On Sun, 25 Jan 2004 06:43:33 GMT, Codifus
wrote:

I'm skeptical. I tend to think that PCM will get a lot of negative press
simply because it came around during the birth of digital music, and was
the major process used for digital music.If it was bad, there was
nothing out there that was better. PCD was the process used with all
those bad DA converters, limited sampling etc. One of PCM's finest
examples, in CD format, is JVC's XRCD format. Of course, it's still
limited by 44.1/16. And how many people even know about XRCD? It's a
niche market for the soon
to be obsoleted CD format. SACD has arrived and it has the benefit of
learning from all the mistakes made in the digital mastering processes.

Unfortunately, it did *not* learn, as 'pure' DSD has a fatal technical
flaw. As a result, all modern SACDs are made either from conventional
'hi-res' PCM masters, or from so-called DSD-Wide, which is merely a
hybrid form of PCM. Hence, SACD is basically just a marketing
exercise, since it is always derived from some form of hi-res PCM, aka
DVD-A.

So has DVD audio, a PCM processs. The only fair comparison would be to
compare DVD audio to SACD, because they both premiered around the same
time and stand to benefit from all that we have learned about the
analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog process of digital audio.

Well, since no one has yet shown absolute proof that either of those
'hi res' formats sounds different from basic 16/44 CD, that could be a
little difficult........................

Here's a link to a site comparing DVD-Audio to SACD using a square wave.
Look at how the CD foramt using PCM, jsut falls apart trying to
reproduce the wave, but DVD audio, also using PCM reproduces the square
wave quite admirably;

http://www.smr-home-theatre.org/surr.../page_07.shtml

What does this prove, other than that CD has a restricted bandwidth of
22kHz, which we already knew?
--

Stewart Pinkerton | Music is Art - Audio is Engineering