Help! Sacd Good Or Bad?, Does SACD ought to sound like crud? Options

[Joe Bloggs]

I've listened to SACD once and it sure sounded good...

I've heard people say that SACD ought to fail in transient reproduction, (because it can only encode a rise and fall relative to the last time step) so I did some calculations:

'Sampling rate' of SACD = 2.8MHz = 64x 44.1kHz

For encoding tones up to 44.1kHz at full scale, it has to reach full-scale from 0 in 64 steps, that is, at any given time there can only be 64 possible positions for the waveform.

This gives it 6 bits resolution to CD's 16 bits??

OK, suppose you only need to encode up to 22.05kHz at full scale, the number of possible positions increases from 64 to 128--7 bits resolution, big improvement

I doubt this is how DSD actually works, but this article http://www.iar-80.com/page40.html (I linked to page 40, but it seems page 1-39 may be going on and on about the sonic flaws of DSD as well) seems to take this view seriously and goes on to talk about how you try to recover musical information from the 6 bit stream.

[mcg1969]

I don't think you can fairly say that SACD is "not by far as good as dvd-a".

Both SACD and DVD-A are overspec'ed, albeit less so for SACD. You don't need 24 bits at 192kHz to get a clean representation of an audio signal; or 24 bits at 96kHz for that matter. So there is no reason whatsoever why perfectly mastered SACD and DVD-A versions of the same music should be distinguishable from each other.

Now of course, the problem with ripping is understandable, but hey in that sense DVD-A PCM can't be ripped either.

As for understanding how SACD works, for me what has sufficed is to note that the signal-to-noise ratio of a DSD signal is lower than 0dB---in other words, there is more noise than signal---but that the vast majority of that noise has been shaped into the inaudible frequency range. So within the audible frequency range, you get all the SNR and dynamic range you want.