Does anyone out there own an SACD yet? Does anyone even know what they are? OK, I'll tell you what they are. (I got a sampler disc in my most recent issue of Rolling Stone.) The acronym SACD stands for "Super Audio Compact Disc". It's going to be the new form of audio playback for the next several years. Now don't worry, you don't need to trash your regular CD player to use them, most of them (the ones marked "Hybrid SACD") will still play just fine in any standard CD player. What's the difference you ask? Well physically, there is no difference. They are still the same size and shape as any regular CD or DVD. The big difference is in the resolution of the digital audio and the way the audio can be played back. Standard CD's, tapes, and vinyl have always reproduced music as a stereo image; two sides, a left and a right channel. This gave audio engineers a great advantage over the old "mono" recordings because it more accurately represented how humans hear sound. We have two ears, so why not have two separate sources of audio feeding those ears. For those of you who aren't familiar with what stereo recordings actually do, sit down in front of a decent stereo and plop in a Beatles album (or any good rock album for that matter). Now close your eyes and listen for the "location" of each instrument. Meaning is it coming from the left side or the right or does it seem to come right from the middle. Sometimes you may hear a guitar coming from way off to the right side, or you might hear the drummer play a drum roll that seems to "pan" or move from the left side to the right side. That's what stereo does. Add in some well calculated reverbs and delays and you have a rich sounding realistic recording. But I digress. The new SACD's will take all that a step further. True music surround sound. I know you can pop a regular CD in your stereo at home press the Dolby Prologic button and listen to music in a simulated surround sound environment, but the new SACD's are actually encoded in 5.1 surround sound. So you can listen to your favorite music in true surround sound! Imagine listening to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" swirling around your head! This gives pop/rock/rap music producers the ability to have instruments coming out of nowhere and surprising you in the rear channels or panning around your head. In classical music or jazz, it will enable the feeling of a more "live" performance because the reverb will be more accurately reproduced in the rear and center channels. The other big advantage of the SACD is its super high resolution. A standard CD is recorded at a sampling rate of 44.1khz at 16 bits, or 44,100 "samples" of music per second where each "sample" is represented by a combination of 16 ones and zeros (binary code) for the digital block of information. This allows only frequencies below 22.05 khz to be recorded (half the sampling rate frequency, see The Nyquist Theory) This is called PCM or Pulse Code Modulation. The SACS's are recorded in DSD or Direct Stream Digital. It's complicated as hell to try to explain, but basically it eliminates the low sampling rates that cause loss of high frequency audio and does so without quantization. The "sampling" rate (if you can call it that) for the SACD is 2.8224 Mhz or 2,822,400 samples of audio per second with individual bits representing the audio rather than in 16 bit blocks! That's amazing! There are currently over 500 titles already out on SACD format. Most of them are older albums that have been remastered into the new format from the original multitrack analog studio tapes. Unfortunately these albums will never get the full benefit of SACD because they were never recorded with any idea that this would even ever be possible. A lot of the newer music being recorded will now be recorded and mixed down into the 5.1 format giving producers and engineers a whole new bag of tricks to work with and a new philosophy on recording music. I can't wait!

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 11:00 AM