24/96 question

KP: Love the name (I was in a folk group back in the 60's called Piglet's Revenge!). There are a lot of prior posts on this subject which you should check in the archives, but there are a lot of players now from Pioneer, Marantz (for example, my DV-18) and I believe Sony (the DVP9000 which also plays SACDs may have this capability) which will output a 24/96 signal from their digital output with a DVD-Video disc, such as he Classic and Chesky DADs. But you cannot at this time spin a DVD-A on these machines (they'll only play DVD's and the Classic and Chesky DADs), and the DVD-A machines will not output a 24/96 signal from DVD-A's (this is a software limitation--currently the DVD-A discs do not allow a 24/96 digital signal to be sent out by the player). SACD will not work on a DVD player unless the player also will play SACDs (it's a completely different laser), like the Sony unit above. And currently there is no universally accepted interface to pass a DSD signal from an SACD, although Accuphase and dCS have utilized their own interfaces for their products. Hope this is of some help.

The Classic Records, Chesky and Water Lily Acoustics DADs; excellent but, unfortunately, not enough of them. Don't know if any DVDs take advantage of 24/96 sound, perhaps the other posters here know that. It's a good format; I could take it as well as SACD, and really wouldn't mind it being a niche product, but there doesn't seem to be a bright future for it. Unfortunately, the powers that be had to choose the DVD-A format, which as I see it is incompatible with existing DVD players and assumes you're going to love the sound produced by your mid-fi DVD-A player so much you don't need an outboard processor (I remember that when Sony unveiled the SCD-1 SACD player I asked a friend of mine who, as a journalist and in the industry, was invited to the press conference to ask the Sony rep if the player would output a DSD digital signal that I could then play through my Audio Logic DAC, which could decode the signal with a proper interface--she relayed to me that the rep stared at her as if she had grown another head before his eyes). I do hold out some hope that down the line the DVD-As will permit a 24/96 or better signal to be output, or, if DVD-A does catch on (and who knows about that), the high end companies will make some good-sounding one box DVD-A players.

As far as Piglet's Revenge goes, we played about 3 gigs the spring of our senior year in high school and then broke up to go to college. So the name is available, folks....