Yestoday I visited the NY show and I did something that did not do for 3 years: I bought a few CDs at thier audiophile’s fleamarket. I did not really need them but lately I heard a lot of positive comments about the superior quality of new SACD-released of Mercury. Moreover, whenever I go all audio-freaks keep spinning those CDs, admiring sound and the “transfer quality”. So I bought 5 CDs to be a “conventional a’phile” and to share the happiness with my audio-brothers. Well…

In my way driving from NY to Boston I opened them up and decided to listen them. I lease Acuras CL for years and in my current Acura there is one of those "default Bose stereo", incredibly horrible … but it never bothered me. (I actually had 2 cars back a very nice system bult in my car, but this is another story). Anyhow, I opened up the Rachmaninoff’s 2 and 3 Concertos playing by Byron Janis and stick it to my CD player in the position of Disk#6. Interesting that the Acura-Bose CD players have 6-disk storage and the disk#2 I'm having for a last 3 cars exactly the same performance of Janis, pre-SACD (probably 16Bit) manufactured by Philips-Mercury-PolyGram in 1991.

When the first accords of the Their Concerto sounded I said: “What the hell?” The CD layer of that super-duper SACD release sounded hugely compressed, with strong coloration of “plastic sound”, with severe deficiency in bass, with cruel shortage of harmonics making sound too sharp and overly hygienic. It was unstintingly amusical even in context of my crappy car audio. I skipped two tracks and went to the opening of the Their movement. The Janis piano instead of a concert Sternway sounded like a Wal-Mart Casio. Even the tape hiss did not sound like the tape hiss but rather wile a white noise! I skipped one more track and let the Minneapolis Orchestra to enter the celebrated opening of the Second Concerto. It has to be said that among perhaps 25 versions of this concerto that I might recall I feel that there is no other performance where the Orchestra enter the scene with such a beautiful effect. Dorati and Minneapolis did that first introductions like no on else and this moment of orchestral beginning is probably the most beautiful moment compose by Russian composer on 20 century. So, what do you think? I MISSED THIS MOMENT OF INTRODUCTION TWICE when I listened this new disc. I mean on this disc the orchestral opening of the First Movement of the Seconds Concerto was NO EVENT! I said to myself: ‘You, Moron went to by music from the audiophiles… here you got it”.

When I got home, I listened those CDs on my home playback and the result was also very unfortunate. I am not saying on LP records of those recordings sound better. I AM saying that they sounded better, WAY better on the previous not-SACD releases of Mercury!!!

I do not know if I play the SACD layer of those CDs then perhaps I would get different result. However, two arguments make me very doubtful that it would be the case:

1) No one would do explicit mastering for CD and SACD layer and put on CD the intentionally worth result.  I’m quite convinced that THE SAME amount of sound-engendering idiocy that those guys put in the CD layer would manifest itself on SACD layer.
2) Up to now I never heard any SACD installation that sounds satisfactory. All of the SACD players, transports, converters, disks that I have heard so far were juts a bunch of audio junk primary supported by the musically or audio incompetent people who have as much idea about what audio as the hoodlum W Bush has idea about english language, atomic mass chemical elements or a multiplication table.

So, I lost $100 to feed the audiophile’s hype. It was not the first time. You, be smarter. Do not buy that new digital foolishness and let those Morons with PhD in electricity to choke with their “idea-loaded technology” and leave them along playing thier music for thier damn oscilloscopes….

Actually I was wrong calling SACD as music for oscilloscopes, as any person with real comprehension about oscilloscopes, even without hearing, clearly understand the fundamental inferiority of SACD as concept. However it is not something that made me to posting this post. The real motivation is that I am upset that we are loosing a lot of good music and interesting performances to SACD format.

Teresa Goodwin from positive-feedback gave a birth to a drooling article about her admiration of SACD

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue42/sacd.htm

I read it as a chronicle of a person who was catapulted from other planet as I feel that SACD is a huge destruction of music. Ms. Goodwin feels opposite and it looks that she is one of those “buy only SACD” type of person. Well, how different the world is. Each time I accidently touch the SACD I them wash my hard with concentrated Clorox…

Anyhow, some of Teresa’s comments are truly spectacular that makes very emblematic of most SACD-only Morons:

“A real high resolution SACD will be from …, PCM at 96kHz or higher….”

“… we as consumers need to warned of low resolution prior to purchase.”

