon as it was released on CD it became painfully obvious.

My feeling is that this variable background noise level is pretty intrusive: worse than just leaving a higher but consistent level of hiss throughout. Any comments?

[Rodney_Gold]

You will always find De-correlated noise far less obtrusive.
Its much like taking a pic of a blue sky and seeing red clumps , they are obtrusive , if you spread the red clumps evenly in the blue sky , the sky will look more purplish but it wont be anywhere as noticeable as the red clumps.
I dont think the loudness wars or compression will ever dissapear ,apart from the radio station reason , the loudness thing is cos most ppl have really lousy hifi's compared to us audiophiles and they need a high average level and anything more than a handful of DB's dynamic range will make loud distort and soft too soft for a decent average level , same goes for compression , imagine the 1810 with cannons if the peak level at 0 dbfs is the loudest canon shot , the rest would be 20 or more DB down from there..so the average level will be recorded at -20dbfs and would lose resolution.