SACD player?

Javi - a lot of brands have SACD players in their offers - most of the Japanese have them. Then you have Macintosh. And OPPO.

So no shortage of good SACD players on the market at the moment.

Not many of them have analogue multi-channel outputs though. OPPO 105 is certainly one of them.

No shortage of SACD players. Big shortage of good SACD players! 

Javi, I Have yet to hear an SACD player which is genuinely involving. It seems to be something to do with reading the discs which causes the problem, because DSD can sound pretty good, though I tend to prefer PCM too.

And modern CD players can sound incredibly good...

Frank.

Frank Abela posted:

And modern CD players can sound incredibly good...

 

Frank I am completely agree with this, but... why  then moving to higher resolutions? That is my cuestion. I have a couple of high-def albums and comparing to Cd version for me it is hard to distiguise. I can found very small diferences... but its becouse res or becouse different master?

Javi,

One question I have for you is what types/genres of music do you listen to most? The reason I ask is because I browse s/h CDs at shops fairly often and it is very rare I see a SACD. When I see SACDs online they are rather expensive, and I have a notion (possibly wrong) that SACDs are most prevalent in classical music. My point being that if you're intending to aspire towards SACD replay it could become an expensive proposition with a relatively limited catalog of availability, especially once you include a quality SACD CDP.

Joerand,

I usually listen prog rock, heavy and pop. I agree with you that the catalog is not very big. Now after that fire that I had at home I moved to NAS/Tidal music, so no physical copies used :-)

The question about SACD is just curiosity, I know if I move to physical music again I will go back to CD. Just a question I ask myself.

Thanks for your commets

I have a copy of 'The Dark Side...' on SACD - picked it up from Amazon for £5 or so. Multichannel version is very interesting.

SACD don't have to be expensive - they are just rare. An alternative is BluRay Audio - that requires a BluRay player though. Hence my use of Oppo 105, which works as a multi format player.

NAS playback is of course far more convenient and once set up properly, there is a clear benefit to Hi Res playback. 

Adam Zielinski posted:

I have a copy of 'The Dark Side...' on SACD - picked it up from Amazon for £5 or so. Multichannel version is very interesting.

SACD don't have to be expensive - they are just rare. An alternative is BluRay Audio - that requires a BluRay player though. Hence my use of Oppo 105, which works as a multi format player.

NAS playback is of course far more convenient and once set up properly, there is a clear benefit to Hi Res playback. 

Hi Adam,

I'm looking at used OPPO for BR and SACD playback. I have read online that the DSD stream is only played back as full HiRes via HDMI playback or it is only decoded properly and fully via HDMI out.

If that is the case how is HDMI converted to play through a 272 (maybe via optical?)

Just curious, thanks.

DAN - Optical is restricted to 96kHZ on Oppo (for PMC playback) and no DSD playback is 'allowed' due to copyright restrictions.

The best is to actually use analogue outputs on the Oppo - it has two DACs (one per each channel) and they are actually very good and feed N272 via it's analogue input. For a regular CD playback you can always use a digital connection into N272 if you prefer the sound of NAIM's DAC.

Best is to go for Oppo 105 - it has better quality components and is more versatile.

Thank you Adam.

Rage Against The Machine has a Steve Hoffman re-master out on Audio Fidelity SACD which I am keen to get so looking at best SACD playback options that isn't in the very high end cost wise. OPPO looks excellent plus you get BR and DVD-A (which I have a few that I ripped to 24/96 while starting out in HiRes a few years ago) appears a good multi disc playback unit.

javi,

At the time that SACD was suggested, an alternative format called DVD-A was also mooted. SACD used the DSD encoding. DVD-A was going to use a high-res PCM encoding. Unfortunately, SACD was further along its development path, so DVD-A never really got a chance. Now, there are several reasons for DSD not to sound that good which have to do with the way 1-bit formats like DSD and bitstream work (essentially high level distortions which can work their way into the listening frequency as harmonics with the reduced dynamic contrast and higher noise floor as a result, as well as worse impulse and low level signals, resulting in worse timing). In the short term, SACD made more sense, but in the long term PCM was always going to be the better format - the problem was that it would take another 10 years' development before it became viable in DVD-A - which killed the format! The irony is that now we have DSD implemented within a PCM delivery (DXD). The worst thing about all this is that very high resolution DSD is used as a studio master so we are losing the quality right back at the studio.

FWIW, the classical music side of SACD was fairly successful which is why you tend to see more classical SACDs than contemporary music.

Now, CD is sounding really good at the moment. My personal opinion is that this is due to the fact that CD has finally grown into a mature format after 30-odd years, so the designers of the players have learned many lessons over the last 30 years and the chipsets have become steadily more refined and noise shaping has become quite sophisticated. So, we are seeing very good CD replay at last. However, the CD format contains the minimum data requirement to cover the 20-20khz in order to rebuild the original signal. This means that if there is any data recovery required there is a very small window of opportunity to fix a problem. If you have higher resolution, you have many more bits which you know are correct and which can be used for your FFT when reconstructing the signal. In theory, this should mean a more accurate and better reproduced signal.

At least, that's my understanding...

Frank.

Ok... I see DSD just like a diferent way of digitalising the original signal. Comparing images and pictures with music...

the DSD is like printed newspapers. You only have white (paper) and black (ink) points. Mixing both of them you can have a wide range of grays. Distance between points is equivalent to sample rate (MHz of DSD stream).

PCM is like a grayscale photo printed in a photolab. You have pixels with diferent gray levels. In this case pixel size is related with sampling frecuency and the posible gray tones that each pixel can show is related with bits depth of digital sound.

What is better depends on the amount of data. A fine art print can show a very good quality but it is made only of black and white points (bits). A picture printed in a photolab taken with an old mobile phone is really bad becouse its big pixels and limited gray range (dymanic range).

Hope this makes more clear technical aspects of both techniques.

...Javi

Not quite that simple because the timing and noise issues have no equivalents in the photo world, largely because a photo is static where music is dynamic. I guess the noise is equivalent to rolling shutter effect potentially...

Frank.

You can relate noise and timing issues with pixel sizes/distance between points (timing) and grey/point size precission (noise).

Of course if your original analog signal (35mm film negative) is noisy becouse a big sensibility or low light (high ISO number) your printed version also reproduce this noise.