The sound quality of DSD?

[Pluto]

When designing the SACD format, Sony bizarrely chose 1-bit DSD

Simply because they had the format, more or less fully formed and ready to wear. The system had been developed a few years earlier as a means of archiving to a better standard than was then possible and, furthermore, Sony/Philips owned every patent relating to the system. It was the marketing executive's dream as the successor to Red Book CD and the solution to the CD-R problem.

And had Sony not been quite so avaricious in its development of what was to become SACD, things might have turned out very differently.

 

[mansr]

Simply because they had the format, more or less fully formed and ready to wear. The system had been developed a few years earlier as a means of archiving to a better standard than was then possible and, furthermore, Sony/Philips owned every patent relating to the system. It was the marketing executive's dream as the successor to Red Book CD and the solution to the CD-R problem.

And had Sony not been quite so avaricious in its development of what was to become SACD, things might have turned out very differently.

It is plausible that in the mid 90s, the best ADC available was a 1-bit sigma-delta design running at or around 64x CD rate. For archival use at that time, this would have been a reasonable choice. It was still a bizarre decision to lock the SACD to this particular format. Anyone with a smidgen of foresight should have realised that ADCs would improve, and before long this would become rather crippling. DVD Audio (and later Blu-ray) took the sensible approach of being flexible with the choice of low-level data format, allowing future recordings to be captured in full. Of course, the format still flopped in the market, but that's a different story.

 

[Wes]

Ok... For a start I would not believe ANYTHING on computeraudiophile.com.

....

An XLNT. general rule - it is now called Audiophool Stool, and is even worse.

But in lurking there I've seen posts by mansr and a few others, including a guy called jabbr. You can rely on those.

 

[Wes]

For any comparison you need to control the variables. Some/many DSD recordings use different mastering.

IIRC, Reiss only compared SACD versions with CD layers on the same disc, and found a slight statistical difference.

Reiss, J. D. 2016. A Meta-Analysis of High Resolution Audio Perceptual Evaluation. JAES 64(6): 364-379.

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18296

As a general rule, it is good practice to keep any HiRes recordings you have - even if you downvert them to Redbook or some fancy, dancy compression scheme for playback.

 

[Pluto]

It was still a bizarre decision to lock the SACD to this particular format

Not if you were a marketing droid for ‘big music’ at that time. The golden age of Red Book CD (from a marketing perspective) had been during the era when home computers had 1MB memory (of which you could only use 640kB) and, if you were really bleeding-edge, a 100MB hard drive. Red Book product was effectively copy-proof because CD-R didn't yet exist (at least not at a price affordable by John Doe) and manipulation of the data was more or less impossible largely on account of its sheer size (a typical music CD was about 400MB). The only weakness of Red Book at that time was the “analogue hole” and even then, you could only go downhill either to cassette tape or reel-to-reel where the tape cost was likely to be greater than the purchase price of the CD you wanted to copy.

By the dawning of the millennium (by when CD-R and adequately big hard disks were prolific) the view of big music was that anything that could be done to shield their prime medium from home access and manipulation was worth doing. And if that entailed the use of a new kind of digital format, so be it. And the ability to dress the whole lot up in a wrapper of “next generation leap in quality” was a gift.

A more interesting study is why SACD flopped commercially.

 

[Jimbob54]

A more interesting study is why SACD flopped commercially.

I'm going to guess for the same reasons hi res isn't ubiquitous now. Not enough interest in the mass market, prices too high?

 

[aac]

A more interesting study is why SACD flopped commercially.

Why? Because for stereo CDs are better as the are compatible with everything.
But SACD hasn't flopped really it just filled a specific market - multichannel (classical) music.
There is non-classical music available in multichannel, but I never heard anything I really liked there.

 

[Veri]

But SACD hasn't flopped really it just filled a specific market - multichannel classical music.

Flopped, as in didn't make Sony much money, wasn't the success they hoped for. That's what it is...

 

[aac]

Flopped, as in didn't make Sony much money, wasn't the success they hoped for. That's what it is...

Free to copy/distribute format always wins if there is a choice.
Maybe they didn't realize that or they hoped marketing push was strong enough.
What they didn't realize for sure is that piracy is usually not a price problem, it's an "access to content" problem. Or maybe call it "quality of service problem" as pirates used to provide way better service than companies.
If multichannel PCM would've been possible at a reasonable price at that time (and companies released it) then it would've stopped existing even in that niche.

 

[mansr]

A more interesting study is why SACD flopped commercially.

I reckon it was a combination of factors:

• CD quality already essentially perfect
• Little consumer interest in multi-channel
• Required new, dedicated players
• No mini-stereos had support
• Restrictive licencing requirements for players
• Difficult to produce; only a handful of pressing plants ever existed

The first point, no real improvement, was probably the killer. Today, we are seeing a similar reluctance in 4K TV adoption. It's just not enough of an upgrade. Compare this with the roaring success of DVD (nobody makes VHS players any more) and, later, HD video.

Once upon a time, however, some were optimistic indeed: https://www.stereophile.com/news/11353/index.html

We ran into someone close to the SACD fire, who told us that in three months the situation would be totally different—one of the main record companies had decided to stop CD production and switch to SACD/CD hybrids for all new titles.

Obviously, that didn't happen.

 

[mansr]

Free to copy/distribute format always wins if there is a choice.
Maybe they didn't realize that or they hoped marketing push was strong enough.
What they didn't realize for sure is that piracy is usually not a price problem, it's an "access to content" problem. Or maybe call it "quality of service problem" as pirates used to provide way better service than companies.
If multichannel PCM would've been possible at a reasonable price at that time (and companies released it) then it would've stopped existing even in that niche.

