Format wars.

Please refer to your recent issue Number 109; the David Rich article "Skeptimania." I enjoy reading everything that David writes; both in The Sensible Sound and The Audio Critic. However it is my opinion that he missed a point or two concerning SACD. First, it is my opinion that the launch of SACD was wrong; it should NOT have been in the Home Theatre mode. There are thousands or maybe millions of stereophiles out there who are interested in the highest fidelity they can get within the context of their existing systems or in modest cost improvements to their systems. I don't think many of them are really interested in Home Theatre; otherwise known as 5.1.

I agree with David that RCA/SONY is on the right track by issuing CD/SACD discs at about $10 that will play in Red Book Stereo and SACD Stereo and in 5.1. I think but I don't have that kind of system. I am a stereophile. These discs prove that SACD is even better that the original LPs, which many Golden Ears think is the ultimate sound.

The worst kind of deceptive advertising is the recent issues of the San Francisco Symphony doing Mahler Symphonies in Hybrid SACD. I made the mistake of purchasing one. As I closed the drawer of my player the window indicated SACD; what came out of the speakers was the same old dull Red Book Stereo! Reading the fine print on the box I found that the only SACD mode was 5.1! You pay extra and get nothing but a CD. No wonder SACD is having problems.

BIS is apparently going to issue many of their discs in SACD Stereo and CD. I have heard some of the Bach Cantatas and they are wonderful. The sound is significantly higher than Red Book CDs. The prices are not too much higher than normal CDs. Maybe they will ultimately be the same and other producers will follow. In today's, technology one should be able to produce a CD, SACD Stereo, SACD 5.1 disc for the same cost as current CDs. Then retailers will need to inventory only one disc! I am also amazed that Stereophile magazine is not issuing their highly touted discs in SACD Stereo! If they believed in the title of their magazine they would not be pushing Red Book discs as the ultimate sound!

R.H.Baldwin

via e-mail

David A. Rich Replies: Against the headwinds of the Tower Records liquidation, major classical music websites often price import CDs 50% lower than SACDs, and it might even be more extreme in some all-label sales. Let's do some empirical research. Take a peak at the back page of the Arts and Leisure section (Section 2) of the Sunday New York Times to find when J&R is having a sale. Those sales are usually specific to CDs. J&R Music World drops many full-priced CDs, including imports, to $11 (shipping, unlike Tower, is extra), while Chandos SACD (single inventory) prices might remain above $20. That same J&R sale had Naxos at $5, so you could get four Naxos for one Chandos. This is why I still do not have Chandos's recording of Stanford's Song of the Sea; I am sending Chandos a message to dual-issue disks if they are going to price their SACDs so high. In some limited cases, single-issue SACDs (e.g., Albany, BIS, CPO and recent Sony) may be priced similarly to CDs in these sales, but this is more of an exception than a rule.

Moving on to the sonic issues, I will discuss the sound quality improvement of a well-recorded 5-channel disc elsewhere in this issue. The problem is the discs only sound correct when speakers are rigorously placed in a configuration that best suits the individual listener. In this issue, I review a signal processor that offers the listener greater flexibility, but the unit costs $12,000. Until the price of this technology drops, most of our readers who listen to an SACD in five channels via a typical home theater system are better off with stereo.

So what about stereo? Let's go to DVD-A first. This is a PCM system, just like CD, only better. The sampling rate is double that of a CD and the real-world noise floor may be one-quarter of a CD's. In this case, we have a measurably better format. Is it overkill or is it audible? It's a non-issue when the media and the CD are priced equivalently.

Unfortunately, DVD-A is a dead format because it has no CD fall-back mode. I have also found many DVD As will not play without first selecting a setup mode, and that rigmarole requires a TV. Moreover, some DVD-A discs may have in-band perceptually coded watermarks for copy protection. The press has made much hay whether the watermarks are audible on CD material, let alone the high-resolution DVD-A.

With respect to SACD, there are more complex issues worth dwelling upon. SACD uses a one-bit stream, not PCM. I have chattered about the difference on prior occasions. Go to the Stereophile web site and access my article on the subject, http://www.stereophile.com/reference/374/index.html

The issues raised in this article were also independently presented in the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Journal by a group at the University of Waterloo. Using an artificially constructed test tone (such as a very low amplitude sine wave) and high-performance headphones, the sound quality of the DVD-A-reproduced tone is better than the CD-reproduced tone. SACD would be superior as well. Unlike DVD-A, however, it is also possible to artificially construct test tones that evoke changes in the noise floor of an SACD that are not present in a CD. Given the potential defects with SACD, a double-blind study is needed to determine whether an SACD sounds better than a CD, and I have yet to see those studies. So, unless SACD prices are harmonized with those of discounted CDs, I would rather have more music than unproven sonic improvement. Only when signal processing technology progresses to the point that the average home theater system can emulate the sound heard in the recording studio with a 5-channel mix, will the tradeoff tilt in favor of the SACD.