PS3 SACD Playback

[Shifty Geezer]

It's not a matter of audiophiles. If jitter is that jarring, how jarring would it be to sit in a cinema with completely offset speakers? Much, much more lag between synchronised audio than than any technical faults, because you're not sat in the middle, or even close to the middle of the speakers in most cases. You ought to be able to hear crazy phasing by moving one headphone away from the head when the other stays on the ear. The real world isn't like that no matter what number you look at.

What some people appear to be saying is that there are mutants who have super-exceptional hearing, who's appreciation of music is destroyed by the occasional nanosecond skip in a wave, and who can't walk around the rest of the world with it's off-centre speakers without being driven crazy by the audio distortions. Maybe there is such a sub-species of human...but I don't see what the blazes this has to do about consoles and games! Moved to HiFi...if there was a HiFi. Moved to HTPC, which it isn't really but hey.

 

[Pete]

It´s all about where the personal limit is, some say they can hear jitter and some semy deaf people can´t hear the difference between MP3 and PCM.

Well, there's quite a bit of a difference b/w those two examples. We're discussing (reasonably) high-end defects. That is to say, it doesn't take an audiophile's reproduction setup to expose the difference b/w an MP3 and the source, whereas the effects of jitter seem to require something more before they're appreciable above a setup's other weak points.

And thanks for pointing me out as being the troll while ignoring the others.

I apologize if I singled you out. The example you cited seemed rather contrived, and that fed into my general skepticism of super-high-end audio's claims to objective aural perfection. I can conceive that jitter may be perceptible and at least to some extent correctable, insofar as it's measurable and there are sensitive people out there (of which I'm one, but I don't play with anywhere near audiophile equipment and so have never focused on jitter). My POV is that there are more important aspects of an audio setup, but that may be unfairly dismissive.

And thanks for the link to that AVSF 'Nature's Journey' thread. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but, if nothing else, it illuminated the max bitrates of HD-DVD and BD. Puts BD in a better light.

 

[phat]

It's not a matter of audiophiles. If jitter is that jarring, how jarring would it be to sit in a cinema with completely offset speakers? Much, much more lag between synchronised audio than than any technical faults, because you're not sat in the middle, or even close to the middle of the speakers in most cases.

What some people appear to be saying is that there are mutants who have super-exceptional hearing, who's appreciation of music is destroyed by the occasional nanosecond skip in a wave, and who can't walk around the rest of the world with it's off-centre speakers without being driven crazy by the audio distortions.

Ugh. Constant or slowly-changing delays are vastly differently from phase jitter. The ear is very sensitive to phase discontinuities, and jitter is a series of random phase discontinuities. It's not an "occasional nanosecond skip".

Just a sidenote- if you are really averse to some extra noise in the extreme treble/ultrasonic range, then SACD is definitely not the right format for "soundstage".

SACD shapes quantization noise into the MHz range, well outside the range of audio frequency circuits and transducers...

 

[Gubbi]

SACD shapes quantization noise into the MHz range, well outside the range of audio frequency circuits and transducers...

It deteriorates with increasing frequency.

From an achieveble SNR/Dynamic range of 160dB at low frequencies to around 90dB at 20KHz (ie. worse than the 96dB of 16 bit PCM). Mind you, it's still a fantastic reproduction format.

Cheers