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In Reply to: RE: "the quality of the original recording trumps everything else" posted by PAR on December 29, 2018 at 00:29:39
. . . especially since most of my hi-rez downloads and discs tend to be MCh! ;-)
Follow Ups:
Touché !!
However I did say " here" where the space is too confined to house anything greater than vanilla two channel.
What is a subtext to my remarks is a realisation that the whole high-resolution concept started in the late 1990s when the attainment of most commercial CD players was little more than adequate. SACD (for example) came as a reaction to that. However developments over the ensuing decades have meant that the margin in subjective performance between redbook and hi-res has narrowed considerably. Which is one reason why SACD was a commercial failure and why IMO there is really little public understanding or demand for hi-res. Just look how slow the turnover of threads in this forum is :-(
With my Sony XA-777ES player, the difference between SACD and RBCD is almost always obvious (that is, when the machine decides to play SACDs, which is infrequently).
But the thing is at least 15 years old. No doubt RBCD reproduction is much better, but I just have to take the plunge and get a decent DAC that doesn't cost a fortune.
I have a very small number of SACD-only discs; the rest are hybrids. There must be a way of ripping the SACD-only discs to a DSD file and then converting it to PCM. On the used (and some new) market, there are lots of reputable DACs that don't do DSD.
" There must be a way of ripping the SACD-only discs to a DSD file ". Brief details on how to do this are in this very thread further down.
Incidentally there's no point IMO in ripping an SACD and converting it to PCM as most are made from PCM files converted to DSD! It's a major scam. Just rip the redbook layer ( which is usually native PCM) if you want PCM replay. It avoids all of the conversion and will sound better even given the resolution.
Depending upon the DAC, "upsampling" - (it isn't really it is just padding) to 24 bit can bear rewards mainly because most modern processors expect a 24 bit word and faced with a 16 bit one use some of their processing power to insert 8 digital zeros on the fly ( so I am given to understand).
Incidentally there's no point IMO in ripping an SACD and converting it to PCM as most are made from PCM files converted to DSD! It's a major scam. Just rip the redbook layer ( which is usually native PCM) if you want PCM replay. It avoids all of the conversion and will sound better even given the resolution.
That hasn't been my experience. I've ripped lots of SACDs over the last couple years. I keep the .dsf files and also convert them to 24/88.2k FLAC for playback on devices that can't handle DSD. My main system supports native DSD playback, and on that system I don't hear a big difference between playing DSD and playing the converted hi-res FLAC. I long ago ripped the CD layer of my hybrid SACDs, and the difference between the 16/44.1 rip and the 24/88.2 conversion from DSD is usually bigger than the difference between the 24/88.2 conversion and the DSD rip. This is true even for hybrid SACDs from labels like AP, Chesky, and Telarc where they tried hard to make the best CD layer.
I do think it's wasteful to take a hi-res PCM master, convert to DSD for distribution, and convert back to hi-res PCM for playback. But those conversions seem less harmful than downsampling the hi-res master to 16/44.1.
Dave K I agree with you! I too have ripped my SACD's and found the PCM 24/88.2 hi rez taken from the DSD file to sound better than the 16/44 redbook from the same disc.
That's what I would have suspected. The relevance of tbe question to me is that there are some very good DACs that don't do DSD. So, if i migrate away from a disc spinner (as I am inclined to do), it might be handy to have all PCM files in mass storage. Some of my SACDs are SACD only, so there would be no way for me to get that music without ripping it to a DSD file and then converting that file to PCM.
And, as you all suggest even hybrid discs might benefit from ripping and converting the SACD layer rather than just ripping the RB layer.
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