What is the benefit of SACD if the original master is not DSD ? Like most of the SACD titles that are available right now, most of them are probably from 48 khz PCM recordings. Most of the 50 SACDs that I own are derived from analog masters; even some of the more recent recordings such as those from Audio- quest and Water lily Acoustics were done with analog tape. Nevertheless, I think you question is a good one. A few months ago with great anticipation I purchased the Delos hybrid Mahler 2nd Symphony. I enjoy this recording very much; it is of very high quality. But it seemed to fall short of my expectations of what I thought was a DSD recording. On closely reading the liner notes I discovered that, unlike the Telarc SACDs discs (so far) which are originally recorded with the DSD technology, the Delos disc is an original DDD recording, which is then transferred (unsampled, down sampled, upsampled; whatever) to the SACD format. That may explain a lot. The Delos recording does not have, what I have found, to be the very clear and audible benefits of DSD, such as unparalleled separation and micro dynamics. These qualities are more evident on the SACD layer but marginally so. So, I guess a question that I have is if a recording was originally "done right" in DDD what benefits are derived from transferring it to SACD? This question is important to me now that I see that Telarc plans to release some of its early classical DDD recordings, such as "Firebird" as hybrid SACDs. I'm still gaining experience and learning about all this, but at this point it appears to me that modern analog recordings such as those from Water Lily Acoustics and Audioquest and older analog recordings such as many from Columbia and the awesome disc Mobile Fidelity disc really bloom when transferred to SACD. Likewise, original DSD recordings, such as those from Telarc, in my opinion, benefit immensely from the DSD technology. On the other hand DDD recordings have evolved over the years to be very good, especially at their best. Perhaps, there may not be much to "unlock" in a DDD to DSD transfer. So as good as the Delos Mahler 2nd sounds, and I am very happy to have added it to my collection, this is one SACD I wish was not dual layered. I wish it was SACD only. I have two very related reasons. 1) The symphony is almost 85 minutes long. This length can easily be accommodated on a single two channel SACD (such as the Ormandy Verdi Requiem SACD on Columbia, but can not be accommodated on a CD. In order to accommodate the CD time limitation the symphony had to be spread over two discs, the 24 minute 1st movement on disc one, the rest of the symphony on the second disc. (I realize that Mahler called for a break between the first and second movements, but this can be done with the pause button or a SACD only disc could actually accommodate the 5 minute pause on a single disc for purists). 2) Spreading the symphony over two discs bumped the price for the set from about $21 to $39 all to have "benefit" of a dual layered disc. Robert C. Lang
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