Battlefield Audio - The CD Format War
Twenty years ago (its hard to believe its been that long!) the CD came to the market as the "ultimate" means of music reproduction. In a few short years, the CD displaced the Vinyl record (as well as the pre-recorded Audio Cassette) as the dominant form of listening to recorded music. In recent years, however, the audio battleground has become more crowded as the CD is being hit from all sides by several emerging formats such as MiniDisc and MP3.
Sony (in conjunction with Philips) and Panasonic are about to raise the stakes in the audio format war even higher with the introduction of DVD-Audio and SACD. The question is: Will the outcome of this war truly raise the sonic bar in audio reproduction, or is it just another way to get us to buy more "stuff"?
Why replace the CD? Hasn't it served us well over the past 20 years? Well, yes and no. Ever since the inception of the CD, many in the audiophile community have complained about its harshness and lack of warmth, especially compared to the sound of a Vinyl Record. Although the dynamic range of the CD is much wider than that of the vinyl record, that is only part of the picture.
The very nature of CD mastering entails the conversion of the actual music into bits (ones and zeros), which in essence means that when you listen to a CD, you are not listening to the actual music that was imprinted, but a mathematical representation of the music that has been restored through a decoding process. During the recording process, sounds below a certain threshold, which could be something as uneeded as background noise to important acoustical information, can be discarded as non-essential data. Mixing needs for a digital recording are different than that of an analog recording.
One improvement, however, HDCD by Pacific Microsonics has quietly entered the market place in recent years, with both extensive hardware and software support. The benefit of HDCD is that, not only is it completely compatible with current CD technology and players, but it also offers sonic enhancements when HDCDs are played on specially-equipped CD and DVD players.
By extending the information stored in the CD signal by a meager 4-bits (CDs are based on 16bit audio technology) to 20bits, HDCD has extended the sonic capacity of current CD technology to new standards, all the while, enabling HDCD encoded CDs to be played on non-HDCD CD players (non-HDCD players just ignore the extra "bits") without any increase in the price of CD software. Also, as a by-product of more precise filtering circuitry in HDCD chips, even "regular" CDs will sound fuller and more natural on an HDCD-equipped CD player.
So, with such a relatively practical and inexpensive solution in place, is there even a need for either DVD-Audio or SACD? An overview of these two formats should shed some light on the subject.
Next Page Overview Of DVD-Audio and SACD Page 1, 2
