War of the Worlds SA-CD

Raggie

hi,

My Mrs has just come back from the shops with the new "remastered" CD of war of the worlds..

Now I normaly use my PC DVD/CD drive for playing music.. in fact apart from a CD in the Kids room, or the DVD in the living room its all we have.

(i like music when i work!!!)

The CD is a Hybrid Super Audio CD (SA-CD).. acording to the book that comes with it..

anyway it will not play in the PC??? it does work on the kids CD.

I have tried all the packages I have on the PC, WinDVD Realplayer etc.. none will play it..

so what is a SA-CD?.. and how can I play it in the PC

many thanks

mike_paterson

Yes, you should be able to put a disc coded with SACD information into your CD-Rom drive and play it.. but.. you won't get any of the "SA" features or content on the disk. All that extra channel information is coded and layered for the extra laser pick-up found in a hardware SACD player. Since your PC doesn't have this.. it will simply play the media as if it were just another dumb CD.

Check the usual suspects.. How old is your drive? How old is your IDE/SCSI controller? How old is the codec you're trying to use? How old is the software control engine (player) you're using? If your hardware isn't ancient (by computer standards) then a couple of driver updates should put you on the right track. There is a chance that your hardware just needs to be replaced. ... sorry about that.. but the media is a bit different.

Super Audio CD uses a new and radically different technology called Direct Stream Digital (DSD) to convert music into a digital signal that can be stored on a disc. Compared to the traditional PCM method (the technology used for CD), DSD offers a much higher resolution by following more closely the original wave form of music. With a frequency response of over 100kHz and a dynamic range over 120dB across the audible frequency range – some 64 times higher resolution then CD - Super Audio CD offers music reproduction that reveals details you just can’t hear on a normal CD.

The Direct Stream Digital™ pulse train "looks" remarkably like the analog waveform it represents. More pulses point up as the wave goes positive and down as the wave goes negative.

Mor info at http://www.superaudio-cd.com/