Taking SACD to the next level?

[Cal_Cobra]

I recently picked up a cherry Oppo BDP-105D Universal Player that has a pair of ESS Sabre32 reference DACs. I have the analog stereo out going to a dedicated stereo system. I have a few SACDs with more on the way, and I have to say the Oppo play with the ESS Sabre32 DACs sounds amazing. Nice benefit of this DVD player is that it can rip SACD so I'll likely rip mine to my Synology NAS down the road.

After looking at various SACD threads here, I see some suggestions of being able to take SACD to the next level by upsampling, audio extraction, etc.

Generally what do folks do to further enhance SACD audio?

TIA!

 

[staticV3]

Generally what do folks do to further enhance SACD audio?

Convert back to PCM, then apply room correction

SACD's magic is all in the mastering, not the audio format.

By converting to PCM, you get the mastering goodness, plus the ability to get the most out of the tracks via room correction.

 

[theREALdotnet]

I’m assuming that the result of your SACD rips are DSF/DSD files? In that case, upsampling is a waste of time and space. Convert to 96/24 PCM, for maximum compatibility, space saving and no loss of quality.

 

[Chrispy]

If you have a player convert sacd to pcm before your pre-amp/amp is one way that's fairly easy. Not all players can do that, tho. Not a lot of point to it, if you apply any eq/dsp it will need to be converted. For me the only interesting part of sacd was the many recordings released in multich that way.

 

[Keith_W]

Most people who believe in SACD upsampling use HQPlayer to do it. It does real time upsampling of DSD.

However - you need to extract the DSD stream from your Oppo first, and then save it as a .DXF file. This process is not easy because of the built-in copy protection of SACD. You need an old Sony Playstation, or some models of Oppo, and special software.

I did consider ripping my SACD's. But before I did that, I bought a DSD version of my PCM rip, and I upsampled that with HQPlayer. Conversion from PCM to DSD with HQPlayer is already a CPU intensive process, and it was almost impossible to upsample a DSD file in real time with the CPU I was using about 10 years ago (Intel i7-6700K). It ground the PC to a complete standstill and music would come out in short bursts. CPU's are much faster these days, but it would still be a CPU intensive process.

 

[dlovesmusic]

Actually hqplayer 5 has significantly improved on cpu resources, my i7 6700k no oc, can upsample dsd 64 source files to dsd256 plus audiolense convolution. Takes no time to start playback with no stuttering. I am only referring to stereo not multichannel sacd tho