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I'm totally confused about Hi Rez formats

I was hoping that somebody out there could help this two-channel audiophile make some sense out of the DVD-A and SACD formats. I was interested in exploring these hi resolutiuon formats, but was told by a salesman that the benefits of these formats are only achieved when used in multichannel setups. I went to the dealer under the impression that if one wished to, he or she could simply use such players as two channel digital front ends, and still obtain the benefit of the higher sampling rate and bit rate. I know of one high end player like the Marantz SA-11 that only has two channel analog outputs.

I was interested in testing the waters with a universal player, but I don't want to go nuts and spend thousands of dollars until I have a chance to experiment with the possibilities. Certainly, I have no use for the so-called high resolution formats unless I can truly obtain higher resolution in a two channel system. I am not interested in multichannel audio at the moment. Can somebody please explain things to me.

Thanks!!
mstram

Showing 1 response by treyhoss

treyhoss
287 posts
 
I can't speak directly about DVD-A but I *think* it is designed to be played in multi-channel. There may be a stereo only option but I'm not sure if all DVDA's have a stereo layer. SACD, on the other hand, has a stereo layer (always) with many discs also containing an optional multi-channel layer. These are two distict layers where the 2-channel and multi-channel are separate and mixed differently as opposed to the stereo simply being a "fold down" of the multi-channel mix. If you are primarily interested in 2-channel, you may want to be looking at SACD.
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