• Audiofidelity SACD albums

    From Eric Oulashin@1:340/7 to All on Saturday, July 26, 2014 14:06:08
    Recently I discovered Audio Fidelity, an online store that sells high-quality audio versions (i.e., SACD) of select albums:
    http://www.audiofidelity.net
    It looks like many/most of the SACDs they have are "hybrid" discs, meaning they have both a SACD mix and a regular CD audio mix that can be read by standard CD players & drives. I've considered buying some of these SACD discs for their audio quality but there are a couple things I'm wondering about them, and I'm curious if anyone happens to know anything about these AudioFidelity SACD albums?

    1. Is the standard CD audio on these hybrid SACDs entirely a creation of Audiofidelity? There are albums that have been re-released as remastered versions on CD (by whoever normally releases those albums), and I'm curious if these Audiofidelity SACDs contain that mix or if they're created by Audiofidelity.
    2. I like having audio CDs for the audio quality, but I also like to rip my music to my computer for convenient access. I could buy a SACD player, but I'd like to be able to rip the music and play it anywhere. I was looking up how to rip SACD audio discs, and it looks like the best known way to do so is with an older-model Playstation 3 with SACD capability and a certain firmware version, hacking the device, and installing some SACD ripper software onto the device to rip the disc to an ISO, then reading the audio from the ISO file on a PC. That sounds more of a hassle than it's worth. Does anyone know if there's an easier way to rip SACD discs? I was hoping a standard optical drive for PC would be able to read SACD discs, but I'm guessing there is no such optical drive on the market.

    Eric
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