2 channel SACD: worth it? what player should I get?

[dave2010]

1/2822.4 Vs 16/44 for CD, so 4x the resolution.

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Not quite sure what you mean here - did something get garbled?

Hi res depends on the mastering, which might use 24 or 32 bits resolution and a higher sample rate. The higher sample rate should be a minimum of 48 kHz, but may be oversampled up to 96, 192 or even higher.
Some discs have been sampled at other frequencies - typically multiples of the 44.1 kHz used for CDs.

The encoding does not have to create very large numbers of consecutive zeroes or ones in the bit stream - depending on what approach to encoding and decoding is used.
SACD players probably do not use PCM for the SACD layer, though ultimately they should still drive a standard PCM DAC.

Re sound quality - some people say that a very good CD sounds as good as an SACD or even better, but there are too many possible variables to be sure. Others say that SACDs or even Blu Ray audio sound better.
There are also differences in the circuits and algorithms used, and sometimes perceived quality differences may just come down to one piece of kit being better made [whatever that is] than another - and not really much to do with the CD vs SACD vs Blu Ray at all.

I have heard, but not checked, that most Sony Blu Ray players will also play SACDs - and are good. We do have one - but I just never got round to testing it with SACDs.

GIven the situation it is probably best to audition some kit before deciding what to buy. Some of the Oppo kit - before Oppo pulled out of the rotating disc markets - was reportedly very good - though it may still be expensive in second hand markets.

[Macca]

1/2822.4 Vs 16/44 for CD, so 4x the resolution.

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it was the meaning of 'resolution' I was after.

Obviously the higher the sampling frequency the higher the frequency that can be encoded and played back, but since CD already manages 22Khz which is higher than we can hear and higher than the vast majority of speakers can output, where is the advantage? All it's doing is pointlessly heating up the voice coil in the tweeter.

As Dave says it's the mastering that makes the audible difference, but you could just put that master on a CD.

[Gramophonic]

I can hear the difference between 24-96 and 16-44. I wasn't sure if the same mastering was just being upscaled or it was literally redbook on the sacd layer as well!
I wish there was sort of cheap, decent way of trying this out. I do like my few Linn titles that are HDCDs, which my Arcam DV88 can decode.

[struth]

it was the meaning of 'resolution' i was after.

Obviously the higher the sampling frequency the higher the frequency that can be encoded and played back, but since cd already manages 22khz which is higher than we can hear and higher than the vast majority of speakers can output, where is the advantage? All it's doing is pointlessly heating up the voice coil in the tweeter.

As dave says it's the mastering that makes the audible difference, but you could just put that master on a cd.

resolution is usually classed as bit depth. Whether it sounds different in its self is i suppose up to the listener. It is certainly useful in mastering and suchlike

[Macca]

I can hear the difference between 24-96 and 16-44. I wasn't sure if the same mastering was just being upscaled or it was literally redbook on the sacd layer as well!
I wish there was sort of cheap, decent way of trying this out. I do like my few Linn titles that are HDCDs, which my Arcam DV88 can decode.

Unless you have some 'pure' SACD discs that you can't listen to without a SACD player I wouldn't bother, especially as you wisely don't want to spend a lot.

If you have decent headphones there's some tests on line where you can see if you can hear differences between the same mastering in 16/44.1 and 24/192. I couldn't, even though I was pretty confident that I could before attempting it.

[Lawrence001]

Not quite sure what you mean here - did something get garbled?

Hi res depends on the mastering, which might use 24 or 32 bits resolution and a higher sample rate. The higher sample rate should be a minimum of 48 kHz, but may be oversampled up to 96, 192 or even higher.
Some discs have been sampled at other frequencies - typically multiples of the 44.1 kHz used for CDs.

The encoding does not have to create very large numbers of consecutive zeroes or ones in the bit stream - depending on what approach to encoding and decoding is used.
SACD players probably do not use PCM for the SACD layer, though ultimately they should still drive a standard PCM DAC.

Re sound quality - some people say that a very good CD sounds as good as an SACD or even better, but there are too many possible variables to be sure. Others say that SACDs or even Blu Ray audio sound better.
There are also differences in the circuits and algorithms used, and sometimes perceived quality differences may just come down to one piece of kit being better made [whatever that is] than another - and not really much to do with the CD vs SACD vs Blu Ray at all.

