Sony is the big kid on the block, the 500-pound gorilla when it comes to music. They own half of all music ever recorded. Thus if Sony want to introduce a new audio format, they can. Even if they do it expressly to compete with a standard the rest of the industry has agreed on. This is the story of the format war between SACD (Sony’s format) and DVD-Audio (everyone else’s). Sony can also produce their own disc players, as they are one of the leading manufacturers of such players, in addition to the discs themselves. Thus single handedly, Sony have established SACD as a contender. They are the only corporation on Earth that can do that. Sony started a format war simply by only allowing their vast music catalogue to be released on SACD, never on DVD Audio.
In spite of starting a format war, Sony did something right with SACD: They created a high quality signal. Their Direct Stream Digital (DSD) process is quite impressive. Instead of using the 20-year-old CD pulse code modulation standards, Sony used their own system of digitizing sound. They encode in smaller chunks and upped the sample rate from 24Khz to 2.8MHz. This vastly exceeds DVD-Audio’s sampling rate of 96KHz. The result? Hi-fi purists find it to be a warmer sound than DVD-Audio. SACD sounds more like an old tube amplifier and less digital than DVD-Audio.
One of the things that make SACD such an experience is the surround sound effect. It offers 5.1 channels of high-resolution sound. The 5.1 format indicates by the name 5.1 the number of discrete (separate) channels it allows. For example, 5.1 sound has to one center channel, a left and right channel, and two surround speakers and a subwoofer (the .1 part). Incidentally, you need at least two loudspeakers to create the illusion of sound having any direction other than from the speaker itself.
In spite of the high quality of SACD audio, it isn’t widely adopted. The format must compete with the convenience of formats like MP3 that, while offering poorer sound, have the advantage of being highly compressed, enabling you to load massive amounts of music into a tiny MP3 and media players like Apple’s iPod. Home music and media players increasingly play formats like MP3 that were created for those desiring portable music players.
In addition to SACD, the player you choose must be able to handle a number of other formats. CD and DVD players have to create the illusion of realistic sound in both music and movies. In order to create the illusion of realistic sound, audio engineers have devised a dizzying array of home theater and audio formats. These days, most mp3 and media players, in tandem with surround processors, will play most and sometimes all of these file types.
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