A certain John Phillips, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :
In article , Chesney Christ wrote:
Leaving aside the X vs Y business, I'd say stereo digital reproduction
is pretty much as good as it needs to be right now; the signal recorded
is essentially identical to the input signal. There's not much room for
improvement at the moment.

If you had said that modern stereo digital reproduction is _capable of
being_ pretty much as good as it needs to be then I could possibly agree.

Yes, my paragraph above assumed "in the hands of an engineer who knows
what he is doing" and "properly set up kit".

I still buy modern CDs (1990s or later) where I think the sound could
have been much better.

Oh, I definitely agree there, and it's a travesty as good digital
recording is not hard to do with modern equipment. I have modern albums
where they've driven over the 0db level quite badly. There's no excuse
for that.

Maybe with SACDs (to return to a topic in the
thread title) in their marketing-led infancy still, more attention is
being paid to getting it right in practice.

I would not feel safe making that assumption. We hoped that might be the
case with DVD video, but frequently it has not been - shamefully
terrible jobs done on some films.

--

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