I have heard, but not checked, that most Sony Blu Ray players will also play SACDs - and are good. We do have one - but I just never got round to testing it with SACDs.

GIven the situation it is probably best to audition some kit before deciding what to buy. Some of the Oppo kit - before Oppo pulled out of the rotating disc markets - was reportedly very good - though it may still be expensive in second hand markets.

No, I mean SACD is 1 bit depth at a sample rate of 2822.4 kHz (DSD) while CD is 16 bit/44kHz.

The resolution is a function of both bit depth and sample rate. If it was just bit depth then CD would be 16x better than SACD! SACD has 4x more "information" than CD despite the lower bit depth.

SACDs can't play through most DACs although you can now use HDMI to get the digital stream of them whereas originally they were designed to not allow digital copies to be made so you were limited to the DAC in the player.

If you can rip the DSD data you can also play it as DSD over PCM (DoP) with a compatible DAC.

Regarding sound quality, I'm assuming the resolution of the master is at least as good as SACD (analogue or DSD mastering). So in theory the SACD should be "closer" to the master than the lower resolution CD.



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[dave2010]

Regarding sound quality, I'm assuming the resolution of the master is at least as good as SACD (analogue or DSD mastering). So in theory the SACD should be "closer" to the master than the lower resolution CD.
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Indeed - SACD players use a so-called bit stream method for storing the data. There are even further complications depending on how the SACDs have been made.
Some are made from PCM masters, which are recoded into DSD format for the SACD. Some are made - or have been made - so I hear - with analogue from the microphones going straight to DSD, and any CD is then done by a conversion to PCM.
There are supposed advantages of the SACD encoding, but not all people can hear the differences. Arguments based on faithfulness to the original master then fail as often the end user has no good way of knowing whether an SACD was made by encoding directly with DSD or contains a DSD stream which was derived from PCM - or even in some cases analogue - masters. There were some Sony/CBS SACDs of earlier recordings which were claimed by some to be better than equivalent CDs. It is probably fairly safe to say that some recordings issued on SACD from performances made before [say] 1975 are going to be reworked from either early digital masters, or from analogue masters. Later as recording companies moved more of their mixing and mastering to digital, there will have been digital masters in various forms - some PCM, some DSD and some other variante.

Some very plausible explanations are given in this article - https://www.mojo-audio.com/blog/dsd-...myth-vs-truth/

This article also throws more light on the situation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Stream_Digital and mentions wider forms of bit stream processing which are also possible within suitably equipped studios.

Re storing long lengths of zeros or ones an a storage medium, such as a rotating SACD disc, I can't remember - if I ever knew - whether these were digitally compressed to save space. Run length encoding works for long repeated patterns of bits, so if there are 5021 zeros in a "bit stream", that can be represented by coding for the bit value - "0" plus the number of 0s to regenerate. Similarly for ones - the bit value "1" is encoded, together with a numeric code for the run length. If it were desired to have different patterns, such as "0101010101" etc., these could also be encoded using run length encoding. In this case the base pattern would be "01" and the run length would be 5. Run length encoding is a lossless digital compression method used widely in different digital processes - such as JPEG image processing. Even though some processing - such as JPEG is actually lossy, some of the digital coding embedded is actually lossless. The data losses arise from other aspects of the encoding/decoding process.

Some have also claimed that the processing to reconstruct data streams even from "obviously" lossless methods, such as run length encoding, introduces perceptual quality disturbances. If these are "real" they almost certainly result from side effects, such as slight jitter or timing errors in the data streams or alternatively possibly from varying power demands within the systems. These explanations are now getting very esoteric, though perhaps can't be ruled out for very high quality media.

The first article suggests that in fact some of the processes and "standards" arose more because of a perceived need to create high quality videos, rather than high quality audio. This is plausibly possible as an explanation.

Regarding end user acceptance - well - firstly now clearly neither CD nor SACD, nor even Blu Ray video are favoured by consumers nowadays. The money has shifted to streaming - and very probably introduced quality losses which purists would find unacceptable. Films and TV shows are different from music, and few people watch videos over and over, so the [perhaps cynical] commercial view is that "hardly anyone really cares about high quality - and audiophiles are a minute part of our market, so we just give everyone something which is "OK" for most people. That kind of thinking may well have spread to other areas too, such as radio broadcasting, and why I now find that listening to my car radio - whih seems to switch randomly between FM and DAB often sounds worse to me that older FM radios 20-40 years ago. The broadcasting companies - many of them - are not seriously interested in quality, but rather on maximising profits, which in many cases [sadly and stupidly IMO] seem to come from adverts.

