I am reposting this from the AVS Forum. It was posted by Bob Sorel here:

www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/005445.html

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Hi guys,
I just got the latest issue of The Absolute Sound, and I found this report directly comparing the Water Lily Acoustics recording of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Nature's Realm. Robert E. Greene put together a panel of serious and experienced listeners to compare the three formats, since the exact same analog master tape was used to create all 3 versions. Here is a quote:


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Both SACD and DVD bettered the CD. The SACD has enhanced resolution of space and a cleaner top end. High percussion instruments were noticably improved. And the scratchiness was reduced. Without DVD and memory for comparison, SACD might have seemed revolutionary.
But DVD won the day - decisively - on all fronts. The high percussion and harp sounded nearly flawless, by far cleaner and more realistic than on CD and much cleaner than on SACD, which sounded veiled and grungy in comparison. Spacial impression on DVD was more convincing than on the others. And the whole sound had an exquisite purity. Gone utterly was any sense of scratchiness or dirt. Massed strings has the purity and beauty characteristics of the best vinyl but without the slight vinyl "scrape" that inevitably rides along on LP playback. The DVD sound was what I had hoped for from this recording. People who have worked with 192 khz-sampling recording tell me that it goes even further in these directions than the 96 khz of DVD. But the 96k is already a major advance. The DVD sounds gorgeous!

Many listeners are mightily impressed by SACD. Relative to CD, I can see why. But don't decide until you have heard the same material in all three formats. Nothing else is really a valid comparison. And don't fall for the idea that SACD is "almost analog." The final signal indeed looks a bit analog-like, but the process of making a SACD transfer or recording involves what amounts to running the sound through a computer program. I have nothing against that if it works, but it is not "analog-like." To my ears, it is really DVD that sounds analog-like, in the positive sense.
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Stacey Spears
Co-Creator, Spears & Munsil High Definition Benchmark, Blu-ray Edition and Lighthouses of the Pacific Northwest.