Comment by mtillman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtillman | Hacker News Reader

Related, many SACDs contain a two channel SA layer that is completely different than the red book layer. The medium is normally mastered to appeal to the widest audience. In the 80’s, CD players were very expensive so the mastering were made for that type of consumer. As CD players in cars became the more popular listening mechanism, the DR shrunk and loudness increased. Some (most I think) modern vinyl is actually just the digital mastering and the newer stuff is written from a DSD source-not tape. Even Mobile Fidelity got in trouble for claiming tape when in fact it was from a digital source. I’m old so my ears can’t tell the difference at normal listening volumes to DR as the article agrees but I can absolutely tell original redbook vs modern mastering. Black Sabbath Sabotage is a good example of mastering techniques to “correct” for mic dropouts and what not.

For loudness comps check out: https://dr.loudness-war.info/

>>the never stuff is written from... Or PCM. Never forget that DSD is a trojan horse for DRM mechanics. It's neither in the producer or consumers interest.

Care to explain why? DSD is just another way to store a bitstream.

DSD does contain copy protection and forces digital (other than hdmi) output to PCM.

I have some SACDs but can't actually play them, even though my dac can do the audio. Is there some way to put the tracks on a computer?

You should be able to with a PS3 and linux installed. You need a PS3 from one of the first two hardware revisions (the fat body ones), they dropped the expensive SACD reader to cut costs after that.

There’s custom firmware for Oppo blu-ray players to dump the raw DSD over Ethernet to a listening PC.

> "I have some SACDs but can't actually play them, even though my dac can do the audio. Is there some way to put the tracks on a computer?"

As per the other comments, it is technically possible, but not exactly straightforward: if you have access to a compatible BluRay player, you can create a special bootable USB stick, boot the player from that, connect to the player over the network, and use an SACD client to extract the ISO and/or DSF files containing the DSD data. You probably won't be able to play these directly on your media server, but you can use ffmpeg to convert to e.g. 24-bit/88.2kHz FLAC files. If you're interested, I wrote up the process I followed (with links to original sources) at https://www.michael-lewis.com/posts/extracting-multichannel-... .

Amazing, informative, and I can see it will be a rite of passage for some die-hard audiophiles.

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