To say that SACD is inherently better sounding than CD presupposes
that there exists at least one SACD whose quality is higher than any
CD ever made--or that _could_ be made. I see no way to escape this
conclusion. One can run a test which can disprove the hypothesis in
this fashion:

Choose a stereo SACD whose owner swears that it could not have been
made to that level of audible quality in CDR. Copy the SACD over to
CDR. The copy must be audibly inferior to the SACD since the premise
was that it could not be done in CD. (Clearly it must be technically
inferior, based solely on the fact that the CDR has gone through an
extra A/D - D/A conversion.) If nobody can reliably distinguish
between the SACD and the CDR, you have your answer.

It's unfortunate that the converse is not proved as well. Being able
to distinguish between the 2 does not necessarily mean that SACD is
inherently better than CD. It could be that the degradation caused by
copying is audible. Nevertheless, I think the experiment should be
run to find out.

Opinions?

Norm Strong