The irony of it is that habitual pirates spend well above average on legitimate purchases.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

I reckon it was a combination of factors:

• CD quality already essentially perfect
• Little consumer interest in multi-channel
• Required new, dedicated players
• No mini-stereos had support
• Restrictive licencing requirements for players
• Difficult to produce; only a handful of pressing plants ever existed

Also, lack of single-inventory for hybrid SACDs.

 

[Pluto]

I reckon it was a combination of factors:

Your bullet points are all, to some extent, valid. But nobody seems to have hit the main nail, as I see it, squarely on the head.

I'll give you a clue

By the turn of the millennium you could walk into any decent supermarket on the planet and buy a half-decent CD player for under $100 – probably a lot less, in fact. It was bad enough that punters were to be forced to buy new players but Sony could have ensured that these new players were available at the about the same price as their Red Book counterparts. Had Sony been prepared to take the hit for a few years, it was within their grasp to have effectively destroyed Red Book and moved the world on to the ‘new standard’.

Why on earth it became Sony's policy to charge hefty license fees which, essentially, restricted the early manufacture of SACD hardware to boutique houses rather than ensure that the new technology permeated everywhere – is something I shall never understand. For what it's worth, I suspect the answer to this question is down to multiple interests within the Sony Corporation and its consequent inability to decide whether, on the one hand, it would be better to invest in ruling the music industry for the next generation or taking whatever profit it could, sooner rather than later.

 

[Jimbob54]

Your bullet points are all, to some extent, valid. But nobody seems to have hit the main nail, as I see it, squarely on the head.

I'll give you a clue

By the turn of the millennium you could walk into any decent supermarket on the planet and buy a half-decent CD player for under $100 – probably a lot less, in fact. It was bad enough that punters were to be forced to buy new players but Sony could have ensured that these new players were available at the about the same price as their Red Book counterparts. Had Sony been prepared to take the hit for a few years, it was within their grasp to have effectively destroyed Red Book and moved the world on to the ‘new standard’.

Why on earth it became Sony's policy to charge hefty license fees which, essentially, restricted the early manufacture of SACD hardware to boutique houses rather than ensure that the new technology permeated everywhere – is something I shall never understand. For what it's worth, I suspect the answer to this question is down to multiple interests within the Sony Corporation and its consequent inability to decide whether, on the one hand, it would be better to invest in ruling the music industry for the next generation or taking whatever profit it could, sooner rather than later.

I'm going to retrospectively claim I was including hardware price (but I was really meaning disc price) here https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ds/the-sound-quality-of-dsd.14773/post-466409

 

[Pluto]

I'm going to retrospectively claim I was including hardware price

OK

But seriously, does it make economic sense to build a Cadillac when you have the option, funds and marketplace to create (and sell) a Ford?

 

[mansr]

By the turn of the millennium you could walk into any decent supermarket on the planet and buy a half-decent CD player for under $100 – probably a lot less, in fact. It was bad enough that punters were to be forced to buy new players but Sony could have ensured that these new players were available at the about the same price as their Red Book counterparts. Had Sony been prepared to take the hit for a few years, it was within their grasp to have effectively destroyed Red Book and moved the world on to the ‘new standard’.

Later, they would do exactly that when they subsidised the PS3, making Blu-ray the popular optical disc format and crushing HD-DVD.

 

[Archsam]

Simply because they had the format, more or less fully formed and ready to wear. The system had been developed a few years earlier as a means of archiving to a better standard than was then possible and, furthermore, Sony/Philips owned every patent relating to the system. It was the marketing executive's dream as the successor to Red Book CD and the solution to the CD-R problem.

And had Sony not been quite so avaricious in its development of what was to become SACD, things might have turned out very differently.

From memory, when Sony launched the SACD format it coincided with the expiration of their joint patents with Philips on the Red Book standards. So the timing was really no coincidence.

 

[Pluto]

the expiration of their joint patents with Philips on the Red Book standards

Which intensifies the question; why did they not do everything within their power to replace Red Book with Scarlet Book? Sony's ability to have ‘subsidized’ the format into the market is unquestionable.

 

[JoachimStrobel]

Which intensifies the question; why did they not do everything within their power to replace Red Book with Scarlet Book? Sony's ability to have ‘subsidized’ the format into the market is unquestionable.

Red-Book CD entered a market that was screaming for more Stereophile formats. Vinyl and cassette had horrible Wow and Flutter numbers, at least the gear below 3000usd. In desperation, people looked at PCM-VHS or high speed tape decks or at least 45rpm direct cuts. Plus the Walkman had created the mobile market the CD was aiming at too, otherwise we would have gotten Laserdisk with PWM. So we were lucky that Red-Book makers did not see the big harddisks and the CDR coming and MP3 was not around and copy protection no doable with that time‘s CPUs. So we got a superb format. Everything thereafter was, is and will be a failure as the market is not there. SACD would have never ever replaced the CD.

 

[trl]

• S/N ratio of DSD at high volume is bad. At high volumes, you can hear noise. Not good at all!

It's from the firmware from the DAC you're listening from, switch the player to DSD software decoding and there should be no more differences.

DSD sounds different than PCM. I've also A/B compared the same tracks in both formats and I can distiguish them. A lot of people prefer the sound of DSD - even PCM converted to DSD. The simple fact that different modulators and filters are used for DSD playback means it sounds slightly different from PCM. It's a matter of taste, not that one is better or more acccurate than the other.

Again, there's a bug somewhere in the firmware, there can not be such a big difference if the audio file comes from the same studio recording company. Try to convert it from DSD to PCM, then do again an A/B test between the two PCM files, but also between the original DSD and the converted PCM and get back with results, please.