delacura

I can get any number of SACD disks at a good price. Do these have the same quality sound as a DVD Audio when played on the RL surround system?

DCD

The oversampleing on the DVD-A is of better quality. But the sound difference is negiligble for all those but audiophiles.
I didn't know the RL could play SACD.
DVD-A's in stores are very hard to come by.

petemc

SACD will not play in your RL, it supports DVD-Audio discs only...I have many SACDs for my home system and it bugs me that I cannot play them in my RL.

Regarding sounds quality, you will be hard pressed to tell any difference between the two. Serious audiophiles have much debated this over the last few years, with that general conclusion.

Pete

mg7726

how is the mp3 quality on the RL? does it have any problems when you rip the CDs using VBR?

eaRL

The RL system will play any SACD if the word Hybrid is anywhere on the packaging. That means there are two physical layers on the disc; a standard CD layer and an inner SACD layer. Usually there is a sticker on the front of the case that says 'this disc will play in a regular CD player or an SACD player' or something like that.

If an SACD is a Hybrid, it will play standard CD quality (16bits wide @ 44.1KHz sampling frequency) when placed in a CD player. But there are a few discs, mostly classical titles, that use Sony's Direct Stream Digital (DSD) process, the same process that's used for 6 channel SACDs, to create standard 2 channel stereo CDs at a higher quality than a standard CD. Well, according to Sony they are higher quality.

When placed in an SACD player, the inner layer of the disc will be played. The SACD layer of the disc contains 6 channels of audio, like a DVD-A or some DTS-CD. But SACD's sampling frequency is 1bit wide @ 2.82MHZ sampling frequency with 120dB of dynamic range. The SACD layer can store a maximum of 109 minutes of 6 channel audio, because of the the 1bit wide encoding used in the SACD creation process, versus the maximum 80 minutes a standard Redbook audio CD can hold with 2 channels of uncompressed PCM data.

DTS audio media is basically a standard CD but instead of encoding the audio as uncompressed PCM data (i.e. like a Windows "WAV" file) they are bitstream encoded using a lossless compression method somewhat like an SACD and most DVD-As. DTS audio is typically 5 channels. The DTS decoder system has its own crossover for the LFE (a.k.a. "sub-woofer") channel so "most" surround mixers will not place anything on the LFE during mixdown. DTS resolution is 24bits wide @ 44.1KHz for CD and 24bits @ 48KHz for DVD.

A DVD-Audio is typically 6 channels of lossless encoded bitstream audio on a single layer DVD. Discs that contain both DVD-Video and DVD-Audio features are either dual-layer or dual-sided and the audio for multi-channel DVD-Video features is typically encoded with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround. DVD-Audio content can be encoded with uncompressed PCM data but most are encoded using lossless compression such as MLP (Minnetonka Lossless Packet) which is to DVD-Audio what Dolby Digital is to DVD-Video.

"True" DVD-Audio is 24bits wide @ 192KHz a.k.a. Advanced Resolution Stereo which is, as you can probably guess by its name, only a stereo recording. Most multi-channel DVD-A are presented in Advanced Resolution Surround, 24bits wide @ 96KHz sampling frequency. But there are exceptions. The new Beck DVD-A, Guero, is 24bits wide @ 48KHz. They probably chose to do this because there is so much other content on the disc like videos, photo gallery, etc. They probably could not fit all of the content on the disc at the higher resolution.

All you ever wanted to know or did not want to know....