Today, let's talk about music instead of computers.
The next hi-fi revolution begins a week from today, with a whimper. In the liner notes for each of the 22 compact discs to be released on Aug. 27, as part of Abkco Records' Rolling Stones Remastered series, you can read in fine print: "This disc actually has two layers. One is a normal CD. The other layer is a Super Audio CD (SACD) of the same repertoire."
The new discs -- which draw on the original master tapes of every album the Stones recorded in the glory years of 1964-71 -- sound fine on a plain old CD player. But in a machine designed to play SACDs (more on that later), there's a clarity that was missing on earlier CD reissues or on the original LPs. You catch every strum and nuance of the guitars; the bass line is tight and distinct; the drums pound; and the tambourines sizzle.
The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
Here are some technical -- may I see geeky or gory? -- details from the author, who describes himself as a "nutty audiophile."
Regular CDs are made with pulse code modulation (PCM) recorders, which take samples of music -- like a sonic snapshot -- 44,100 times per second. Each sample is translated into a 16-bit signal, which means the data stream consists of 705,600 bits per second. SACDs are recorded in a new process called direct stream digital (DSD), which samples the music as single-bit pulses 2,822,400 times per second -- four times faster than PCM, resulting in four times as much information. The faster the speed, the greater the clarity -- in the same way that increasing the number of frames per second boosts the quality of a film image, or multiplying the number of dots in a connect-the-dots puzzle improves the accuracy of the final picture.
Fred Kaplan keeps going on with more technical information. He also thinks that the SACD format can become a commercial success. Here is why.
Every now and then, when you’re on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve hit them where they live.
—Shelley Winters (b. 1922)
Sony, which holds the rights to the DSD process and (along with Philips) the SACD format, is pushing this new medium very aggressively. Sony lowered the price of its own SACD discs to just $1 above regular CDs, it slashed the prices of players (which play all CDs as well as SACDs), and it's luring customers to buy SACD players without their being aware of it. For instance, Sony's latest models of the highly popular "home-theater-in-a-box" systems -- which include a DVD player, a five-channel surround-sound receiver, five mini-speakers and a subwoofer, all for $500 -- also include an SACD chip. This fall, Sony is putting out a stand-alone progressive-scan DVD player that's also a multichannel SACD player for just $250. It's like getting an SACD player tossed in for free.
So, are you ready for these new 22 disks from the Rolling Stones?
Source: Fred Kaplan, Slate, Aug. 20, 2002.