Audio formats battle it out, but few listeners will notice a difference
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If you've been to the record store lately, you may have noticed a new product on the shelves: DVD-Audio discs.
These high-tech marvels promise a sonic leap over CDs akin to switching from black-and-white to color photos. But before you spend $1,500 on a new player, and $25 apiece for the discs, be warned: A second new format called Super Audio CD also is vying for your wallet.
The looming fight between the two standards will combine all the waste of the Betamax-VHS war with the achingly slow adoption pace of high-definition television.
And most people won't hear any difference. Few Napster users have noticed the loss of sound quality in MP3, the digital format used to transfer music files over the Internet. Most MP3s contain less data than a CD track. Background noise in cars and the limited sound of ministereo systems easily mask the shortcomings of CDs and MP3s and the benefits of the new formats, says Steve Lawson, a veteran of Seattle's recording scene. His Bad Animals studio has recorded REM, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Nirvana. "If I did a blind test with record producers," he says, "they wouldn't know the difference."
So while DVD-Audio and SACD battle it out, the convenience and ubiquity of MP3s and CDs might make the two standards irrelevant to all but the most finicky (and well-heeled) listeners.
That doesn't mean the war won't be fierce, slow and wasteful. Unlike Betamax tapes, which didn't fit VHS players, the new audio discs are all the same size, and players will support both new formats plus DVD video and regular CDs. Unless record companies agree on one standard, the two systems could easily limp along for years.
Those making the players are in a similar bind. Since all four formats are completely incompatible, players will essentially have to be four machines in one. Consumers won't shell out four times the price of a typical DVD player, so manufacturers will cut corners to hit attractive price points, sacrificing sound quality.
That means the difference between the new formats and a plain old CD probably won't be audible except on the most expensive players, linked to expensive audio systems. This became abundantly clear when I listened to both new formats at Definitive Audio on Roosevelt Way Northeast in Seattle.
A $35,000 test
The competing players - we needed two because all-in-one machines haven't come to market yet - were plugged into truly impressive gear: two 120-watt amps whose heat fins made them look like rocket boosters; a pair of 4-foot speakers; and a pre-amp. Total tab for the rig: $35,000 without the player.
Even so, it was hard to hear a difference.
"I definitely hear more air," said Definitive Audio Vice President Craig Abplanalp, a former musician who's been in the stereo business here since 1993. "But you have to start using your audiophile or wine-lover terminology to describe the difference."
He wasn't joking. The "air" includes whispery echoes and high harmonics that gave the sense of space in the room around the players. (We were listening to Buena Vista Social Club.) The music seemed less squished together. There was more sound, and it was better-defined. The detailed timbre of voices and instruments was more clear.
But the differences are subtle. SACD and DVD-A sounded very close to CDs, despite much more information in the recordings. Unlike vinyl records, which play a continuous vibration-to-vibration print of the sound as it was created, CDs break up the sound into ones and zeros. To reduce the volume of data to fit on a disc, a CD recording "samples" sound 44,100 times a second and packages it into 16-bit words readable by a computer chip. It was based on the state of computer technology in 1982.
Since then, player makers have found ways to take more snapshots of the sound and make up much of the missing information. Such tweaking is why an expensive CD player sounds better than a Discman. "Think what a computer was like in 1982," says John Zimmerman, manager of Audio Connection on University Way Northeast in Seattle. "We're still using that crummy system that was developed in 1982, and which was a compromise then."
Today, SACDs promise the full digitized stream of the original music, with no sampling. DVD-A uses sampling, but at a higher rate than CDs - 96,000 times a second - and packs it into 24-bit words. Both provide more information and more sound clarity.
MP3 files, because they are software, not hardware, allow for flexible sample rates. The most popular - 96 and 128 kilobits per second - carry less information than a CD track. "I tend to encode at 128, which is close to CD quality," says Martin Tobias, chairman and founder of Loudeye, the Seattle-based digital-encoding company.
All of these formats, Tobias says, are "trying to approximate the original - an analog recording that is a direct copy from the air."
Purists prefer vinyl
That's why many purists still prefer analog vinyl records. In his showroom, Zimmerman cranks up a 1905 Edison Phonograph to play a recording made 100 years ago. No electricity was used in recording or playback. With the strength of their voices, the singers literally engraved their performance on a wax template that was stamped onto metal cylinders. The sound is tinny, but surprisingly clear.
The fidelity of that older technology has kept turntables in demand even as CDs became wildly popular. Zimmerman says he sells as many today as he did 15 years ago. Music lovers recognize that digital technology is only "a computer chip's rendition" of the music, he says.
But today's records, including those released on vinyl, already make compromises. Lawson, the recording engineer, says virtually all hip-hop is recorded digitally, as is about half of all hard rock. "It would be hard to find a recording that hasn't been edited digitally in some way." All of Loudeye's audio encoding and some DVD-A and SACD records are taken from sources that are CD-quality.
Even as the discs improve, the players will lag behind. An SACD or DVD-A played on the $1,500 Sony and Rotel machines I auditioned probably won't sound much better, and maybe worse, than a normal CD on a $5,000 player.
That makes the format war a fight over lifestyle. Zimmerman tells his high-end music lovers to wait two years until the format sorts itself out and high-grade players come to market.
Lawson and Tobias think MP3s will win over either high-quality format simply for the convenience the mass market wants. "Having 150 cuts on a CD will win over 12 great-sounding cuts on a CD," Lawson says - even though "cuts" aren't part of the process any more.
Alwyn Scott can be reached at 206-464-3329 or ascott@seattletimes.com.