SACD... can you hear the difference?


I'm fairly new to SACD as it's only been a month since I purchased my first player that takes advantage of the format. Some say even on a good system which is set up properly that they can not notice a difference between SACD and standard CD.

For example my Wife is a huge James Taylor fan. A couple weeks ago I found 2 original master recording SACD disks from a company called Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs. Both James Taylor just as she has on CD. I dialed them in perfect and OH MAN! To me the difference was like night and day, but she couldn't tell the difference in sound quality.

So either I'm imagining things or I'm able to pick up on musical pitch and clarity much better than her. I'm sure of what I'm hearing with no doubt, but she thinks I'm crazy.

Can anyone here notice how much better SACD sounds on their system verses a standard CD.
pigchild

Showing 3 responses by ghosthouse

Ptss - do you need a switch or is it possible to accomplish the same by reversing +/- at the speakers or at input to amp(s)? Honestly don't know...not trying to be provocative.
Ptss - thanks for the reply. Glad I saw it. I'm good on making the switch without shorting things out. Understand very well your advice. Auditioning a CJ Premier that DOES invert phase and have reversed R&L inputs at each speaker. As an experiment, I need to go back and see what things sound like without the channels reversed.
Hello again - the XLO test & burn in CD has a couple of tracks for testing "phase-correctness". They have multiple versions of the same excerpt of "Stormy Weather" that are done mono, stereo out of phase, stereo out of absolute phase and the full song correct absolute phase.

To my ear, differences between the out of absolute phase and correct phase recordings are difficult to detect...I THINK the out of absolute phase sounds a little less focused but am not sure I could pick it out with my eyes closed. Just to be clear - no such difficulty detecting the out of phase recording...it's diffuse and uncentered.