Did Redbook get it right?


I've always felt a tension between the narrative that a) the Redbook spec murdered music, probably in cahoots with greedy plastic vendors, and b) the great respect I've had for engineers I have worked with. I would think they knew what they were doing, considering the stakes and the state of their art at the time.

I leaned towards the murder/greed scenario, especially as my original Sony 520-ES CD player presented a fleshless corpse of Joni's Blue album, and the few high-end players of the time I tried, like the Enlightened Audio, seemed to fail at resurrection.

I've reconsidered. If I rip my CD's to FLAC, feed a Benchmark DAC over USB, and into my tube amplification, I am stunned by how good and satisfying many CD's sound. I have no desire to fire the Linn Sondek back up. I have no sense of things missing. Sure, there are many crap CD's, but is any of that stink coming from Redbook spec? Some newer CD's simply stun. I not into country, but something like the Mavericks' In Time CD is acoustically complete and fully fleshed.

I've been over to HDTracks and Acoustic Sounds to download hi-rez versions, and I can feel the pull to feed my rig the best I can buy. It's such a good story, easily embraced by the audiophile mind, but I'm increasingly wondering if it is all marketing razzle-dazzle...more, denser, higher...and in the end, Redbook got it right, and the new DACs finally do it justice.

Always with an open mind, and there's much better gear than mine, but I'm newly impressed by the original Spec.
electroslacker
There's nothing wrong with Redbook. If its good enough for Manfred Eicher, its good enough for everyone.
I was thinking exactly as Kirkus was - the 44.1KHz rate came from TV/video scan rates.
Good post, Kirkus.
So digital wasn't perfect right out of the starting gate. Was the first turntable?
I think we were lucky to get Redbook quality digital. At the time, the technology didn't exist to do things like lossy compression. If the industry waited to release a digital format, we may have gotten MP-3 instead.

In my view Redbook did get it right, but it's only fully realized when played with correctly implemented R2R Multibit Ladder Dac convertors running with todays far better I/V stage setups.

Not when Redbook is played through 1 Bit, Bitstream, Sigma Delta, or ESS convertors, then it sounds at best, average.

Cheers George