On Wednesday, February 17, 2016 at 12:36:09 PM UTC-5, Mr. Luddite wrote:
On 2/17/2016 12:11 PM, John H. wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDxGQ5t4lvI

Enjoy.


Telarc has put out a number of Super Audio CD's, this being one of them.

Hopefully, you have a Super Audio CD player (Sony) and
amplifier/receiver that
will accept it's 6 channel output with each channel having a dedicated,
discrete input. The amp/receiver must be then put in direct, 6 channel
mode, (often called "Multi-Channel Input" driving a main left, main
right, center, left rear, right rear and subwoofer. Most Telarc SACD
are hybrid, meaning they will also play on a conventional CD player but
you will lose superior fidelity of a SACD recording. Conventional,
digital "Surround Sound" ... be it 5.1 or 7.1 is *not* SACD.

In addition, SACD's are recorded completely differently than a regular
CD. It's complicated and hard to explain but it uses phase modulation
rather than amplitude modulation. Basically, it's much like the
fidelity difference between AM and FM radio. Many people don't realize
that AM radio's bandwidth is limited to 10Khz which means it can't
broadcast the full audio frequency spectrum that the human ear can
detect. FM, in addition to being frequency modulated rather than
amplitude modulated has a 200Khz bandwidth.

While the channel separation (bandwidth) of FM is 200khz, it is used for several signals. The resulting audio bandwidth is 15khz.

It's really unfortunate that the US adopted the stereo FM system it did. While it maintained compatibility with the mono FM receivers of the day, it severely limited the performance of the FM stereo signal. We're still suffering with it today.

Oh, and there are scores of SACD players on the market now. And while some have the analog outputs you describe, most of the modern players are also Blu-ray, and transport the audio via HDMI. It then depends on your AV receiver to decode and route the audio to the discrete channels.