“ I never liked the sound of CDs but these MP3s were warmer and more ambient with less strident highs.”

“I find 24 Bit 96kHz lossless uncompressed music files have much greater resolution than any type of 44.1kHz music files. They have even more warmth and ambiance than MP3…”

“Microphones with the smoothest and widest frequency response should be used, at least to 40kHz or if on hand some of the newer microphones that extend to 100kHz.”

“Buy only SACDs”

“Tell them that SACD/CD hybrids make everyone happy…”

“Record Companies your choice: SACD or die?”

scooter wrote:

"They have even more warmth and ambiance than MP3" Even more!?!?!? On related note, I saw the BSO tonight (Sibelius, Rachmaninoff and Ives); the evening had its ups and downs although I enjoyed Steven Hough. While at the Symphony Hall I picked up the BSO's recent release Daphnis et Chole.

There is quite a lot of absurdish in her writing and thinking, this stressing of “resolution” is so funny. Ask her what resolution is and she will not be able to say. When you when to BSO last night did you see a lot of “resolution”? Anyhow, the problem with CASD is much deeper then those smile “people” are able to understand, I juts brought her up as she is a “typical”.

Anyhow, I thought to go on Saturday but decided to skip, - I will record it today and tomorrow primary because the Steven Hough. He is very interesting guy; did you get his Hummel concerts yet? – even though I cough a few of his performances where he was not in a shape.

On related note. Last night he WHRB broadcasted SF under James Gaffigan . The Liszt’ Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat was wonderful, the young Yundi Li played piano. In the end they played the second Suite from Ravel’ Daphnis and Chloe. It was kind of “modern” reading but the SF was juts brilliant.  Well, not too much for then brilliance of the event. The Morons David Elliott from WHRB marinades the CDs he got from SF in barbecue souse (or something of the same magnitude of complexity) and as the result the damn CD with the broadcasts is skipping, craps pops and all imaginable noises.  It is very-very simple to address it but that idiot does not care and consider it beyond him. How related is it?

 You see, the problem is that the very same attitude “I do not give a shit” that WHRB‘s David Elliott  has is very much dominating among the people who produces today SACDs (it is in addition to the fact that SACD is faulty and semi-criminal technology to begin with). If you take a CD layer of any SACD and carefully pay attention how it was “mastered” than you might see very clearly recognize what they had in mind what they produce those CDs. It is the same stupid WHRB Elliottism what a person just do not give shit about very rudimental problem with sound but fancy himself as “audio establishment”.

As I predicted, the fucking SACD keep vandalizing everything. The SF keep calming about the big efforts that took them cook their Mahler 8 but in the end the morons record everything in SACD. If would be the same if they records it in Mono!

http://www.youtube.com/user/sfsymphony

Now the same Morons convert their shit to PCM to edit it, then back to SACD to release the mater. If you want a normal PCM copy then the Morons cut for you another come from the SACD master. Amassing, they do all this shit to places a dozen retard-revisers who invented the stupid SACD noise 10 year back. Now, we harvest the results: the pros bough the expensive worthless SACD gear and they need to recover he investment.  Only God knows why those idiots do not record in PCM. One more recording was vandalized by idiotic “new” format.

Paul McGowan, the head of PS Audio send his newsletter with his comments about SACD. The comments are childish and in many way absolutely ignorant. I hate what the industry professionals twist the facts and go into pure falsification in order to boost status quo of their collages and associated partners. But the most I hate when the Morons present objectively wrong information and brash out the opponents with the comments like “they may be correct but they aren’t listening to the music”. What the fuck this hi-fi junky would teach others about listening music!!!? The music that Paul mentions with pride during the Colorado Audio Society gives a very clear indication where he stays.

Perhaps instead of expressing his “reference” but absolutely ignorant opinion about the subjects he is uninformed Mr. McGowan shell concentrate his time on making his own products better – namely to make the PS Audio Power Plant to sound acceptable? Then it might give to Paul some credibility to talk about the subjects where he is less competitive. Anyhow, here is a fragment from Paul McGowan newsletter:

"I happened to be invited to one of the Colorado Audio Society meetings at the facility a few weeks back.  Terri and I came over for the tour before going to dinner with some of our management team and I was so taken with what I saw that not only were we quite late for dinner but it wasn’t long before I was back to discover more.

