RE: DSD/SACD [was 192kHz/96kHz soundcard...]
RE: DSD/SACD [was 192kHz/96kHz soundcard...]
- Subject: RE: DSD/SACD [was 192kHz/96kHz soundcard...]
- From: "Kevin Vanwulpen" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 15:02:46 -0800
Hi Roman,
I would argue SACD is a step forward in audio technology.
The technology for sure has it's merits and problems. So does PCM.
Keep in mind the reason why many PCM devices simply sound bad and in essence
gave digital a bad name is simply because they don't have good conversion.
Do to PCM good is not easy, similarly to do SACD good is not easy. In this
respect much more experience has been gained over many years with PCM so
DSD.
There are some mathematical arguments against SACD as well from the (very
respectable imho) likes of Lipschitz and such.
I am not sure if you ever have had a chance to truely compare both
technologies being
A very good implementation of 24bit 96k or 192k (96 is more than enough
imho) versus a very good SACD implementation.
Besides that it's not like DSD is such a new thing, in essence sigma delta
technology has been around inside converter chips for a particular part of
the chips for a long time. For most IC vendors it was in fact very simple to
support DSD, it was just a matter of bringing a signal they already had to
the outside world. Chips who do DSD ADC or DAC are both DSD and PCM chips by
the way, not very surprisingly imho.
I am not sure if we should keep this on a CoreAudio list as this is getting
too of topic. So feel free to mail me personally but I won't post regarding
this topic to the list anymore.
CoreAudio related storing/playing back DSD would be fairly simple. In
essence if a format like PCM 32bit unsigned int would be supported one could
store a DSD stream in there as well.
There is CoreAudio support for 32bit float so in other words that's enough
space to store 32 times 1 DSD bit in.
You can't use the 32bit word in any way to do
Just try imagining how you would implement a simple gain operation by the
way on a DSD stream if CoreAudio would support it. It's not very simple is
it :-).
You can always cheat by doing a DSD to PCM conversion, doing the math in PCM
and converting back. Neverheless the SACD fans would call that blasphemy.
There are some discussions in the SACD camp regarding formats and believe it
or not some new SACD formats emmerging which are... multibit. Some call it
DSD Wide, which is not the same as PCM narrow by the way. PCM is a regular
sampling technique, while DSD represents a sigma delta stream (in other
words you need the entire previous history of the stream, or at least from
the last zero-point to now) to reconstruct it. So some other data formats
would be needed.
Anyway I don't see a real need to change anything about CoreAudio to really
support DSD. If someone were to implement IO for it, they would pretty much
would need to provide custom OS X software for it anyway and at that point
could get it done by using the things already in CoreAudio and doing a
custom interpretation. The only problem I see with that is that a user would
launch a PCM application and attempt to do something meaningfull with the
stream assuming it's PCM obviously resulting in utter garbage.
Cheers, Kevin
-----Original Message-----
From: email@hidden
[
mailto:email@hidden]On Behalf Of john
Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2003 2:38 PM
To: Roman Thilenius
Cc: email@hidden; email@hidden
Subject: Re: DSD/SACD [was 192kHz/96kHz soundcard...]
Hi Roman,
I definitely see a wide market for DSD, though maybe not in the next
month or 2 :) The steadily increasing consumer fascination for
compressed audio formats and more recently downloadable music I believe
is responsible for SACD (and DVD-a) having an extremely slow start.
However, after the technology fascination fades, I do think (at least
hope!) the general consumer will desire higher quality - certainly the
classical music crowd, such as myself.
I prefer SACD/DSD since it is a step forward in audio technology, as
where DVD-a is an enhancement which may be suitable today, but I don't
feel it's a long term replacement for the CD. The actions of music
distributors isn't the fault of SACD or DSD :)
-- John
>
that would be really interesting if that would work to have DSD format
>
streams on PC or Mac OS playing (and documents on the HD... !), it is
>
hard
>
to imagine from what i know about it.
>
>
do you really see a market for this format ? sony sells SACDs since
>
years
>
and they only offer a few thousand titles until today. their SACD
>
burner
>
costs USD 6000, mainly to prevent piracy but thats also why the avarage
>
consumer doesnt buy players - because they dont record :)
>
>
SACD is the next big f*ckup of the music distributors, after DAT and
>
DMC.
>
no wait, thats already napsters .wma ...
>
>
/r
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