Mahavishnu Orchestra’s ‘Birds Of Fire’ is coming out on something called a hybrid multichannel SACD, boasting original quadrophonic mix, surround sound blah blah blah.
I don’t have an SACD player, I don’t know how much of the audio stuff is on layers that a normal CD player can’t access…
My question is this: if I spend the£25 required to purchase a copy, to be played (whatever part of its content can be…) on a normal CD player, am I likely to experience an appreciable enhancement/difference in sound quality?
Has anyone here purchased any other SACD Hybrid versions of favourite albums?
I’ve got a SACD player and an AV amp with five speakers, send it to me and I’ll tell you.
Depends largely on your lugs. In your 40s, as one of the more youthful members of the cabal, you probably only have moderate hearing loss in the higher registers (probably depending on your Quintessence vs uillean pipes balance, let alone to Bohovision Orchidectomy)
Most of our ears will be SAD so SACD will be a luxury we won’t see.
I’ve recently bought a new Arcam CD player which plays stereo SACD, so I bought myself Jeff Buckley’s Grace on hybrid SACD to try it out. It sounds very nice, though I haven’t compared the sound of the CD layer yet. Or compared it to the original CD issue, or the Legacy Edition CD, or the Music On Vinyl LP pressing.
If you ask me, the mastering is more important then the carrier format.
Previous experience would suggest that hi-res material sounds better because they’ve gone to the bother of digging out the proper first-generation tapes and mastered them properly, so even down-converted to CD, it still sounds better.
I think the industry is missing a trick by pitching these at around the £30 mark. I’ve never seen anyone even look at one!
The bottom has fallen out of the CD market so there are fantastic bargains to be had every day out there, much more so than vinyl.
Who’s going to pay £30 when Fopp are selling the perfectly serviceable ones for £3 each or you can get them for £1 in an Oxy?
I guess you’re all convincing me not to bother. I’m usually a sucker for these things (when it’s the MO), but still.. maybe I’ll wait to read some reviews.
Actually, I must say the mastering on a relatively recent 180gm vinyl reissue of Birds Of Fire on a third party label (ie not Sony) is fabulous. I’d say it was better than any CD version I have, or the original LP mastering. So I should be happy enough with that!
I’ve just ordered a vinyl copy of this:
I have it on CDR, from a wolfgangs vault download a couple of years ago. A great performance, originally an FM broadcast. But like I say, it’s the MO so… I had to have the vinyl.
Curious, isn’t it, how there seems to be some kind of legal loophole these days for vintage US radio broadcasts appearing commercially without artist consent. Go on to SpinCDs’ site and find loads of these sort of things from Bruce Springsteen downwards.
If there’s a hybrid CD/SACD for quid 30, there’s probably a basic CD with the same mastering for under a tenner. Remember you can’t play the SACD layer on a standard CD player. There aren’t that many SACD players around these days, either, although Oppo Blu-Ray players will play anything silver and disk-shaped.
I’m a Talking Heads fan and those semi-legal bootlegs can be a mixed bunch. The Saratoga Psycho one is awful, recorded off-air on an out-of-tune radio. There are two different versions of a Chicago show with very different masterings. Some of the Blondie ones sound atrocious. Buyer beware and all that.
Yes, Fenton – what I was trying to get at was whether someone could say, ‘Yes, I’m a fan of Artist X and I have their Album Y in 24 blahblah AND the Hybrid SACD thing and the SACD – played even on a normal CD player – is EVEN BETTER because blahblah…’
But if no one can really say than then it’s a waste of my time buying this.
Just to be clear, if there’s any confusion, the Mahavishnu SACD is of their best-known studio album. The quasi legal radio show on CD/LP is something else that I just mentioned in passing.
No.
However, if the CD layer has been remastered in conjunction with the SACD upgrade then it may sound better.
SACD uses Direct Stream Digital (DSD) to encode the audio, as opposed to Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) as found on CDs. The technical aspects of DSD are difficult to explain, but the net result is a far better resolution than PCM. DSD can be down-sampled to PCM, albeit with a significant loss of resolution.
Hybrid SACDs contain two layers, a standard stereo CD one, and the second DSD encoded layer – the latter often containing both stereo and 5.1 versions of the album.
If the Birds of Fire has been mastered with both stereo and 5.1 versions of the album, the CD layer will most likely have been down-sampled from the SACD stereo layer, and will hence have a different mastering to previous editions.
JQW said it, check out if there is a new CD issue with the same mastering.
I don`t know why SACDs are so expensive, they were about the same price as normal CDs when I got the Bob Dylan SACDs a while back. Now £30 each! BUT the sound on the SACD of my favourite album is the best I have heard including the original vinyl.
I bought a SACD once (A Love Supreme as you are asking) and it won’t play on any CD player I’ve got. Hey-ho.
Whilst I’m here, Bowie releases a box set of his early albums in September. It’s called Five Years and the discs are gold rather than silver. Does that make any difference?
In short: No it doesn’t. See also the recent Modern Magic Beans thread.
Didn’t think so. However, Five Years won’t be available in silver. At least, not at first.
I bought quite a number of SACDs a few years ago when stuff was coming out quite regularly – Dylan, The Stones, Moody Blues, Early Elton, Tommy, etc, mainly for the 5:1 mixes. I also have some DVD-As as there was a bit of a format war. I do think they sound great, and I recently bought a Denon Blu-Ray player that plays all of these formats and sounds bloody brilliant – better than my old Oppo that blew up..!
