would really be a game changer for audiophiles if they donāt bump the price too much for it.
Iāve been using their, whatever upper tier was that allowed you to get a substantial discounts on hi-def file when you purchased them. But the discount as of a few months ago isnāt anywhere near as substantial as it used to be.
(often a 24/96 download would be the near the same cost as a std. 16/44 download)
This is good the hear though, looking forward to seeing if this encourages more DSD product from creators and record companies.
I was looking through this today, the āSublimeā subscription discount makes many of the albums around $12-$15. At this price itās tempting to buy a set of favorite albums that I know for DAC testingā¦
Iād take just more of the SACD masters being released digitally, there are so many you currently have to find someone whoās ripped them, even if your willing to buy.
And thatās before you get into the only available for purchase from Europe stuff because of the restrictive licensing.
Agreed, and for what itās worth. Iāve spent some time looking for copies of all of my DSD albums on Qobuz and have yet to find one thatās available there. So.
Itās a licensing problem, the way physical media was licensed was by region, because commonly distribution was undertaken by different companies in different region. Itās the same reason console titles and DVDās used to be region locked. So distribution rights can be held by different companies in different regions.
I also donāt know the specifics of how artists were paid for DSD, artists who released CD early were compensated at an elevated royalty rate because it was a āpremiumā format, and Iād assume the same for SACD, depending on how those contracts were written, that might require contracts be renegotiated with artists for streaming distribution.
Would be nice is there was enough motivation for the license owners to get through the red tape though.
I just want the DSD files for Jazz at the Pawnshop 30th anniversary. I have some but a lot was corrupt. That is a must have, not just fir the format but as a great listen on top.
That was never the reason, at least post SNES/Genesis, the manufacturers would have preferred global access, it was the software producers pushing for the region locks.
It gave them scope to ādouble dipā, they could sign one distribution contract per region and negotiate terms based on probable regional demand.
There were some odd laws that caused Europe to be split into multiple regions in practice, France has a law that any game sold in France has to have French as the first language seen, which for pre PS2 consoles you couldnāt easily do, because you didnāt know what country you were being loaded in.
Germany has a bunch of content laws that are different to everywhere else etc etcā¦
But localization is a separate issue generally.
My position on this is that I wouldnāt spend money on a DSD album if Iāve already got a hi-res version. I just donāt think the benefit is worth it especially if I can listen to a DSD streamed. That said, Iād gladly open up my wallet for DSD versions of albums that Iād jump on that were never offered in anything above 16/44.
Iām torn on this, while itās true that 24/48, 24/96, 24/192 closed the gap to DSD by a lot, I still prefer it on a DAC with native DSD support, and many of the DSD masters for SACD were just better than their PCM counterparts. Though there are a few cases where the reverse is true.
N64 era still had splits with differences in carts for ntsc and pal and for matching frame rate. I assume the PS1 did too but i dont know for sure.
Maybe distribution fueled some of this but there were also localizations as well.
Tbh i dont know why most of EU still hugs and goes to the grave on 25 frame broadcast. It is outdated at this point and does very little favors for anyone especially sports fans.
Yes but it had an actual OS, so the software could detect it.
On SNES and Genesis, there was no OS, you literally had to write to a bunch of hardware registers to even turn the display on.
Itās a different issue, as I said, there were hardware lockouts on earlier titles, they literally wouldnāt boot, in the other regions. There is a difference between letting me play a Japanese game in Japanese and not letting me play it at all. The hardware lockouts were all about distribution. I believe for PS2, you could release a game without a region lock, but publishers rarely did.
But Iām not positive because approval was still done by region.
PAL was arguably a better broadcast standard, better color reproduction than NTSC, larger vertical resolution, from a games standpoint you got 20ms a frame vs 16ms which really mattered when you were dealing with 8MHz Z80ās or worse.
I used to hate doing NTSC releases when I lived and worked in the UK, it was always such a pain to make the game playable. It was less of an issue when I was developing in the States, you just let the game play slower, but then youād discover the game felt entirely different and needed to be retuned for PAL/SECAM.
Yeah for things I never have to worry about ever again.
Ok yes, were talking about two different things. Roms for NES are listed as with or without headers, SNES i havent seen that but it may be built in and not matter, or not matter as an emulator will just run it anyway.
From what ive seen and heard from speedrunning NTSC goes faster as in real time goes faster, are you saying that you ran it slower so it would match the intended speed or am i miss understanding?
It is much easier now, and tends to be more straight forward. The world really needs a new standard as we are overdue. I just honestly hate the lower frame rates, it dominates the viewing experience for me. Even in theaters something just seems so off.
Old School sprite based arcade games and early console games (pre PS1) all basically dealt with time the same way.
There was no frame buffer, so you couldnāt just triple buffer, or have it tear. So you pretty much ran at a sub multiple of the refresh rate. And lived wit the time budget that allowed. Most arcade style games endeavored to be 60 or 50Hz.
Generally game time elapsed in ticks (monitor refreshes) not seconds, so the NTSC version would often be ~17% faster than the PAL version. This was never really the case for PC games because of varying hardware, and the unpredictability of framerates, But on dedicated hardware without an OS you could time it to the clock cycle if you wanted to.
Some games would attempt to adjust for the speed, BUT since your animation was also designed to be played at a sub multiple of the frame rate, and it dictated movement speeds you would have to reanimate (or live with jerky animation) to really do it properly. So most people just lived with the 17% difference.
Whatās less obvious is input latency while the same in frames is longer in real time on PAL, and the combination of that and the slower play often made the same game in PAL and NTSC feel different, even if one was just running slower. And it wasnāt always that the NTSC version was harder.
It looks like the DSD are only available for purchase, not available for streaming. They donāt show up as a playback option either in Qobuz directly or through Roon. Perhaps that will change but I donāt expect it to become available as thinking through it, it would undercut the value of being able to SELL the DSD version. Letās see.
maybe because PAL is higher resolution and therefore higher quality. frames per second is overratedā¦
maybe its a cultural thing how we determine quality/value, for example something silly like apples, in US they need to be big and look perfect, in EU they need to taste good and not to many chemicals used in production.
