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.
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.

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

Food for thought

CD

Farrell8882 wrote:
I found this article on another newsgroup:

http://www.diamondcenter.net/digitalstress.html

Here are (to me) the most significant paragraphs:

"With the advent of Direct Stream Digital (DSD) recording, it is now
possible to conclude that the negative effects I have stated above are due not
to the digital process per se but to the mode of achieving it, Pulse Code
Modulation (PCM). For DSD recordings do not have these negative effects.

"Although it was suggested, unfortunately the record industry did not
make analog backups of their digital (PCM) sessions. So now there is a (very
expensive) twenty year hiatus. Hence some SACDs (the CD format for DSD) are
being released which have gone through the PCM process and are as negative as
regular CDs."

I have two questions:

I wonder whether it is possible to find pure DSD recordings, and how to
recognize them.

Also, are DSD CDs -- as opposed to DSD SACDs -- as likely to be free of the
negative artifacts Diamond cites?

Thanks.