SACD and DVD-A recordings?

[kcl]

I'm absolutely brand new to this technology, so please excuse any stupid questions. (I've never even 'ripped' anything yet.)

Given I'm satisfied with either the SB3/DAC or Transporter that I end up with, will I be able to get SACD and/or DVD-A quality? Will I be able to rip an SACD or DVD-A on the computer and get the higher density information, or do I need other hardware? I see where there are sites like Linn (sp?) where I can download studio-quality music. Is this a good way to go?

Thanks in advance.

[bobschneider]

While some of us have been trying to get this to work, thus far it appears that no one has gotten the Linn Records high resolution downloads to work with a Squeezebox, other than by downsampling them to 44.1kHz files. There are a couple of current threads on this very topic on this forum

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32951

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31616

With regard to SACD and DVD-A, both these formats have copy protection schemes that keep you from getting the high resolution data copied onto a hard drive. I have successfully copied the Redbook layer of a SACD into my Slimserver library, though.

[jmourik]

Will I be able to rip an SACD or DVD-A

SACD I don't know, DVD-A sometimes, but it's difficult. Some you can successfully rip with smartripper, or a combination of smartripper, vstrip and lpcm24 (see: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showpo...1&postcount=34 ).
But it doesn't always work...

jan

[DCtoDaylight]

SACD doesn't use PCM encoding, like DVD-A or CD's. As a result, it's not compatible with either a Squeeze box or a Transporter. Most SACD's also have a CD layer, which you can rip and play, but it's no higher quality than a standard CD.

DVD-A disc's are encrypted, and generally cannot be ripped, although if you can, they are completely compatible with the Transporter. The only way to rip a DVD-A, that I'm aware of, is with a hack to WinDVD, which you may be able to find if you look hard enough....

There are also some music releases on DVD-Video, using it's best audio quality, which is 24/96. These can usually be ripped using any ripper that extracts audio from video DVD's such as "DVD Audio Extractor".

Cheers!

[DCtoDaylight]

DVD-A disc's are encrypted, and generally cannot be ripped, although if you can, they are completely compatible with the Transporter.
Cheers!

Oooops! Got a little carried away there! I should have said any DVD-A's with a sample rate of 96k or lower are compatible with a Transporter. The DVD-A's recorded at 192k will need to be down converted.

Dave

[CarlOtto]

Ripping SACD's can be done but has a couple of major drawbacks:

1) It takes expensive equipment (see below)
2) It takes a lot-of-hard-disk-space!!!
3) It is difficult to play the high resolution music.

Slimserver/Squeezebox/Transporter etc can't do it, you need other players. Even so, you may not get the full resolution when playing.

How to do it:

You need a SACD player with a digital out, this is the expensive bit. A dCS Verdi will sort it, but it will set you back a serious amount of money.

The digital out will be a firewire. The format of the audio is not PCM, as pointed out above, but rather DSD and it is copy protected (that is a native feature of the firewire). So you need to shift it over to a non-copy protected format. To do this, you can use a digital filter like the dCS Purcell. That is a digital up/down sampler. The later versions of this will take firewire input (DSD format) and resample/reformat it to whatever you like and what you like here is "Dual AES". The AES format contains no copy protection, so the Purcell kindly removes the protection and puts out a 192 kS/s PCM formatted audio signal.

Now, handling this signal is a bit of a nightmare. The "dual AES" means exactly that; It is two AES cables. You want to feed this into a computer sound card and record the digital signal to hard disk. Unfortunately, not many soundcards will handle a dual AES which is a pretty extreme format. You can find one though, but it will again set you back a lot of money.

The whole setup of a dCS SACD player, a digital filter and a soundcard able to receive the 192 kS/s signal is - expensive.

I don't know of any other consumer SACD player capable of producing digital DSD out, but they might exist. There is also some studio equipment, notably dCS again, that can do this.

I've compared the quality of SACD to an upsampled 44.1 kS/s source of the same music (so the CD layer of an SACD recording) and the quality difference is there, but it is small. I haven't found it worth bothering really so I use streaming audio via Slimserver and 44.1 kS/s into an upsampler and very rarely actually play an SACD recording.

Some general info on high quality streaming audio is here:
http://www.lossless-music.net
[/shameless plug]

[kcl]

CarlOtto -- Thanks for that great information! Yes, I've just about come to the conclusion that SACD and DVD-A is not reasonably doable.

I did find that Linn Records has a number of "Studio Quality" downloadable music. I think I'm going to give that a try, as well as see how the CD layer of SACDs work (as you recommend).

You mentioned "so I use streaming audio via Slimserver and 44.1 kS/s into an upsampler". Do you mean through a Squeezebox or Transporter? If so, what upsampler do you use and/or recommend?

Thanks again!

[MahlerFreak]

I have been using a player modified by these folks:

http://dvdupgrades.ch/digital_audio.html

for a couple of years now to convert SACD to 24bit 88.2 Khz PCM for input into my Meridian system (which doesn't have DSD digital input). It outputs 24/96 from DVD-Audio, too.