SAC has been a part of the production of the vast majority of SA-CD’s on the market. The chief wizard behind SAC is a soft spoken, brilliant mastering engineer, Gus Skinas.  Their involvement spans various combinations of recording, editing, mixing, mastering and authoring.  In some cases, SA-CD projects are edited, mastered and authored in the Boulder facility by Gus Skinas. Other times, SAC will work with the great recording and mastering engineers like James Guthrie and Doug Sax by supplying equipment and support as well as editing and authoring services - as was the case with Pink Floyd “Dark Side Of The Moon”, Diana Krall “The Girl In The Other Room”, Aerosmith “Toys In The Attic”,  and Ray Charles “Genius Loves Company”.   Sometimes SAC even produces SA-CD projects from start to finish, for example Anthony Newman / Graham Ashton “Music for Organ, Brass and Timpani” and David Elias “The Window”, both released on SAC’s own Sonoma label.  Lately, Gus has been working together with Steve Hoffman for Acoustic Sounds to release several Nat “King” Cole albums on SA-CD. Some of these SA-CD’s include the original three-track recordings on the multichannel layer, with stereo and mono versions on the stereo layer.

Gus and I have become fast friends and I am now the newest convert to DSD recording.  Not necessarily SA-CD (more on that) but pure DSD done right.  So here’s a little history so we’re all on the same page.

DSD (Direct Stream Digital) is about the closest binary encoded medium to analog ever devised.  It is based on Pulse Density Modulation (PDM) rather than Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) which all CD’s and high-res WAV audio are based on. 

PCM takes snapshots of the analog audio stream and converts each singular snapshot into a number.  That number is a representation of the voltage in the analog signal at that exact moment in time.  When we want to playback the PCM stream we need a decoder (DAC) that can convert the number into a voltage and make playback snapshots appear in the same order we grabbed them during the recording.  This is a pure code/decode system that tries its best to duplicate analog.  It gets reasonably close if we use high sample and bit rates throughout the entire chain, as in 192kHz 24 bit high res audio files.  But, let’s face it, it isn’t analog.

PDM is more like a continual stream of bits that are moving at a rate 60 to 120 times faster than red book CD’s are sampled at and the density or grouping of these bits gets more or less depending on if the voltage in the analog signal is getting higher or lower.  It is really simple, there are no snapshots and coding taking place as we have in PCM.  PDM is so close to analog that you can actually take a PDM stream, run it through a simple low pass filter and listen to it through your preamp.  That isn’t possible with PCM.  PDM became DSD when Sony added some of its great engineering refinements to it.  Both PDM and PCM have been around for about the same amount of time.

SA-CD is basically PDM with a complicated encryption scheme to keep you from copying it.  There’s nothing other than the copy protection scheme that makes SA-CD different than DSD; they are the same thing.

What’s so great about DSD?  It’s analog without even a hint of digital.  The closest thing I can relate it to was in my days in the recording studio where the feed right out of the microphones was just so real it was startling.  DSD captures this analog perfectly.  There’s not even a hint of digital in the stream - it’s truly amazing.

A few of the people I have mentioned this to are a bit skeptical.  They’ve heard SA-CD and know it can vary from good, to great, to bad and everywhere else - just like every other recording.  What I have discovered is that many SA-CD’s suffer from a number of common malady’s including: converted to PCM first, recorded in PCM in the first place (then transferred to SA-CD), poor mastering off the analog tapes, etc.  Even pure DSD masters, done improperly can sound harsh and digital.  Gus told me many times he had to bite his lip as others used the incredible Sonoma DSD recording system to master off an analog tape and played around with EQ, loudness, etc. only to basically destroy what was on the tape in the first place.  Many engineers and mastering people fail to see the world as you and I do: in terms of purity and high-end.

To further confuse the issue, many people hook up an SA-CD player using the digital outputs of the player into their DAC and hear no difference.  OK, that makes perfect sense because there’s no such thing as digital outputs on an SACD player (not legally anyway).  What you get is the PCM layer at 44.1kHz because many SA-CD’s have a dual layer with a standard Red Book version on them.  Lastly, most SA-CD players have Ho Hum non-high-end audio outputs.  You have no choice but to rely on whatever Sony or Philips decides is “high-end”.  Even the impressive Oppo player with its HDMI SA-CD output needs a receiver with the decryption chips and output stages to listen.  How many receivers do you have in your high end system?  Ed Meitner’s beautifully built SACD/DSD products are state of the art but most of us can’t afford them.

