Andre Yew wrote:

Randy Yates wrote in message news:bTXxb.250002$9E1.1349810@attbi_s52...

Are they? If you walk into the living rooms of most people at this
point in time, you will find CDs - not DVD-A or SACD. And I think the
average consumer, who finds compressed MP3s sound just fine and makes
around $30,000/year, isn't going to be willing to shuck out a few
thousand dollars for new equipment and replacement media to gain an
extra 20 kHz of bandwidth that he never missed in the first place.


Yes this true, but many receivers and surround pre-pros are running
internally at higher sampling rates already.

Forgive me for not taking your word for that. If you can provide some
verifiable evidence, I would like to see it.

Some Pioneer receivers
run at 88.2 kHz, for example, and current Lexicons run at 96 kHz.
They often use A/Ds at high sampling rates, so analog sources are
digitized at high rates and are processed that way.

Sampling at a high rate in no way obligates the rest of the data path
to operate at that rate. Again, you're making some assertions I don't
believe are true.

CDs are dealt,
usually, in their native rates.

This would make no sense. If the remainder of the data path you speak
of above is operating at 88.2, then it would make sense to upsample
the CDs to 88.2. I suspect your data is wrong - the internal rate
is 44.1 while the converter only runs at a high rate to mitigate
antialias filter requirements.

I would also suggest that most high-end audio design isn't aimed at
your average consumer.

Your statement was that high sample rates are here. I did, and still
do, challenge that remark, if by "here" you mean in widespread market
use. Sure, a small percentage has DVD-A or SACD. (I myself have purchased
a DVD-A - and was abysmally disappointed.) There will always be a small
part of the market buying the most expensive products available. That
wasn't my point, and I don't think it was yours either.

I'm not saying it's necessarily economically
viable, but I think DVD-A and SACD compatibility looms large on their
design specs.

Whose design specs? If you mean the average digital audio equipment
maker, then I'm not sure you're correct. But if they do, the market
will decide with their pocketbooks, and I'm betting which choice they're
going to make.

Frankly, I hope these (SACD and DVD-A) formats fail. CDs are more than
adequate for audio reproduction in any venue barring perhaps a laboratory,
and creating a profuse array of formats does nothing but confuse consumers
and dissipate resources.


I hope not. DVD-A and SACD are very useful in providing high-quality,
non-lossy encoded multichannel music.

They may provide multi-channel music, but we've already got high quality
stereo music. It's called "CD." These formats provide *no* (zero) practical
advantage in music quality over a CD.

DSP engineers know how to properly design and implement a low pass
filter. Filtering is one of the most basic tasks for a DSP engineer,
and lowpass is the most basic type of filter.


Yes, but there are so many tradeoffs to make --- will they make the
right choices, perceptually speaking?

Yes, they will. It is easy to design and implement a half-band filter
using polyphase filtering techniques with fraction-saving or even
noise-shaping that will perform extremely well.

One of our fellow rahe members,
Bruno Putzeys, recently described on the pro-audio list his
experiences with a TI SRC4192 chip,

Irrelevent. Generic asynchronous sample rate conversion
is a far, far more complex task than a simple half-band lowpass
filter interpolation (resampling) filter. You're comparing
apples to oranges.

It is my experience that bugs are best dealt with by repairing
rather than covering up.


Yes, but only if they're under your control. Shoddy mastering and
engineering practices abound. Higher sampling rates, and deeper bit
depths can deal with some common audio engineering problems.

A mastering engineer can easily screw anything up, even DVD-A and SACD, if
they're not careful or don't know what they're doing. You'll never overcome
ignorance with more technology - only with education.
--
% Randy Yates % "...the answer lies within your soul
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % 'cause no one knows which side
%%% 919-577-9882 % the coin will fall."
%%%% % 'Big Wheels', *Out of the Blue*, ELO
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr