Wescott,

At the risk of going hopelessly off topic, in response to your links, Gene is a really smart, well-educated guy, but I still maintain that my SA-CD disks sound worlds better than typical redbook CDs. He obviously makes some important observations, though he admits himself that work-around solutions exist for some of the drawbacks that the recording industry hasn't yet addressed, but I have found that even 16 bit recordings benefit from adaptation to SA-CD, and no amount of skeptical reasoning after the fact changes what I hear. I will easily concede that not everyone will, or should, take the time to discriminate the degree of improvement on the less refined disks. However, I'm willing to bet that anyone with even a modest interest can hear the improvement in the better ones (often of later vintage), whether in two-or multi-channel formats. And certain disks are just plain breathtaking. I don't listen to SA-CDs in PCM form derived from their DVD-A brethren, but I'm not convinced that even though this is certainly not the optimal way to hear them, they might still be a cut above the norm in many cases. It might be worth starting a new thread on the subject.

Ed