I haven't tried to use it to rip audio, though, and I doubt I will - it would be awfully cumbersome and slow, in the best case.

[CarlOtto]

You mentioned "so I use streaming audio via Slimserver and 44.1 kS/s into an upsampler". Do you mean through a Squeezebox or Transporter? If so, what upsampler do you use and/or recommend?

I did use a Sqeezebox first but the Transporter wasn't available (or even known) at the time so I eventually gave up on the SB3 because it couldn't handle external clocking (and balanced connections). I changed over to using a professional soundcard (a Lynx Two) which has all the clocking etc I was looking for.

Transporter handles all this - but I didn't know that one was being developed (1-2 years ago).

Then I used my SB3 as display, because it looks so good. I used a SoftSqueeze in the HTPC into the sound card and synchronized that player to my SB3 where I controlled the music. Drawback with that is that the synch isn't very reliable and I lost the gapless feature of my FLAC music. So in the end I left the SB3 completely and I now use a little handheld (IPAQ) as remote.

I think I prefer this over a Transporter anyway, I have got used to having all this information, including a nice picture of the actual CD playing.

The upsampler I have is a dCS Purcell. Mine is a Firewire version, but if you haven't got more dCS equipment, the FW is of little use to you. You can get an older Purcell - which is exactly as good audio-wise. It will still nicely re-sample your 44.1 (or 48 or 96 or whatever) to 192 kS/S (or 176, or 96, or whatever). These older Purcells can be found at around USD 1500 second hand (Ebay, Audiogone) and they are very much value for money.

One advantage above the actual upsampling, is that it also re-creates the clock. This re-clocking is very accurate and it does improve on the sound even from something as good as SqueezeBox (and I presume, even from a Transporter).

If you can find a Purcell with word clock in/out connectors (some of the older purcells had no word clock in I think - you need to investigate that in detail for each machine as they can have been upgraded) - you can experiment with clocking quite a lot.

I currently have no proper master clock (a dCS Verona is on my wish list, but I refuse to fork out for a new and second hand ones are scarce). The second best option I've found is to use the clock from my soundcard to daisy-chain around the rest of the equipment as an almost-master-clock. It takes a lot of experimenting though.

When I used the clock from my DAC as master (which would be the natural choice), I got funny effects (sound fluttering on certain sample frequencies but not all). In theory, I can see no reason for this but I have assumed it has to do with my daisy-chaining (clock out from DAC, into next thing and then out from that into next etc). The daisy-chain works better using the soundcard clock, I get very good sound but it does lose the synch once every half hour or so with a crack sound, silence for a few seconds and then re-synch. I can live with that because the sound is better in between than if I had not used this quasi-central clock.

The art of streaming lossless audio to hifi equipment

[CarlOtto]

I have been using a player modified by these folks:

http://dvdupgrades.ch/digital_audio.html

for a couple of years now to convert SACD to 24bit 88.2 Khz PCM for input into my Meridian system (which doesn't have DSD digital input). It outputs 24/96 from DVD-Audio, too.

I haven't tried to use it to rip audio, though, and I doubt I will - it would be awfully cumbersome and slow, in the best case.

I've seen this system, it's interesting. It is certainly an option for ripping as well, but the downside of a hell of a lot of diskspace etc are still there of course.

I had another problem when I experimented with higher sampling frequencies as well (which was another reason I shelved it); I'm using a SoftSqueeze to play the music from Slimserver through my soundcard (Lynx Two) connected further to upsampler + DAC. It turned out (about 1 year ago, don't know if it has been fixed) that SoftSqueeze did not check the sample frequency in the sound file (or if it was Slimserver, don't know). What happened was that when I played a 48 kS/s file through Slimserver + SoftSqueeze, the sound was sent out as 44.1 kS/s. I could then only get it right if I manually adjusted the "master" clock, i.e. my soundcard clock to 48 kHz. This option is no option, I can't keep track of which soundfile is which sample frequency and I can't handle this with a little IPAQ as remote. I needed Slimserver + Softsqueeze to correctly identify the sample frequency in the file and send it at the correct rate. Apparently not working at least a year ago.

I tried using other players (on pure WAV files) and that worked fine, sample rate switched where it should. So it seemed to be a Slimserver/Softqueeze thing.

Anyway - ripping SACD, even if ripping it to 44.1 kS/s can actually sometimes also be interesting. One example is the old Mercury Living Presence recordings. They were remastered in the early 1990's to CD by Wilma Cozart herself with very good result. Lately, they have come out on SACD as well, now remastered again from the original source (35 mm film). But the CD layer on the SACD's is the older Wilma Cozart remastering.

By ripping such a SACD and downsampling to CD (44.1), it is possible that the sound quality is better than if you rip the CD layer. After all there is 10-15 years between the Cozart remaster and the newer SACD remaster so technology could have improved. I have thought about trying this just for fun, but it is a lot of work so I'll probably shelf that project...



Using FLAC lossless encoding for streaming hifi