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DSD playback and Sony Patents

"I wonder how long until the Patents run out and other companies can design their own software to use DSD?"

Do we know that no one offers this because of patents? Do we know exactly which patents?

SONY does have patents on some parts of SACD technology, including the copy protection mechanism and other aspects of the disk technology. However, the basic sigma delta modulation (DSD) format predates any possible invention by Sony. I looked at all the US patents assigned to Sony that had "delta sigma" or "sigma delta" in the title or abstract. None of these were related to simple playback of DSD. They were concerned with encoding DSD data from analog signals, sending it down wires, and processing the data in various ways (e.g. changing sample rate or gain).

I would be very surprised if playback of DSD data from ordinary computer storage media infringed any Sony patents. I doubt that Sony could stop the availability of computer equipment to play DSD files by means of their patents. Someone should offer this equipment and then we can encourage the record labels to make DSD downloads available.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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