When we came out with the PWT/PWD combo we decided against SA-CD because of the digital rights management issues and the restrictive nature of doing things the way Sony demands.  I still stand by that decision, but now understand that the real heart and soul of SA-CD is DSD and DSD is an open format just like WAV.  I am writing this piece to inform the world about DSD and how analog it is.  Compared to high resolution WAV, DSD is clearly better.  Not light years, not thousand shades, but better.  More analog.  The “experts” will wail and gnash their teeth telling you that DSD has higher distortion and more noise than PCM and is a technically inferior format.  They may be correct but they aren’t listening to the music.  I can tell you categorically: DSD needs to stay alive just as high resolution WAV has a permanent place in our lives. 

I know a few of our fellow high-end manufacturers get it: like Ray Kimber who went out and purchased an entire Sonoma recording kit and Meitner DAC setups.  Many of you visiting the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest might have heard some of Ray’s fine recordings.

Among many idiotic audio publications the Positive-Feedback strikes me as less idiotic – once in 2-3 issues they do have a good article. I still find it idiotic, as any product -centric audio publication might be but the people who run the game in audio are limited to understand that it might be different.

Anyhow, Teresa Goodwin, the Positive-Feedback staff writer who wrote many articles about her admiration of SACD published another peace: “High Resolution Audio, What is Next?”

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue56/sacd.htm

In there she is trying to pretend that she is thinking about new development of audio formats but in fact she just keeps selling to reader her beloved SACD.

What I found interesting is that in her article she kind of dive into a virtual debate with me referring to the “Audiophiles boycotting SACD and high resolution in general”. Since I never seen anywhere or heard of anyone who in fact actively boycott SACD beside of me and since I was the person who have very strong anti-SACD position and did proposed to boycott SACD I feel that the comment was targeted as a response to my criticism of SACD:

Teresa Goodwin wrote:

Many audiophiles have either convinced themselves that 16/44.1kHz PCM is good enough, believed studies showing 16/44.1kHz PCM and high resolution sound the same or are afraid of supporting a format that may not be here in the future. The SACD/DVD-Audio war was also a hindrance in the acceptance of physical high resolution formats.

This is pure Teresa’s hallucinations. No one denies SACD because “16/44.1kHz PCM is good enough”. Also there was no SACD/DVD-Audio war. The DVD-Audio never was acceptable format. If Mr. Goodwin writes then she need to have at least basic familiarity with the subject, does she?

Teresa Goodwin wrote:

In many forums posters claim SACD is worthless and was only introduced because the patent for CD was expiring and Sony/Philips needed to replace the stream of income that would be lost. It is hard to argue with this as licensing fees can be a large part of corporate income, however in Sony's defense they did introduce DSD in-house for re-mastering the old Columbia analog recordings before SACD was invented. Some posters also claim CD replay has improved so much that they prefer the best CD players to SACD.

Again, it is pure BS. Sony could not make such foolish claims. DSD was not invented “in-house for re-mastering” as DSD never able to do any re-mastering and editing. Even now the DSD re-mastering and editing is done by converting DSD to PCM, editing and then conversion it back to DSD. So, what the purpose was for Sony to invent DSD if high resolution PCM existed 20 years before DSD show up. The history how DSD was invented is too fresh in memory to override it with a comfortable BS fabrication.

Looking further into the Teresa Goodwin writing I do not see that she is taking about next step in High Resolution Audio but rather describe her feeling and her practice of hating 16/44, adoring SACD, admiring the new re-mastered and oil-lubricated LPs, The fact that most likely all of those new LP and SACDs come from 16/44 master dubs Teresa Goodwin prefer do not mention. 40 years ago as impressible fool as Teresa is was writing in audio publication if his time that the new Sony developed format called CD is as “perfect” as Teresa feels the SACD is today. As the result 40-30 year back the whole industry converted zillion tones of master tapes to 16/44 and destroyed the masters. The recording industry people of the 70s do report that humongous amount of master tapes (some people claim 90%) were disposed after coping them to 16/44 formats. Today, most of the SACD (with a rare exception) are made from those first 16/44 dubs.

No one deny that 16/44 is bad but the format limitation is now near as destructive as industry horrible culture to deal with digital file distribution. Teresa is bitching about 16/44 but I would insist that never none-edited 16/44 is heads and solders more interesting then the crap that download at 908963257023 GHz sampiling rate and 128 bit resolution… that was incidentally produce by pimplely tanager in the back room of the HDTracks store converting MP3 files into the  admired by Teresa SACD.