September 2000 • Rockbites Alternative Daily
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September 2000 • Rockbites Alternative Daily
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Super Audio CD player announced 11 September 2000 As the legal and entertainment worlds reel and buckle trying to figure out how to deal with low quality audio in the form of MP3 (MPEG I layer 3) files, last week at the CEDIA (Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association) expo in Indianapolis, Netherlands based Philips Electronics announced their first Super Audio Compact Disc (aka SACD) player for the US. The unit conforms to a new higher quality audio standard co-developed with Sony. SACD uses so-called Sigma-Delta modulation—dubbed Direct Stream Digital by the Philips-Sony coalition—rather than the pulse-code modulation (PCM) encoding of traditional CDs. The SACD format boasts a 2.8 MHz sampling rate, 64 times that of CDs, and provides a dynamic range of more than 120 dB compared to a raw dynamic range of 96 dB for CDs. The new Philips SACD unit also plays DVDs, regular CDs, CD-Rs, and CD-RWs, and is compatible with MPEG2, AC3, and DTS. It will cost about US$2,000. Sony recently announced similar products for Europe, in a similar price range. A competing group called the DVD Forum, with members including Intel, IBM, Panasonic, and Toshiba, boasts endorsements for their DVD-Audio standard from major music labels. Consumer level DVD-A players will be cheaper than SACD players to start. But Sony believes that the DVD-A format is already obsolete and will find future use only for DVD film soundtracks. Members on both sides of the divide remain confident that their standard will prevail. | SACD info | | SACD vs. DVD-A article | | top of page | |
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