sacd first test

today i have played my first ever SACD... this may be old news to many of you but i was pretty excited to give the Bach sacd i got a run.

my player is a fairly recently acquired Pioneer 565A (so nothing really high end), which has been used mainly to play dvds (which it does very well) so far.

now i don't know if i have to burn in the sacd playing separately from the dvd playing (anyone?) but as a first attempt i was pretty impressed. i played the sacd in a two channel setup (my usual hifi setup) through my amp and speakers with rubbish cable so there are many improvements that can be made. Still, i noticed a considerable increase in soundstage and "air" around the instruments. volume contrasts seem to be more evident too... there is certainly a much greater sense of space and ambience compared to a normal cd (certainly compared to the cd layer of the sacd but i read that they make the cd layer of these hybrids in such way as to emphasise the sacd quality... marketing... )

perhaps with a better external dac i can get even more sound out of the sacd reproduction... you can use an external hifi dac (bel canto for example) and the player as transport to boost both cd and sacd play cant you? or are there tricks i don't know about?

anyway, just to share my little moment of joy with all of you... have you had similar experiences with SACD? What are your experiences on this?

:beer:
Jack

 

Just on the DAC thing, no, you can't use an external DAC for SACD. You can still use it with an SACD player to do the D/A conversion for normal CDs but not SACDs. The reason is that SACD is:
a) a totally different digital format (DSD bitstream instead of 16/44.1 PCM)
b) encrypted.

There are DACs that will handle DSD bitstream for SACD but not many. The only one I can think of at the moment is the dCS one which costs $$$$. It takes a FireWire input for the SACD signal. Of course you'd need an SACD transport/player that also had the FireWire bitstream digital output, and there aren't many of those either.

The simple answer is you can't use external DACs for SACD at the moment.

Michael.

 

Firstly - almost no DACs on market at present will decode SACD material. On all players I am aware of the digital outputs are disabled when playing SACD. Only a very small number of transports equiped with IEEE 1394 output will output a digital SACD signal to an SACD capable DAC - examples are DCS, Sony SCD XA9000ES via iLink to the matching Sony multichannel amp and ilink capable Pioneer and Denon universal players like the DV868i.

I was pretty much bowled over by SACD on the Sony SCD-1 I used to own, but at the time there was so little SACD software that I swapped it for another better redbook Cd player. Now there is a lot more good software available on SACD, especially classical, even from major record companies like DG, Decca, Chandos, Hyperion etc. I now have about 40 SACDs.

So a few months ago I bought the sony XA3000ES player, its pretty good as a CD player especially for its price, but disappointing with SACD, soft and undynamic, reallly need to turn up the volume to get impact from it. It is beaten by redbook CD (including the CD layer on hybrid discs) on a good cd player or through the DAC64 I have on loan.

But - I still remember how good the SCD-1 was with SACD.... and am currently awaiting delivery of a Shanling CTD 200 two-channel SACD/CD player. I was also trying various different dacs and new CDS to improve CD replay but now have become quite committed to SACD so want to improve it to.

I reckon the story of the CD layer on hybrid discs being downgraded to show up the SACD layer is complete mush and exactly the sort of cynical conspiracy theory nonsense that generally seems to get peddled on forums. I have at least one SACD which is a duplicate of a CD I already owned.... I can tell absolutely no difference between the CD replay on either copy.

Already some companies are only releasing some titles as hybrid SACD, at same price as normal CD. Why bother printing, pressing and distributing different CD and hybrid SACD product?

Last week I bought the new recording of Shostakovich Symphonies 5 & 9 by Kirov/Gergiev on Philips from the local HMV, price was £15.99. The same recording on traditional single layer redbook CD was sitting beside it on the rack in the shop, price £16.99. Why bother with the CD-only release?

 

sacd is indeed a great format, but i personally dislike the 5.1 version. too much artificial surround nonsense.

of course, dvd-a imo is a sonically superior format, but both have a far wider soundstage, much more air etc than redbook

 

Technological advances by Pioneer is making the use of external DACs obsolete. HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) and i.Link Digital Interface is capable of transfering raw digital data from some of their universal players to suitably equiped amplifiers/receivers.

HDMI Version 2, due to be shipped sometime this year, will extend audio capability to full uncompressed DVD-A and SCAD.

It is a pity that companies with huge R&D budget has turned their back on hi-fi. Is Stereo hi-fi destined to be a sub-set of multi-channel AV ?!

