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.