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Part 3: Comparison of Diana Krall's Look of Love on SACD, DVD-A, CD

Sometime ago you will recall (see link below) I did two articles comparing 2ch versions of Diana Krall's Look of Love on DVD-A (96/24), SACD (DSD) and CD (44.1/16).

The two "surprising" results were: clipping observed on CD and DVD-A versions, and wider relative dynamics on SACD over DVD-A, and over CD.

At that time, several people correctly pointed out that there is a small chance the clipping could be a result of overload on the analog circuits (player, amplifier, sound card) and the relative dynamics differences could be the result of the different players used for SACD and DVD-A.

Well, I've repeated the experiments, addressing both those concerns, by using a "universal" player (the Denon DVD-2200) and recording at a constant gain such that the peak digital sample on any format never exceeds -3.5dB FS.

The results are ... the same. I can still see the clipped waveforms on the DVD-A version, and SACD dynamics are *still* relatively better than DVD-A.

So it now looks like the differences in dynamics may be more fundamental than differences between players. Given that both DVD-A and SACD transfers come from the same analog master, the differences can now be narrowed to either the transfer process or the underlying format.


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Topic - Part 3: Comparison of Diana Krall's Look of Love on SACD, DVD-A, CD - Christine Tham 01:24:50 06/14/04 (61)


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