hdcd or sacd

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why did naim bother to incorporate hdcd compatability and overlook sacd when theres so little demand????

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Scotty

I guess there are a few reasons

Firstly HDCD has been around for quite a while. These discs play fine in an ordinary CDP it is only that to get the full "sound" you need a D/A convertor that is capable of converting a signal with more than 16 bits.
I have quite a few HDCD's, mainly US west coast style JAZZ and feel they have a bit more "clarity" than standard CD's. Other than that they are PCM encoded at 44.1KHz and are bandwidth limited at 20KHz just like ordinary CDá

SACD is much newer and is a totally different encoding technique which is referred to as DSD (for direct stream digital). The bandwith is much larger, though because it is necessary to filter very high frequency noise it is limited to about 40KHz. You could argue that only bats can hear it all but the harmonics of the extreme frequencies do add a sense of "airiness" to the sound of a stereo SACD which makes it very "vinyl" like.
To play the SACD stereo (and multichannel) discs you need an entirely different decoder from the ones used for CD replay.

Basically SACD has only gained minor acceptance and is considered a more contrived sound than pure stereo CD replay. Naim may be planning to offer it as an option for their new DVD player, but I would guess on purist grounds where there might be some degredation in CD replay due to intereference Naim will not add it to any of their CD players.

regards
GEOFF

thanks for clearing that up geoff,well put
regards, scotty

My CDX plays HDCD disc (seems like Japanese ones are that way).
I can't remember the name of the company who designed HDCD but they've been taken over by Microsoft.
My impression is that perhaps HDCDs are better than standard but it's all down to the particular disc.

Paul

HDCD was invented by a team of California engineers at Pacific Microsonics, including the brilliant Dr. Keith Johnson, of both Reference Recordings fame for his work as a purist recordist, and Keith is a designer at Spectral Audio, a small very high end American electronics maker.

Like many in the high end community, Keith and his peers at Spectral felt that CD, as it was implimented in the 80's left much to be desired sonically and musically. They also felt that it was highly unlikely that the needs of the very top of the market would ever convince the mass market firms to consider a new format, so HDCD was intended to offer better recording tools for the studio world, better discs for everyone, and potentially better playback for users willing to upgrade their CD players to a player equiped to fully decode a CD with the HDCD encoding.

At the time of their initial wave of publicity, they were very circumspect about the technologies involved. Now that the copywrites are in place, they have disclosed more information. Full HDCD recordings are mastered at 88.2, and use word lengths of 24 bits. When played back on a great CD equiped with the chip, these recordings are amoungt the most natural available. If you a fan of classical music, a good place to fully appreciate Keith's work is on any of the recent RR CD's, which are spectacular.

It is extremely rare that everyone in high end audio agrees on much of anything, but most serious high end firms that make world class CD players do offer HDCD filtering, which would seem to vindicate all of the work done at Pacific Microsonics. Their firm was bought by Microsoft, but they continue to work on various elegent compression schemes that won't destroy the subtle aspects of music or now video.

Good listening!

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Their firm was bought by Microsoft, but they continue to work on various elegent compression schemes that won't destroy the subtle aspects of music or now video.

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Couple of points on this:

a) I wouldn't have thought MS was interested in sound quality per se unless it allows them to "enhance" Windows Media Player and therefore surely they'll focus on stuff playing from a PC (e.g. compressed digital audio formats)

b) Surely : Compression is bad (tm)

-- woody

Having said that, the HDCD version of Joni Mitchell's "Blue" is absolutely superb in comparison to the normal CD version.

Andrew, where did you get this? Amazon either don't seem to stock or it's not indicated as such.

Thomas

I'm not absolutely certain, Thomas K, but I think the version you'll find on amazon will be the HDCD version. An awful lot of HDCD discs aren't actually marked as so, and I think the Joni Mitchell one is one of these.

Have a look at www.hdcd.com for a fairly large catalogue.

Not commenting on HDCD but I have three CDs in both regular CD and SACD (Sting's newest, Peter Gabriel's Up and Roger Waters' In The Flesh Live) and the difference in clarity, definition and soundstage is mindblowing. But I can only play them with the same Sony player, so maybe they detoriate CD replay on purpose to support SACD?
system is DVP-N900 + 72/140 driving Totem Arros. Saving for a hi-cap and then for a cd5, if it gets the regular cd archive competitive again... of course it will, you all say!

Starbuck, thanks. I know that it sometimes doesn't even say on the cover whether a CD is HDCD. If you follow the link from the HDCD site, it takes you to amazon, where the release date of the CD is listed as 1990 -- HDCD was introduced in 1995!

I'm not that interested in the HDCD bit, actually: If the current incarnation sounds that much better it's probably mostly down to other aspects of the remastering process.

Thomas

bdnyc: Does it mean that 88.2/24 recording is stored on a HDCD disk? How does this work?

mark knoflers sailing to philadelphia and peter wolfs sleepless sound superb on my cdx.highly recomended.

Is it too expensive for naim to produce some of their CDs as HDCD? In the same time the last Forcione is better than any HDCD.

Emil

The Joni Mitchell HDCD releases can be got at HMV and Virgin. Look for the silver remastered stickers (newly digitally remastered from the original master tapes). It will also say HDCD somewhere on the back. Blue seems to be quite common. I got Ladies of the Canyon on Saturday and it is quite simply superb. Beware however you must check the labelling is exactly as above. There are quite a few old German and French re-issues about.

Also some of the HDCD Roxy Music reissues are in the Virgin clearance at £4.99 each. Worth it if you want to try HDCD.

Sorry Thomas, just noticed you are in Germany.

HDCD part II-

1) Jun- My understanding is that the 88.2 Mastering is what Pacific Microsonics and Keith feel is the best available higher sampling rate, due to the ease in creating algorhythmns for the "reduction" of data to the 16 bit, 44.1 sampling rate that is mandated on CDs. This is technically called decimation if I am not mistaken. Although I may be wrong here, I do not believe that anyone has claimed that the full measure of resolution can be stored on a HDCD release, no matter how precise and complete the perfectionist approach. I think they use some novel approaches to squeezing more data on to "control tracks" that are buried in the 16th bit of a CD, and they clearly imply that their process allows for more musically relevent information to be retained, but it is not a new format, such as SACD and DVD A which offer huge storage gains relative to CD.

2- Andrew- I had a chance to ask Julian about their use of the Pacific Microsonics chip in the CDX and the CDSII, and he did say rather emphatically that they felt it was the best digital filter available at the time, and that they were not all that interested in the HDCD aspect as such. Now, this may have been a reflection of the fact that there were very few recordings out at the time that utilized the process, or maybe he and Roy and the Naim folks didn't really think the HDCD process was to their tastes. I don't know about that, but I did note that the CDSIII seems to use the chip more selectively, and Naim implies that they only engage the HDCD chip when an encoded disc is in use, and they use the dual 24 bit chips the rest of the time.

In any conversation with Julian about digital he always stressed that the overall implimentation was far more important than just a chip set, which has often been the way the marketing side of high end audio simplifies these issues into advertising campaigns.

Good listening