A few years ago, two new high-resolution digital audio formats debuted amidst the flurry of low-resolution audio formats that were aimed for portability and downloading.  This article will help you decipher some of the different high-res and disc formats available today.  Although support from the major labels for these formats is dwindling somewhat, it is still a viable niche market that many audiophiles enjoy listening to and collecting.

In recent years, we’ve heard about downloadable music in the form of MP3 and WMA files, and other music formats.  These file formats are all compressed, and they all sacrifice fidelity to a varying extent.  Personally, I can’t listen to compressed formats for too long, before they begin grating on my nerves.  My Sony MiniDisc players sound decent over headphones, but I certainly don’t consider it to be as good as a CD.

A few years back, the major labels began releasing discs in two different high-resolution formats.  The idea was that not only could two-channel audio be improved with higher sampling rates and bit depths, multichannel audio was also now possible since disc storage space had improved with the advent of DVDs.

There are two main formats:  DVD-A (DVD-Audio), and SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc).  DVD-Audio’s digital format can contain just about any sampling rate and bit depth, but the most common seems to be 24 bit, 96kHz PCM digital.  DVD-A is also more flexible:  in addition to two-channel and multichannel high-resolution audio, DVD-A can also have some video content, as well as additional data areas that carry a Dolby Surround program and/or a DTS surround sountrack, so the disc can be played back on players not capable of playing DVD-Audio.  DVD-A discs will not play in standard CD players.

SACD is a whole different animal.   SACD is music-only.  SACD can contain both a two-channel and a multichannel (surround) program on the same disc.  In addition, most recent SACDs also have a separate CD layer that will allow playback in standard CD players; these are called Hybrid SACD.  The digital sampling on a SACD uses DSD (Direct Stream Digital, a format developed by Sony for archival storage of their master tapes), not PCM as in CD or DVD-Audio.  DSD has the potential for higher quality sound than PCM digital, for technical reasons I won’t go into here.

One short-lived format was the DualDisc, which was a non-standard disc with CD audio on one side, and either a DVD-A or DVD-Video on the other side.  Often, the DVD side only has Dolby Digital surround, rather than high-resolution digital audio.  The incompatibility is with the CD side of the disc: as the surface of the “pits” beneath the surface is closer to the laser than a standard CD, many players are incapable of playing them.  For that reason, along with market confusion, the discs never really took off.

Many brick and mortar stores no longer carry these discs, but you can still find them, if you’re persistent, by shopping online.  For players, Pioneer and Oppo both make entry-level, affordable players, and others such as Denon and Marantz have higher-end universal players that will handle all of these formats.  So, it is still not too late to get in on the fun.  High-resolution digital just sounds so much better (if the mastering is good…an entire separate issue), and the surround versions are a totally new and enjoyable experience for many listeners.