 

You don't need to reckon it's a conspiracy, just read the relevant Stereophile bit for bit comparison, with pictures.

I agree with your findings Jack, I remember the volume contrast [and the silences], and that was only once, a year ago at Rory's pad.

£15.99/16.99? Not for me thanks.

 

While the CD layer may not be downgraded, that doesn't rule out the possibility that the SACD layer comes from a differently-engineered mix - as others have pointed out.

 

Teac make an external dac that decodes SACD, the D70, Wadia also now do one (a bit dear though )
The Discrete I believe will be available with a firewire input as a factor retro-fit soon.
As far as the different 'mixes' on the hybrid discs go, are you lot being cynical I wouldn't fr one minute believe that sony would instigate such a thing

 

Agreed, and then there's just general music industry incompetence - like here:

http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/372/

 

I think it already is for most companies.

-- Ian

 

I personally havent heard anything in dvd-a to lead me to feel its sonically superior. Is there are particular player/setup/disc you've heard that convinced you it is sonically superior. Conversely which SACD machines have you compared DVD-A to? Not a loaded question, just interested in finding out what convinced you so clearly.

 

Without having heard either DVD-A or SACD I'd still be inclined to believe that SACD was better. DSD bitstream just seems the much more logical way to do digital audio and the fact that you can "see" the analog waveform in the bitstream is somehow comforting.

I also don't really like the association of DVD-A with DVD-V.

Michael.

 

Plus the acronym DVDA has other meanings...

DSD seems the logical way forward, as it ties straight into PWM amplification easily, whereas PCM does not so easily.

 

very interesting stuff...

i guess i was under the impression that you would be able to use a normal DAC for the multiple formats because they now boast 24bit and 96 or 128Khz... and SACD uses 24/96... but now that you guys mention it, of course the digital encoding is different and i should have thought about it... still, it seems a bit of a waste to me.

anyway, glad to see that many of you agree with my findings in the way sacd sounds. i still wonder if i have to burn the pioneer sacd playing in separately or not... unfortunately, the sacd software is still scarce and too expensive.

WM, this TEAC DAC you mention, how would it receive the signal from the transport? Firewire like dCS? and is it as costly as the wadia and dCS? (just curious)

About hifi becoming a subset of AV... i am not convinced that most people will convert to listening to music in a multichannel environment that quickly... i play cello, and to me it is quite "normal" to listen to what we play being in the middle of it, but it is certainly very different (and not as musically enjoyable) as being in the audience. And being in the audience does not allow you to hear the music all around... the ambience may be more realistic but thats about it... to my mind, these new formats still make sense in a two channel setup, and i imagine it will be a few years before we use multichannel mixing for music in the right way...

as for the hybrid layer, honestly, it was something i read and made a mention to... i don't know it to be fact, and if some of you have compared like for like and found them to be similar, i believe that much more than what i've read.

:beer:
Jack

 

SACD does not use 24/96. Its single bit at something like 2.8MHz

 

Precisely, it's a completely different way of digital encoding to PCM as used in CDs (16/44.1) and DVD-A (24/96).

JackOTrades - check out this PDF from Sony about how SACD works.

Michael.

 

The price of SACD software is coming down... when I had the SCD-1 it was £22-£23 for disk in UK shops. But that has changed. As per my post above the SACD hybrid edition of a new Philips classical recording was actually £1 cheaper in HMV than its CD only edition! Like I said, why do these companies bother with single layer CD issues?

From Amazon.com or crotchet.com, SACDs are now about same price as ordinary CDs.

I buy most of my SACDS off Ebay, you can get some great bargains. I've been able to get about a dozen brand new still shrinkwrapped SACDs, major labels major artists for never more than £8 or £9.

 

Thank you Michael.

I made a right mix up of the standards... so from what you said above, would you then be able to use a 24/96 or 24/128 DAC to improve on DVD-A output, since they both use PCM?

Jack

 

I think they have another gotcha in store for you there, some DVD-A discs and some players will disable the digital outputs of your player for anything greater than standard CD playback! This could vary between players, but I think the DVD-A disc itself can do this.
DVD-A has been beset by copyrighting issues and they want to prevent you taking a digital copy of whats on the disc. There was also the issue of watermarking on DVD-A audio discs which reportedly was extremely harmful to DVD-A sound quality. That was a few years ago I read about that, I don't know what has happened since.

 

I presume (ie. guess ) that DVD-A word length is larger than CD?