I've finally come to the conclusion that, despite taking an early lead, SACD is INFERIOR to DVD-A, which I'm really enjoying a lot, and more consistently. Good thing about DVD-A, too, is that the tools for it are readily available at MUCH lower prices than SACD. I'm stilll using tape, but ... I'm interested in anyone else's thoughts on the subject -E

geiginni wrote:

Have you heard of DSD yet? Not to be tooo optomistic, but I am pretty sold on this as the next generation. You can now buy 24 tracks of DSD platform with A/Ds & D/As plus mastering capabilities for $57K. That's about the price of an A820-24, right?

If you haven't heard SACD yet, you're missing out. Yeah, there are still issues to be worked out in the way of standardized long term storage. In the meantime I think DVD-R/RW formats would suffice.

The future is looking a little brighter, but we'll have to give up some of our attachment to big metal pieces of gear with knobs all over 'em.

I spoke to the local Hi Fi specialist a while ago about it.
He said that the average consumer sees no point in adopting either. No one other than Audophiles seem to see that anything could be better than cd.
Unfortunately DVD-A and SACD don't have any OUTSTANDING differences, not like the difference between cassette and CD. It's STILL a shiny silver disk, you can still just skip between tracks etc etc. Nothing that they average person would actually be able to hear/see to sell the product.
DVD-A has a massive advantage as there are millions of DVD players capable of playing DVD-A out there already. But I do believe that the whole idea of SACD and DSD recording/playback holds big advantages. Mainly due to the 1bit by 3mhz idea versus 24Bit by 96/192Khz. It just seems nicer??!?!

To be fair barely anyone who would buy either one of these playback systems has an equivilently "Hi-Fidelity" system or well calibrated room to be able to hear the difference between them and CD. I mean on a little mini Hi-Fi that you would find in the average teenages bedroom (not that I've been looking) you just can't tell the difference between mp3/aac and a cd.

At the end of the day if someone can have their whole CD collection in their pocket on an iPod, then why would they bother going through another complete upgrade of stereo system, and not be able to take their music anywhere with them.
I think something that would really help sell these systems is for the disks to always contain a version of the music in mp3/aac, protected/unprotected so that people can still use it on their iPods or whatever.

It's sad because we as professionals always look down on the quality of consumer playback systems be it mp3/cd/dvd-a/sacd, but the people who buy them have no idea of how good something like tape can sound. And at the same time a lot of people don't actually give a shit either.

If I had my way EVERYONE would have a 1/4" machine in their living room. And when you bought an album it would come in a beautiful box with lots of lovely artwork, and would contain 1/4", 180gm Vinyl, CD, SACD, DVD-A, mp3, aac the lot even fucking laser disk! So people could have a choice.

Sorry that's a little off topic I just got inspired by the post before.

Hey there,
I feel the need to bring this up again because I'm out of tape for weeks now. What's the word about Quantegy? Any reliable news?
I spoke to my usual tape supplier today and the guy told me that the distributor for Quantegy here in Germany says that the company will never produce tape again because the factory would have been dismantled already and machines would have been sold.
There's something that tells me the guy can't be right.
If yes, who bought those machines and what are they going to do with them?
I just bought another tape machine last week because it was so cheap that I couldn't resist but now I'm beginning to feel nervous about it.
Max

max wrote:Hey there,
I feel the need to bring this up again because I'm out of tape for weeks now. What's the word about Quantegy? Any reliable news?
I spoke to my usual tape supplier today and the guy told me that the distributor for Quantegy here in Germany says that the company will never produce tape again because the factory would have been dismantled already and machines would have been sold.
There's something that tells me the guy can't be right.
If yes, who bought those machines and what are they going to do with them?
I just bought another tape machine last week because it was so cheap that I couldn't resist but now I'm beginning to feel nervous about it.
Max

well....
http://www.wtvm.com/global/story.asp?s= ... =Printable

thanks goldsounds... that's good news... i had heard from a couple of the EA folks that tape was indeed shipping again... this is good news for everyone... does anyone know if the price has gone up?

the analog tape lives again!!

Remember everybody: back when cassettes were the most popular consumer playback format, our profession still did it's best to make the highest quality recordings possible using the fanciest gear we could afford.

We didn't let the dominant consumer format change the way we did our job. We continued to strive for the highest quality and fidelity. Let's continue with that goal. MP3's be damned.

bob

MP3----------> Guilty


condemned by hanging

Have y'all been buying tape lately? Is the shortage over? How are the prices? Just curious, I've only been working on my project which is on 2 reels of one inch, but I'm going to need more tape sometime.

from what i understand, quantegy is up again running mostly filling in back orders for distributors.

the ATR stuff is not ready yet..

We got a back order of 10-14 reels 2" a month ago. I forgot to mention.
They were date coded 2005