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High Resolution Audio - is anyone using it ?


davd_indigo

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I recently purchased a Sony PCM-D100. It has a variety of resolutions including DSD - which seems to be a Sony thing. I'm not a technology wonk by any means. But I started doing a little googling and reading. There are a bunch of Hi-Res players out there. Most seem to be really pricey. Of course, prices drop over time. At least when a technology becomes adopted by the masses.

 

Is anyone using any of the current high resolution components or gadgets ? Is it anywhere near as nice as the hype ? Is it gaining traction in the marketplace ?

 

I noticed the Sony turntable (linked below) rips to high resolution formats, including DSD. It seems to me that if I were going to fool around with ripping them (my old vinly albums) to a file format, a higher resolution format would be a better return on my time/hassle investment (rather than ripping to mp3's) . We all know that Sony has a history of technology that ends up disappearing - I'm thinking of Betamax and Minidiscs.

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Sony-PSHX500-.../dp/B01D8RWMGQ

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DSD technology came out in 1999. Super Audio CDs or "SACDs" were the format that used DSD. For a time back in the early to mid 2000s they sold SACDs at record stores. I remember seeing them at Barnes and Noble and Borders Books and other places that sold CDs. Many of them had a 16bit/ 44.1khz pcm layer on them so they could be played on CD players as well. I think Bob Dylan's entire catalog at one time was only available on SACD. The plan for Sony Music was to eventually move away from CDs and release everything on backward compatible SACDs.

 

Not sure why that never worked out. The first SACD player cost five thousand dollars. They eventually fell to about fifteen hundred dollars so most people couldn't afford the players. Also there was a format war with DVD-Audio at the time but I think those pretty much disappeared as well.

 

I got a cheap DVD player a couple of years ago and I noticed that it plays SACDs. I don't have any SACDs and I'm not sure they are even sold anymore.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD

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DVD-A seemed like the format that had the best chance at success to me due to the huge number of DVD drives in computers, but the public seemed to be much more interested in the convenience of being able to take a large number of songs with them in the form of compressed MP3 files than they were in better fidelity, and of course now we're moving away from optical drives too, and everything is moving towards streaming. Maybe someday we'll have the bandwidth to support truly high fidelity streaming. I look forward to the day when uncompressed 24 bit files being streamed are the norm.

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