Must say I’m surprised to hear of new release as I thought the fomat had died – blu-ray audio seems to be the new thing…?. £30 sounds mighty expensive though – pretty sure the hybrid discs I bought were CD price.
I purchased Let it Bleed on SACD.
In error.
I don’t think it cost 25 notes though.
Sounded great the one time I played it through the SACD surround sound system I irresponsibly ‘invested’ in.
That was a good row
I don’t think I’d even have the money to instigate a consumer electronics situation from which a row could happen. As you can imagine when I’m going to this much effort to get advice on spending £25.
The most confused I’ve ever been in my life was in 2002 when all the Stones’ 60s LPs were reissued on CD.
Did I dream it but, aside from U.S. and U.K. versions coming out on the same day, weren’t some of them on SACD, some of them on DSD, and some of them on normal CD?
It was, and still is, complete chaos.
I think those Stones remasters were an early example of hybrid CD/SACD discs.
DSD is just the data format on the SACD layer (whereas it is PCM on the CD layer).
DSD is a Sony format also known as BitStream, which has been used in DACs since the early-90’s.
So although the data on your CD is encoded as 16-bit 44.1kHz PCM, it actually gets converted to BitStream format before conversion to analogue audio.
Confused? I could go on. And on…
I have a number of SACD’s, both hybrid and some of the Japanese SHM-SACD which are a pure SACD layer. As stated in some the posts above, I would say that the main improvement in the is due to the remastering (especially the Japanese SHM-SACD’s which tend to be “flat transfers” of the original analogue masters.
That said, comparing the CD layer and the SACD layer of the same disc, I would say that to my ears the SACDs do sound better – better overall soundstage and definition of the instruments (I’m probably opening that old can of worms here on MP3s are good enough for anyone etc etc).
Throw in the multi channel aspect of SACDs which for some albums works fantastically – Roxy’s Avalon (which has not surround ‘effects’, just a fantastic all enveloping atmosphere), Peter Gabriel’s Up (which I believe was recorded as a multi channel and then mixed down for the CD), the Genesis remasters (which sound compressed on CD but great in multi and on SACD).
The biggest problem withe SACDs is that being proprietary Sony format, it is a bugger to rip for a computer audio based system (which I tend towards these days). It can be done, but requires a first generation Sony Playstation which original firmware and a box of software tricks – not something that I really want to do. Fortunately, there are others that have done this work (search for AVX plus Home with a .se on the end and look for HR & Vinyl – apparently, so someone told me) and there are SACD disc images available which can be either played direct using software such as Audivarna or converted to PCM for iTunes etc (on a Mac you can use XLD).
Many modern Blu-Ray players carry SACD over HDMI. It’s then possible to buy a legit HDMI to S/PDIF box for about 25 quid which gives you 24/88.2 PCM. It’s not quite as easy as ripping an ISO, but it gets you the SACD layer data in hi-res format.
AVX is blocked in the UK following a court ruling by e-book publishers.
I think Sony are shooting themselves in the foot with all this proprietary gubbins. I don’t think people want to buy an advanced music format if they cannot transfer it to their computer, phone, ipod etc. These days I buy DVDs over Blu-ray because I want to be able to watch the film or tv show on a tablet, phone or stream to my TV as well as the DVD player.
I never even consider Sony for that reason. Great professional products though.
Sony have previous in this regard. I once designed an adaptor to make Sony Broadcast cameras work with standard vision mixers.
Sony take the spec (usually written by JVC or Panasonic) then if they find something they think they can do better, do it their own way.
So SACD came as no suprise.
@colin-h I’ve looked for the Birds of Fire hybrid disc. It’s by specialist US Audiophile label Audio Fidelity and won’t be available as a vanilla CD. The CD layer will have great mastering, though, even if you can’t play the SACD layer.
Yes, it all depends whether the mastering is SO fantastic that I need to add to my existing collection of FireBirds in various forms!
The mastering will be ace and taken from 1st gen master tapes. I have a number of other Audio Fidelity releases and they’re all great. Whether you think it’s worth £25 is subjective.
I agree about Audio Fidelity mastering, it is very good.
Was thinking of buying the reissue of Roger Waters’ Amused to Death
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_4_9?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=amused+to+death+sacd&sprefix=amused+to%2Caps%2C1826
what is the likely difference between the first three formats listed – hybrid sacd, blue spec hybrid sacd, and blu ray?
SDE did a thing on this http://www.superdeluxeedition.com/feature/how-to-buy-roger-waters-amused-to-death-vinyl-and-hi-res-reissues/
The Blu Ray and SACD all carry the same content (CD + hi-res stereo + 5.1). If your player doesn’t play SACD, you will only be able to play the CD layer of the hybrid SACD. Unless you really want to pay three times the price for the SACD, I’d go for the CD + Blu Ray combo.
To answer the other question, SACD is mastered on DVD blanks. Blu spec SACD is the same DSD data mastered on Blu Ray blanks. Whilst there is a small difference, it’s 1% science and 99% marketing – similar idea to gold-plated CDs. You can even buy Blu-spec CDs in Japan, but why is anyone’s guess.