DSD worth it?

[Snoopy8]

On 12/05/2020 at 9:14 PM, Tony@melb said:

I use Chord Qutest DAC. This DAC supports both PCM and DSD. I ripped an album (by Hanne Boel) in flac and DSD 2.8MHz formats. We listed to these two formats, plus in LP. We found that the flac files played through PCM was slightly inferior. LP and DSD quality were not distinguishable.

Found that in some SACDs, the PCM layer is from a poorer master!   It is impossible to tell until you try it.  The only reliable material to use for comparison is from 2L.

55 minutes ago, sir sanders zingmore said:

As far as upsampling to DSD goes sometimes I think it sounds better, sometimes not and sometimes I think I'm imagining the difference.

The Gieseler Gross DAC played DSD better than PCM using the material from 2L. However, when I upsampled some of my favourite PCM tracks to DSD, I could not tell the difference. 

[firedog]

There is some great sounding DSD, as DSD releases are clearly intended for audiophiles, and are generally carefully mastered without adding lots of volume compression. Some of my DSD albums are the best sounding version I know of. 

 

There are basically three types of DSD releases on the market:

1. Classical recordings: there are a few labels doing recordings in DSD and the SQ is generally fantastic. Some are conversions from DXD, but also sound fantastic.  Note that some older recordings are conversions from PCM, even Redbook. They may sound great, but why buy them for those high prices?
 

2. Jazz: there are some smaller labels making some recordings in DSD.

 

See  nativedsd.com and HDTracks for DSD downloads of the above. 

 

3. Legacy analog recordings remastered to DSD/SACD. There's a huge catalog of these.  Literally thousands I have lots of these ranging from classic rock like Dylan and the Who, to classic Jazz like Coltrane, and there are lots of historically great classical tapes remastered to DSD. Sony turned all of the catalog it owned at one point to DSD for archival purposes. Some has been released. Acoustic Sounds specializes in such remasterings from tape and they generally sound great. In Japan, where there is still a thriving SACD market, there are a lot of remasters. 

 

Tape to DSD often sounds fantastic, I think there is something about DSD that can bring out the best in tape recordings. But many will say that such a release is "fake hi-res".  I personally don't care if it is a good sounding remaster.

 

The downsides are that some releases are only available in SACD, so you have to rip them or find a rip that someone else can give you if you can't rip the DSD layer of the SACD. In addition, there is very little  new recording in DSD - it's almost all classical, as there's an established classical market for SACD/DSD, and 5.1 channel masterings on SACD. A small amount of new Jazz is recorded in DSD, and almost nothing else in terms of new recordings. 
 

If you listen to classical or legacy rock and Jazz, there's lots of great sounding albums available. 

Edited May 14, 2020 by firedog

[Hilton]

I have a very simple answer to this.

It's more difficult to make a really high quality 44.1khz filter and audio reconstruction and make it sound better than a DSD filter.

 

Put another way, Redbook standard CD's frequency rolloff introduces aliasing, timing and phase changes that are in the audible range. 

DSD filters are way above the threshold of hearing and when properly filtered, not audible.

 

Therefore you would assume DSD to be superior. 

However there are plenty of well mastered CDs that sound as good as DSD when played back through a high quality 44.1k DAC and filter.

 

So my advice is listen to as many 44.1k DACs as you can and find one you like. If it happens to do DSD or MQA, great... but I wouldnt buy equipment specifically for DSD, because there are many more rebook CD's and FLAC's available than DSD/MQA and a good remastered CD will almost always sound good as a DSD recording given the same quality redbook DAC vs DSD.

Edited May 18, 2020 by Hilton

[MattyW]

5 hours ago, Hilton said:

I have a very simple answer to this.

It's more difficult to make a really high quality 44.1khz filter and audio reconstruction and make it sound better than a DSD filter.

 

Put another way, Redbook standard CD's frequency rolloff introduces aliasing, timing and phase changes that are in the audible range. 

DSD filters are way above the threshold of hearing and when properly filtered, not audible.

 

Therefore you would assume DSD to be superior. 

However there are plenty of well mastered CDs that sound as good as DSD when played back through a high quality 44.1k DAC and filter.

 

So my advice is listen to as many 44.1k DACs as you can and find one you like. If it happens to do DSD or MQA, great... but I wouldnt buy equipment specifically for DSD, because there are many more rebook CD's and FLAC's available than DSD/MQA and a good remastered CD will almost always sound good as a DSD recording given the same quality redbook DAC vs DSD.

Hear hear. 

[Gabehcuod]

Firstly, tidal masters is hot garbage. I used to think that it was amazing till i heard CDs and got my hand on Qobuz. Tidal Masters is coloured, DSPed, Bass Boosted hot trash.

Secondly, DSD can be very good and it can also be a massive meme.

Modern music in DSD is 95% of the time gonna be a meme as very few studios actually are fully DSD. What you tend to see if that they constantly go back and forth between DSD and PCM, effectively meaning what you're listening to is converted PCM. You gain none of the benefits but suffer all of the downfalls.

The good DSD however comes from alot of earlier recordings where digital wasn't a thing and master tapes get run through an ADC to DSD.

Almost all of my DSD is from 2xHD and their sub-labels. I get these from https://www.nativedsd.com/ You have to be careful with them though, money has been going tight so they've started scamming uninformed buyers into paying for software up-samples.  So if you do use them, check the "Tech Specs" to see what it was actually recorded to.

Finally, make sure the device you're using has a good clock cause with these sample rates, jitter starts to become a real issue.

[GregoryS]

As someone who uses DSD to record, I can tell you right now that whatever you record onto DSD off the mixing desk is IDENTICAL when played back. 

Zero change, no "flatness", no strange difference that you can't quite put your finger on... it's an exact duplicate.

The downside is you can't really edit it without converting it to regular sample rates but for archival purposes it's unbeaten and that's because no multiple levels of filtering or decimation are applied at the analogue to digital converter and back to analogue, unlike PCM digital audio!

As for any catalogue that you can purchase, well that's a bit of a grey area isn't it? ...because you don't know how the audio was treated in the studio before it got to DSD  Unless stated otherwise, the chances are it went through a regular PCM stage or two during the mastering process so you're not really getting anything "DSD" in full glory, you're just getting it as a final format.

In my opinion, it's not really a consumer format because of that... but for archival it's at the top of the food chain as far as I'm concerned.

Edited June 7, 2020 by GregoryS