Dark Side of the Disc Article
Reply #26 – 2003-05-21 13:24:55
SACD cannot be maxed out to a hard limit the same way as CD, and if the production is done in the DSD domain with direct conversion to red book CD format for the second layer of the disk as described in the link above, the dynamics and mastering of the CD layer will be the same as for the SACD later. This is not likely to happen any time soon IMHO. DSD is more a "delivery" format and not a record/work format. I expect that all mixing and mastering will be done in PCM for a long time, with just an extra preparation for SACD (DSD encoding) as the last stage. Besides the point, but I suspect that DSD is also a convenient layer to hide the source bit depth for the consumers. It's not obvious if the master was analog,16,18,20 or maybe 24 bits, but the consumers will be made to believe that it's all 24/192 (or something like that) so, better than 16/44.1 . The mastering problem is not a format problem, it's just the silly call for louder than that other loud album. Once SACD is generally accepted this will go on if the attitude of the record companies isn't gonna change. Like happened in the movie industry, there they go for dramatic (loud) sound effects. To provide the headroom for those peaks there are reference levels specified (much like replaygain). The resulting crisp sound is actually a selling argument for DVD. BTW expect the hybrid SACD (with CD audio layer) to disappear once SACD reaches a "critical mass". That might take a while though. -- Ge Someone