So does SACD sound better than CD? There have been many different comparisons over the last decade or two, with few "definitive" answers. Just as with other "hifi" kit, some units do actually sound better than others, but the reasons may be hard to discern. Some listeners may be more sensitive, and better able to hear problems than others. Also the nature of the recording proesses and the styles of recorded music may have an effect. The articles above refer to the need for filtering out high frequencies in the processing chain. In the case of PCM encoding this is to minimise anti-alilasing effects, while in the case of bit stream DAD noise shaping shifts a lot of noise up into "inaudible" regions, but it may still come back to cause problems in other ways, so should be filtered out. If the original sounds actually don't have much very high frequency conent then at least PCM recordings should always sound reasonably good.

It is also clearly the case that some listeners can hear differences between different methods, and our OP here may be one of them. The perceived differences could be immense for such people - though they may be described as "subtle" by some reviewers, and many users may not even notice them at all. I have heard recordings which to me sound great on some kit, and merely "ordinary" on other systems, and I was able to identify passages in the music where these differences occurred. I shall avoid a sexual reference, but shall we say that in some cases the difference can be between a really great mind blowing experience, compared with a very ordinary one.

So after all this all I can recommend is that our OP - who does seem able to hear "subtle" differences, does do the slog of listening to different systems, and making his mind up as to whether it is worth investing time and money into SACD or other hi-res systems for music reproduction - and also note that this may be manufacturer and system specific.

[dave2010]

I would ask the same of HQCD - is it worth bothering with?

Yes - if the only media available is HQCD format. Also I have known some HQCD recordings to sound appalling if played without decoding.

Generally though I would expect worthwhile performances to be available in different formats - but if the only available recording is in HQCD format, then it does make sense to tackle that. That can however often be done in software if you know where to look - and converting the HQCD data into a more hi-res form. That might be a cheaper and acceptable way to get the desired result, rather than investing in yet another piece of kit to play HQCDs. A similar situation applies also to CDs, as some CDs - probably aimed at the Japanese market - also have additional decoding and analogue processing to increase the dynamic range and minimise noise. Most earlier CD players were supposed to include the circuits to do that, but I think few now do. I only ever had one CD where a light came on to indicate that the circuits were active in one of my players.

[Macca]

No, I mean SACD is 1 bit depth at a sample rate of 2822.4 kHz (DSD) while CD is 16 bit/44kHz.

The resolution is a function of both bit depth and sample rate. If it was just bit depth then CD would be 16x better than SACD! SACD has 4x more "information" than CD despite the lower bit depth.

It does have more 'information' but all of that extra information is above 22Khz and on most SACDs it is just noise. And cannot be heard in any case,.

More bits gives a wider dynamic range, but there's only a handful of recordings that have a higher dynamic range than can be put on CD, and to take advantage of that would require listening at a volume you would never use domestically and which almost all domestic equipment could not manage without the amp clipping or the speakers running into high distortion.

[dave2010]

It does have more 'information' but all of that extra information is above 22Khz and on most SACDs it is just noise. And cannot be heard in any case,.

More bits gives a wider dynamic range, but there's only a handful of recordings that have a higher dynamic range than can be put on CD, and to take advantage of that would require listening at a volume you would never use domestically and which almost all domestic equipment could not manage without the amp clipping or the speakers running into high distortion.

Re the HF noise from SACDs - this should be filtered out. If it isn't then it can cause aliasing and also perhaps even damage to some kit.

Re more bits giving wider dynamic range - probably better to write "more bits gives the possibility of wider dynamic range". Many recordings have a deliberately narrower dynamic range because someone thinks that's a good idea - and depending on the type of music there may be some point to that. Impressions of loudness may at first sight be greater with a narrower dynamic range, and the volume levels turned up on the playback kit - but that can be very tiring to listen to. The motivations may be commercial and profit seeking, rather than purely musical. Both CDs and SACDs should be capable of a dynamic range greater than most people would really want.