Mobile Fidelity stereo sacds (eg Thriller)

[Sthunderrocker]

So I've been torn that many multichannel sacd and bluray audios sound fantastic, and I'm a 46 yr old diehard quadie so there's that, but I have never been happy with any stereo sacd I've ever heard. This came to a head with the new Thriller sacd. I played it through my top end Denon and it just sounded horrible. Flat. No real EQ. Just no competition to my og vinyl.

So today I ran my zone 2 preamp outs into my sansui quad setup on qs synth and back into my Denon via pure direct like I always listen to my quads (has to suffice unless I set up speaker sharing between amps). I popped in the same Thriller sacd... Wow! Night and day difference. Suddenly surrounded with howling wolves in each speaker. Tight full bass, silky smooth audio. Not as analogue as my og vinyl, but man does it process amazingly. I'm going to have to rethink my position on some stereo digital audio...

 

[par4ken]

SACD especially those from "audiophile" labels are usually flat transfers, more true sounding to the original master. It's so easy to simply turn up (or down) the bass and treble on playback with that old equipment to compensate when the sound is too flat.

Being more true to the original master can't hurt the decoding any, QS surround mode makes stereo sound almost like discrete quad! I think that if that feature would have been promoted much more often and vigorously it could have helped quad flourish even without new quad releases!