DSD is not audio madness, there are real audio benefits to DSD
No, not madness, but the advantages of DSD, these days, are dubious. Let's look at some history. DSD was developed as a concept during the late 90s when conventional PCM converters typically ran at a maximum of 48kHz and an accuracy of 14 or 15 bits, if you were lucky. While there were converters that would deliver 24/96 format, their true performance was highly questionable. There were two significant realisations that happened, more or less, at the same time.
The first of these was when the record industry realised that its principal asset – its vast library of original recordings dating back 50 years or more – was quite literally falling apart. The older recordings were degrading rapidly (as entirely predicted by the chemical and magnetic characteristics of the tape on which they were created) and many of the newer recordings were meeting a somewhat premature end thanks to a mistake in the design of the tape formulation, causing the tape stock to self-destruct in spite of the highly optimised conditions in which the precious recordings were stored. The industry sought a "future proof" digital format on which to safeguard its asset. The mantra within the recording industry was that it had to operate at a level of quality an order of magnitude superior to whatever was being sold to the consumer, and in a world in which the Compact Disc had become the primary format for consumer delivery, that was not an easy ask. Hence the development, largely within the Sony laboratories, of the DSD format with its performance measurably (if not audibly) superior to the 16/44 standard of the time.
The other issue that caused record business executives to cry in their champagne related to the area that we now term "rights management". In its earliest days the CD had been an answer to a record executive's dream insofar as the things were inherently uncopiable, were it even possible; the 600MB capacity of the CD would completely overwhelm the storage capacity of even the largest hard disks available to the consumer. But the landscape was changing. The arrival of CD-R technology coupled with the ever increasing capacity of hard disks had broken down the inherent immunity of the medium to illicit copying and manufacture.
Sony suggested that its DSD technology could become the basis of the next consumer format but this time, there would be no mistakes. The system would be sold in a highly encrypted format, locked in by technologies that would remain highly proprietary to the licensees. And so the SACD was born, the record industry breathed a brief sigh of relief and returned to its indolent and extravagant existence. But while the record industry slept, the world moved on.
Over the next few years, while the record industry was fighting a losing battle to sell the world yet another new format, necessarily expensive, touting an improvement in sound quality to a market that
loved the CD (yet 10 years previously had been largely happy with the sound quality of Compact Cassettes), the technology was moving on apace. Manufacturers (essentially the integrated circuit industry) were achieving better and ever better performance with analogue to digital conversion and vice versa. Sampling rates and bit depths were improving in orders of magnitude with the actual accuracy of conversion vastly exceeding the capability of the human ear.
I have been involved in many well-controlled industry tests over the years in which the capability and resilience of many formats and technologies have been examined and at no time has any evidence arisen that DSD-based technology has any inherent superiority to equivalent PCM. Comparing 16/44 PCM to DSD produces the results that are to be expected given the increase in data rate but once you increase the PCM format to the 24/96 region, DSD is left trailing in the dust.
). Due to a world situation beyond our control, I thought the release of the D90-MQA would be significantly delayed, but maybe not so. Waiting for it to be offered on Amazon (got too many AMEX points for my own good).
