Sunday, April 05, 2009

Americans like TV better than stereo, why we have hi-def video, but not audio

Recently, I purchased an OPPO Digital universal disc player or DVD player, I wanted to upgrade my CD player, but that is a lot of bucks. This unit ,the 1080, geared towards sound is 169 dollars, makes your regular CDs sound alot better and if you have DVD audio product or SACD CD, they sound incredible. Yes, there is technology to make much better sounding music for not much more money, Company's are not making much in the way of SACD or DVD audio these days, because we did not want it, I remember Best Buys used to have a whole aisle of it. If you do want to listen to something awesome, check out Alison Krauss's "Live DVD" , It is quite remarkable sounding in dolby digital, which the OPPO does too. I guess most people are wired for visual rather than audio. Today's CDs for the most part , don't sound that great, there is not a standard sound. When we had vinyl, it seemed like all records had about the same sound quality, well, unfortunately, not true for CDs. Another enhancement, the OPPO picks up is the HDCD, which is done alot, but if your CD player can not read the HDCD, you can't hear what it does. Alot of true audiophiles have gone back to vinyl completely, a lot of today's CDs are available on vinyl. Rhino records and MusicDirect are two good websites to look for vinyl. A common myth about CDs is that mastering is some kind of digital magic that started with CDS, mastering has been around since vinyl records are mastered too, but in analog. In truth, you cannot hear a digital signal. It has to be converted to analog so you can hear it, so one of the most important things about a CD player is its Digital to Analog converter. My old CD player, which is only about 10 years old had a 1 bit DAC(converter), that is not alot, my OPPO has a 24 bit DAC, which is a big reason that it sounds so much better.
Finally, one last modern thing we have are mp3 players, mp3s are very compressed forms of music, so they do not take up much much space and the average mp3 player that people jog around with has a DAC that costs about 15 cents. Well, enough of that, I'm sure that lots of you knew at least some of this, but I sure wish that there were more SACDs around, in fact, they make a hybrid kind now, that you can play in any CD player, so maybe they will catch on.
Best now
Jim

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