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In Reply to: Hands Up! So, shoot me posted by Bruce from DC on December 14, 2017 at 13:52:31:
While it's true that the high res formats didn't offer enough of an advantage to the typical listener to take off, I can tell you that SACD was not just a money ploy by Sony. David Smith, then the director of North American recording for Sony Classical, was a good friend and we spent many hours discussing the issues affecting digital audio and the virtues of the various formats. I worked as well with some higher-ups in Sony management in my capacity as a consultant.
The guys at the top of any organization want to make money -- that's their job -- but that doesn't mean that the people working for that organization don't have a passion for good sound. It was certainly David's passion -- the focus of his life -- and he was genuinely enthusiastic about both high sampling rate PCM and SACD, which we felt sounded even better.
The guys I worked with at Sony were very concerned with the sonic shortcomings of digital audio (many of which in those days had nothing to do with the sampling rate) -- not just the engineers, but the artists and producers as well. As David memorably put it, when they switched during a recording session from the live feed to the backup analog recorder's confidence playback, the client's expression changed to one of dismay, and then when they switched to digital confidence playback, one of horror.
All of which is to say that I don't think we should be too cynical about improved formats, whether SACD or MQA. If there's something we should be cynical about, it's what more frequently occurs in the corporate environment -- commercially-oriented producers and management degrading sound quality for commercial reasons. That's given us abortions like the loudness wars and the 44.1 kHz redbook standard, as I understand it a cynical move by Philips to capitalize on its oversampling technology (about which Sony didn't know at the time).
I've really been taken about by the response to MQA. Surely, anything that delivers better audio into the home is something we should support? You'd think from the way people are talking about it that it was Autotune or something!
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Follow Ups
- OK, shot. :-) - josh358 20:41:24 01/01/18 (0)
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