Audibility of "typical" Digital Filters in a Hi-Fi Playback
Reply #338 – 2014-11-19 16:24:05
It's a strange thing to launch a new product on, isn't it? Doesn't the commercial world usually go for bigger wins? 2x or 4x subjective improvements to launch a new format? AM to FM. VHS to DVD. SD to HD. I don't recall a 15 wait before someone finally managed to spot the improvement in a double-blind test with those. I know we're not talking about physical formats any more, but still; the commercial realities of what people will pay to replace/upgrade must still apply. Maybe in 2-channel audio formats there isn't a 2x or 4x improvement left. The launch of both SACD and DVD-A were due to business needs, not consumer. SACD came about because the CD patents were about to expire and Philips and Sony needed another proprietary format so they came up with SACD. The format also came out when piracy was seen as a major threat to music labels. So they wrote in their license that you could not even play SACD on a PC let alone rip it! They wanted to "unring the bell" with CD's lack of copy protection. DVD-A came about because the rest of the CE industry couldn't see another gravy train for Sony/Philips. They had created the DVD standard in DVD Forum (and Audio DVD) so they pushed ahead with a complex and messy system requiring interpreting fancy menus and such. This made building players difficult and very expensive due to high royalties that the fancy menu people demanded. And of course they put in a strong copy protection because DVD was breached and due to piracy factor above, they would have no hope of getting content if they did not rise up to SACD's level of copy protection. You say that the quality difference was incremental/tiny. Not at all. Music that we remastered for these formats sounded far better than the CD. You can read this in Meyer and Moran report:Though our tests failed to substantiate the claimed advantages of high-resolution encoding for two-channel audio, one trend became obvious very quickly and held up throughout our testing: virtually all of the SACD and DVD-A recordings sounded better than most CDs—sometimes much better. Had we not “degraded” the sound to CD quality and blind-tested for audible differences, we would have been tempted to ascribe this sonic superiority to the recording processes used to make them. Plausible reasons for the remarkable sound quality of these recordings emerged in discussions with some of the engineers currently working on such projects. This portion of the business is a niche market in which the end users are preselected, both for their aural acuity and for their willingness to buy expensive equipment, set it up correctly, and listen carefully in a low-noise environment. Partly because these recordings have not captured a large portion of the consumer market for music, engineers and producers are being given the freedom to produce recordings that sound as good as they can make them, without having to compress or equalize the signal to suit lesser systems and casual listening conditions. These recordings seem to have been made with great care and manifest affection, by engineers trying to please themselves and their peers. They sound like it, label after label. High-resolution audio discs do not have the overwhelming majority of the program material crammed into the top 20 (or even 10) dB of the available dynamic range, as so many CDs today do." So the quality differential was absolutely there. If not in specs, but actual performance. Why did they fail? Simple: general consumer puts convenience ahead of fidelity. With MP3s they were getting huge convenience over CDs. Many songs in your pocket. And here come these labels and CE companies saying, "here is a new disc and oh, you can't rip it and we are proud of it!" The tiny group of audiophiles who cared about the difference could not save one format let alone two in the midst of a format war. So both failed and the record execs who claimed this was their savior fired. Fortunately we are able to take a second bite out of the apple now. By downloading high resolution content and ease with which we can play them, there is no longer a technological barrier. Most wonderfully, the files are copy protection free allowing full portability. This is why the formats are growing despite catastrophic failure before. Everything about them is different this time around. Edit: typos as usual .