A friend said he is sending me a quad audio CD of his band. I have been Googling this and the best I can figure out what he is referring to is DTS audio, does that sound right?
OK, now what do I have to play this thing on. Because I read where if you don’t have the right set-up you just hear noise.
I recently bought a Samsung BD-J7500 blu-ray player. I looked in the manual and it mentions DTS audio. So hopefully it will be able to play my friend’s bands “quad” audio CD. I’ve not heard of DTS audio until I looked this stuff up today. DTS is audio surround like 5.1?
Anyway, the last and most recently not the least is that all the audio systems I have are two speakers, except for one that has two speakers and a sub-woofer. What will happen assuming I can play this “quad” audio CD, will it mix all the channels to stereo? Will it leave out some of the channels?
What about if I did a rip of this CD to listen to it on a computer? Would I be able to get more than stereo audio tracks out of it? Could it be ripped as separate tracks channels such as L,R,Center, etc?
Without knowing exactly what he means by “quad” audio CD, it’s impossible to say. Standard audio CDs can only hold 2 channels of PCM. “Super audio CD” (SACD) can play multichannel sound, but it uses an entirely different encoding method (DSD) which not all players can handle.
Yeah. I’d guess he means a 4-channel SACD as well. They’re technically DVDs, but the nomenclature makes it confusing. They are a big thing in the audiophile community. They use DTS audio, which they think is the best thing ever, even though it’s been proven that PCM (aka standard digital audio) will always be more accurate.
Unfortunately, SACD pretty much lost out to DVD-Audio. While all modern DVD and Blu-ray players will support the equivalent DVD-Audio format (which uses DTS), only those devices that specifically mention SACD support will work. Even more unfortunately, the format is so different that there is no way to rip an SACD from a conventional optical drive on a computer. (Apparently, DVD firmware prevents you from doing a direct bit-by-bit copy.)
Now, a well-designed SACD will be a hybrid, with a regular CD layer that will work in nearly every CD player in existence. So you might still be able to use it. I’d suggest (after confirming he means a SACD) that you ask him to send you a FLAC file instead. Say you don’t have any SACD equipment, but you want to be able to hear it in full quality. (Plus, if he’s rolling his own SACD, it may not be a hybrid.)
FLAC is another format that audiophiles swear by, and it actually does have some advantages. Someone who is using SACDs probably really cares about this sort of thing.
Probably isn’t SACD format. Assuming this is an amateur band (even if they are good enough to be making a CD).
DSD format is very very hard to work with. In fact, the dirty secret of SACD is that almost all the recording are turned into PCM, mixed down, and then turned back into DSD. Worse however. You can’t author a SACD disk without an appropriate license.
OTOH, there is a good chance it is a DTS encoded 5.1 CD. These are not too hard to make. Your player will play them.
Good to know. I hope this work, if so, it will be the first DTS audio disc of any kind I’ve used.
Are their commercial available DTS audio CDs? I don’t real ever seeing that available as a format. Must be a pretty limited group that didn’t catch on. Thanks!