Is there a consensus as to blu ray sound quality?

Markphd - I just expressed doubts about book (Animal Farm) being witten in 1984 since author died in 1950 (book was written in 1945). I might not remember it correctly but Napoleon did not say that - it was written on the barn.

"Is there hope that the typical audiophile out there can buy a $399 blue ray, and end up with sound quality which is better than even the very expensive (red laser) cd players which are audiophile grade?"

I'm confused. Are you asking about using it as a transport or player? If player, then there is a lot of other thing affecting sound. If you want to use it as a transport to play redbook CDs then you'll get perhaps a little better tracking but you can get it as well with DVD player.

Lrsky - Redbook is fixed at 16 bit and the only thing that better transport provides is lower jitter. Better laser resolution does nothing if overall quality doesn't follow. Many factors affect player's performance and SACD players, for example, are not the best redbook CD players. They have separate laser assemblies for each format but designer probably concentrated on SACD part more. Same might be true with Blue Ray. If you plan to use it as a transport than it might be better to get cheap DVD player and jitter suppressing DAC like Benchmark DAC1 or Bel Canto DAC3.

Such DACs have resolution of 24bits but redbook is defined as 16-bit (as well as HDCD and SACD).

Lrsky - You assume that picture that you scan has unlimited resolution. That is not the case here - CD has fixed resolution of 16 bits. Time spacing between bits is fixed and has nothing to do with spacing between players. If the player plays CD without errors and jitter than there is nothing else that can be improved. Jitter itself has nothing to do with harmonic structure or distance but is simply a noise. If you play any singular frequency with jitter you'll get sidebands at very very low level - still audible since not harmonically related to root frequency. Jitter applied to music converts to noise.

In addition Blue Ray players might use separate traditional laser (like SACD do) since their blue laser is optimized for certain depth and other factors.

That's what I think. If error correction works and there is no jitter I don't see what else can be improved in reading process.

Higher resolution can be obtained in digital filtering (think averaging)but it stops short of 20-bits because of DACs. In case of traditional DACs better resolution is not possible because of components' tolerance while in case of delta-sigma DACs better resolution is limited by timing accuracy. There are some DACs from TI that are combination of both but without any apparent benefits. DCS introduced long time ago RING DACs that bypass resistors tolerance resolution limit by shuffling constantly many (I think 5)different resitors (of the same value) to get accurate average value of given division.

SACD is a recorded byproduct od delta Sigma modulation before filtering (PWM at 2.8MHz) if I understand it correctly. It supposed be equivalent to 20bit performance at 96kHz. Notice that traditional DAC ICs got eliminated and substituted by one bit DAC (switch) and filtering.

Lrsky - Better laser might provide better results with less than perfect disks if its optimized for that (blue ray might not be). Shortcomings of digital comes not only from resolution but mostly from unfortunate sampling rate of 44.1kHz. Just imagine one period of 10kHz sinewave estimated with only 4 points. With ratio of 2:1 (44.1kHz/20kHz) it is impossible to filter out in digital filter frequency components above 22.05kHz (and keep 20kHz bandwidth) that can "fold" over from zero (Nyquist/Shannon) 22.1kHz becoming 50Hz. Using brickwall digital filters gives more attenuation but creates uneven group delays (improper summing of harmonics) and ripples in the passband. Sampling frequency has to be higher and that's why we have different oversampling schemes where artificial samples are created just to increase rate.

Better sounding schemes like SACD are not very popular and probably created only to promote scheme with absolute copy protection (pit width modulation) - nobody cares about us audiophiles. We don't represent any buying power and the most of people are happy with MP3.

Digital sounds less than perfect but record mixing is even worse.

Lrsky - there is nothing wrong with digital (just look at HDTV)and the most of LPs pressed now are made from digital masters. My friend who works in recording studio says that they have in "junk room" multitrack tape recorders that costed an arm and a leg when they acquired them many years ago (Apex if I remember correctly) - now everything is digital. Digital master tapes on high end gear sound incredible (so I've heard). The problem is media format and quality of electronics. SACD should be much better, providing more resolution and easing D/A conversion, and it is (according to reviews) but amount of available records is still very low. Everybody is hoping, including you, that new media like Blue Ray will bring some solution. I don't know.

I would think that person has to be a little older to appreciate fine things and long time ago older people were driving the market. Everybody wanted to be older - just look at names like "Oldsmobile". You wouldn't name car company like that today. Oldsmobile closed factories and everything is oriented toward teenagers or recently even children and children don't buy SACDs.

Lrsky - I don't have enough experience to judge and I use digital for the practicality of it. It doesn't make much difference to me what sounds better if I cannot buy record at all.

If digital is inherently flawed, as you suggested, how about sound of LPs made from digital master tapes - are they all bad sounding? If not, then perhaps media and players are still not up to the task (but might be in future).

I don't defend digital and it is likely that I don't have good enough ears but I read some glowing editorial reviews of SACD players.

Nobody argues about quality of the first CDs. Not only that it often contained jitter acquired in poor A/D processing (impossible to remove) but also had poor equalization/mixing. Also remember that CD players were really bad then.

Lrsky - I suspect that better reflection from CD translates somehow to a little lower jitter which is irrelevant if you have jitter suppressing DAC. There might be some improvements with cleaning, balancing, painting edges with green ink etc but I don't want to play this game. I want better technology. I would be willing to compromise with SACD but I can see what happened with HDCD and DVD-Audio. Many Blue Ray don't support SACD and one of the latest editorials in Stereophile claim that format is dead.

As for all discs created equal - I hope you're not saying that he wrote it in 1984? (that would be spooky - he died 1950)