best music surround sound reference discs

#BEST MUSIC SURROUND SOUND REFERENCE DISCS MOVIE#

Let me stress that I am not talking about the kind of surround sound and music provided by video and movie soundtracks. At best, it may provide some insights into a promising future path towards the absolute sound at a time when digital streaming and high-end audio do turn to surround music. At worst, experimenting will reveal some of the strengths and weaknesses of even the best two-channel systems. Most audiophiles already have the AV components that provide the “second system” needed to experiment with surround sound at a reasonable level of performance, and many already have a source of surround music in their existing collection of SACDs. What I’m suggesting in this article is that it may be fun to join them, particularly if you already have a really good AV system. None that I know have made a serious effort to move on to streaming surround music, using truly demanding audio components for every part of their surround system, although it is clear that such pioneers exist. The tiny fraction of such audiophiles that do use their “second system” to listen to surround music do so largely because they invested in SACD and DVD-A surround recordings in the past. Even fewer invest anything like the money in the audio parts of their video system that they invest in their high-end stereos. It is also a track where about a third of the audiophiles I know have the AV equivalent of a “second system,” but few actually use it to listen to music. Serious videophiles now add height channels to their center, side, and rear channels and subwoofers, effectively creating “9+1” and “11+1” systems and shaping those systems around a separate track in high-end electronics. AIX is the only really active source of high-quality PCM and Blu-ray surround music I know of in the U.S.Īs a result, surround sound consists largely of video soundtracks, and has led to the creation of something approaching an alternative high end. audiophile recording firms like Reference Recordings and a number of European firms that have helped keep SACD alive after Sony largely abandoned it, and that are now beginning to experiment with other methods of surround recording. To the extent that new surround recordings exist, they now seem to consist largely of SACDs from a few leading U.S. DVD-A has long been effectively dead Sony, SACD’s original sponsor, has ended its support of SACD and high-end streaming is far more focused on issues like MQA and high-resolution recordings than on five- or seven-channel music. The potential promise of surround music DVD-As and SACDs that once helped lead to the creation of The Perfect Vision has largely been forgotten. Only a relatively few audiophiles now invest in serious surround systems, and only a few companies keep issuing serious surround-sound recordings. The years have not been kind to high-end surround sound.

Best music surround sound reference discs