[FullRangeMan]

Bad News:
A member in SACD Reference Library site SA-CD.NET are informing his new 50dollars The Who Super Hi/Hard Material SACD split in two half in his hands after a cleaning.
Iam sure this is a bad glue problem the JVC factory could have planned in advance and resolved.
http://www.sa-cd.net/showthread/58963//y?page=first
Any one more have this bad experience too ??
Gustavo

>Never go to a psychiatrist, adopt a cat or dog from the street. On the streets they live only two years average.

[Ronm1]

Now I'm all for better sounding audio but I've never been much of a fan for these new media processes after some informal testing a colleague and I did. Remastering yes, these processes not so much.  Did a fair amount of comparisons awhile ago.  Conclusion we came too was that with a mediocre rig some improvement may at times be noticeable, but if you have a good source rig no difference was apparent.  Results seem reasonable to me as SHM and these processes abate errors and a good rig one would think would not get many errors anyways. IMHO of course, just glad I didn't send my $50 in. 

[bdiament]

Hi Ronm1,

Now I'm all for better sounding audio but I've never been much of a fan for these new media processes after some informal testing a colleague and I did. Remastering yes, these processes not so much.  Did a fair amount of comparisons awhile ago.  Conclusion we came too was that with a mediocre rig some improvement may at times be noticeable, but if you have a good source rig no difference was apparent.  Results seem reasonable to me as SHM and these processes abate errors and a good rig one would think would not get many errors anyways. IMHO of course, just glad I didn't send my $50 in.

My experience has been very different.  When comparing SHM discs with their plain CD counterparts known to be from the same mastering, the SHM was so much closer to the sound of the master I was quite shocked by the difference.  This with the Magnepan system and Metric Halo ULN-8 converter in my studio/listening room.

Ever since I created my first CD master at Atlantic back in 1983, I've been saying that CDs made at different plants (sometimes different lines at the same plant) all sound different from each other and none sounds indistinguishable from the master used to make it. 

Over the years, I've sent masters to dozens of plants all over the world.  And I spent a great deal of time researching which plant we'd use for Soundkeeper CDs.  The best CD pressings get very close, to the point where I sometimes need a direct A/B to hear the differences.  Typical pressings however, still lose a bit of focus and fine detail.

With those SHM discs I've compared, the difference (in those particular instances) from the plain CD made me at first think they could not possibly be from the same master.  But extracting both to hard disk and nulling them in soundBlade proved they in fact were both made from the same source.

It should be noted that extraction to hard disk eliminated the sonic differences.  This has been true with SHM/plain disc pairs as well as plain CDs pressed at different plants.  The audible differences are meaningful only when the discs are played and decoded in real-time using a CD player.

Just my perspective.

Best regards,
Barry
www.soundkeeperrecordings.com
www.barrydiamentaudio.com

[Ronm1]

Just my perspective.

Best regards,
Barry


I hear you, point taken.  When we did these comparisons we also did Blue-Spec and essentially felt the same way about that, the better the rig the less improvement that was noticeable. OtoH, results from K2HD were the opposite, the better the rig the better the improvement.

IMHO, up to now the best commercial source media I've heard is the 192/24 2ch dvd-a's mastered with JVC's mod'd K2 h/w for that spec.  Plus as you can tell I'm a fan of the K2HD process. FIM has put out some nice stuff with that.

[bdiament]

Hi Ronm1,

I agree on 24/192.  When properly done and played back through a DAC that can do it properly (some get into trouble with the increased demands on their clocking and analog stages), it has removed those reservations I've held for years, where I felt the best analog does some things better.

I find playback from hard disk (or SSD or memory) even better than playback from regular spinning disc (e.g. DVD-A).  Would that more labels got into releasing full 24/192 versions of their catalogs and new recordings.

Best regards,
Barry
www.soundkeeperrecordings.com
www.barrydiamentaudio.com