WHAT ARE DVD-AUDIO AND SACD? WHAT EQUIPMENT DO I NEED TO PLAY THEM?
In February, 2003, DTS Entertainment released Halloween, the first Zappa release in one of the new “high resolution” digital audio formats. Both formats promise better-than-CD audio quality, and are completely incompatible with each other. There are no Zappa CD releases in the SACD format as of now, so let’s focus on the DVD-Audio format. DVD-Audio (which is the format used in Halloween and QuAUDIOPHILIAc) is actually two formats in one. The DTS Entertainment DVD-Audio discs contain a DVD-Audio session and a DVD-Video session. The DVD-A session can only be accessed by DVD-Audio players, and offers lossless surround and (although not on the DTS discs) lossless high-resolution stereo playback. Lossless refers to the method used to compress the audio; lossy compression schemes like MP3 and Dolby Digital “throw out” parts of the audio they think you cannot hear in order to reduce file size, while “lossless” compression schemes are more like zip-files, in that they preserve everything about
