BD-Audio format

[James Morrow]

... a major problem is that most of the music we ever hear is at CD quality or less - as a consequence our hearing adapts to what it's given. The point is that CD sound quality is very low - SACD/DVDA192 are much better, but it can take quite a while for your hearing to adapt to something it doesn't normally hear in music. Yet still SACD/DVDA192 are nowhere near reality. To use a visual analogy, you might claim that DVD quality is great, but when you see well produced 720p you're likely to agree that, yes - it's better. ... and 1080p then shows you something that's obviously better again. ... then SHDV and UHDV show you something that seems much closer to reality again.

I can tell you that there is a vast difference between 96/24 and 192/24 - and indeed between 192/24 and 384/24. but you need a high quality system and to give your hearing system time to become accustomed to it. Both audio and video can get to a standard at which the brain can't tell the difference between the recording and reality - but even 384/24 is nowhere near...

Whilst it's good to have speaker frequency response out to 100kHz or so - and it makes a very audible difference to sound quality, it's nothing to do with hearing frequencies beyond 20kHz (I'm sorry if this comes as a shock to you) but much more about the temporal resolution of the system and its phase response. Any good speakers (supertweeter or not) will clearly show the difference between 96, 192 and 384, when properly driven. Several have even gone beyond this and still the difference is clear ...

... and then of course there's DSD - currently at 2.8224MHz but clearly much better at 11.2896MHz - and without all that ultrasonic "noise-shaping" ...

... and of course you can use entropic considerations to throw away a lot of redundancy in these higher resolution systems ...