You might want to wait for awhile for a 2nd generation combination DVD/DVD-A/SACD player. Pioneer makes one now, but personally, I'm waiting.

In my own opinion (Bosso, please step out of the room for a bit...thanks) is that the main draw to either of these formats is the ability to play multichannel material. This can be either awsome or so-so of an experience depending on the mix of the material you are listening to - it varies. For classical, jazz, and some other acoustic music, in all honesty, I can get pretty much the same effect by feeding my surrounds with a studio reverb fed off the stereo fronts. Believe it or not, this is exactly how it is done on some movies with the music track: surround channels are sometimes left up to the mixing engineers because they can integrate it better with the other sounds in the track. With other types of music, you are at the mercy of the taste of the person mixing the tracks. Personally, I don't like guitars coming from behind me - but sometimes it gets done extremely well.

As far as the supposed increased resolution of 24 bit and 96K, well, I don't think you would be able to really tell if it were well done in 16 bit and 44.1k. The differences are _extremely_ small, to inaudible. There is no such thing as a 'real 24 bit' analog to digital converter; 144db of dynamic range is just beyond the capability of any practical electronic circuit in use today. The most that can be reliably captured is about 18-20 bits - the lower bits are just recording electronic noise. Also, to put a digital to analog converter in a consumer product with _actual_ resolution of 24 bits would cost, well, more than you could imagine, if it could be done at all.

The increased sample rate? well, that too, in my opinion is pretty much wasted. I sure as hell can't hear as high as 46,000 hZ, can you? Can you speakers reproduce that high? Can your power amps pass that high a frequency?

In a mastering situation, it can certainly make sense to use 24 bit resolution, but only because most of the internal math done by the DSPs is done at that bit depth, and multiple DSP operations would pile up rounding errors if the word length were reduced for every operation.

Personally, I think they should have used the 50,000hZ sampling rate used by the original Soundstream digital recorder as a standard, and called it a day; 44.1 is cutting it a bit close to the audible band.

Bosso - you can come back into the room now

[This message has been edited by soundhound (edited October 27, 2002).]