The Day the Music Died

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DSD then is a much more simple, and accurate method of capturing analogue waves in a digital form. According to the sa-cd.net FAQ, that "the DSD bit stream is so closely related - perhaps analogous would be a proper term here - to the analog signal that if you were to feed it to a speaker (as a series of +1 and -1 values) you'd get back audible music." Wow.

However, much like Blu-ray and HD DVD, it was locked in a format war with another rival high res audio format - DVD Audio. This is also far superior to CD, but was essentially just an up-rated version of CD - using the same PCM encoding methods but typically for a 5.1 surround disc at 24-bit, 96KHz levels. Note that the DVD-Audio standard was different to the audio that you'll find on regular DVDs - those being Dolby Digital or DTS, both of which are high quality, but still compressed audio format. Therefore to hear high-res DVD-Audio required a compatible DVD player and of those that were, some were only two channel. While DVD-Audio's surround mixes could be down-mixed to 2-channel's, this isn't part of the SA-CD spec - if there was both a 5.1 surround and a 2-channel mix, they would have been stored separately on the disc.

An advantage of SA-CD was that many discs were ‘hybrid' in that they contained a regular CD layer and an SA-CD layer enabling you to play the disc in any CD player, letting you built up a collection, even before you upgraded to a real SA-CD player.

Now you may have noticed that I've been using the past tense to describe both SA-CD and DVD Audio. That's because, as far as I'm aware, both these formats are effectively dead. Recently I was chatting to a PR representative for Denon, that produces some very fine dual DVD players that can play both formats, and he pretty much said the same thing. Significantly no stand alone player in either the HD DVD or Blu-ray formats had support for either format. Not exactly encouraging.

Yes you can buy discs - there are around 5,000 SA-CD actually available and many DVD-Audio discs too but the sad fact is that nothing has been released for a long time. Check out the Coming Soon section of both formats at play.com - both are forebodingly empty. Yes, DVD Audio gained some attention with the release of the Beatles ‘Love' album, but that was possibly the last hurrah for it. Yes, the back catalogue of Genesis is being released on SA-CD later this year, but I don't think that the 70's rock dinosaurs are going to get the kids looking up from their iPhones.

What a waste.

But PS3 could have saved it. Just as the PS3 was the Trojan horse for getting Blu-ray into the homes of millions, a move that looks as though it could have paid off, it could have done the same for SA-CD. Sony actually had a full time engineer whose job it was to turn PS3 into a leading edge audio machine that would up-sample standard CDs, as well as offering SACD. Pure audiophiles might have still turned their noses up, as while the 60GB PS3 played SA-CD, and was one of the only players to send it over HDMI, it still converted the DSD stream into PCM, which theoretically meant some fidelity loss.

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