I just started to mess around with DSD and downloaded a couple digitized albums from RuTracker. Kill 'Em All and …Nothing Like The Sun. I have heard may versions of both but they have never sounded better. I was really surprised, it was very noticeable.
GINGO.
And the law of diminishing returns applies.
Get to dsd256 and you won’t hear any difference between that and 128.
Great source will sound great if its flac or dsd.
And the quality of your DAC is vital.
FGPA are the finest dac chips
Never forget that humans have severe limits of audio perception.
All hires audio is way beyond that limit.
A 16/44 can be as good as a dsd256.
Cd was capped at 44khz for a very good reason.
Much of what I have on sacd isn’t available in other digital formats in higher than CD resolution, and often there are no other multichannel versions available period. But as others have said, it’s mostly about the mastering process.
I just jumped into this rabbit hole of DSD last week. I have a few SACD’s and was looking for an affordable player that could play them through my DAC. The more I read the more I understood the difficulty of doing so without converting the signal to PCM. I decided to download a couple of DSD sample files and configured Foobar2000 to play them as DSD256 direct to my Topping D90SE. I’m way too early on in this to have a solid opinion, but my initial reaction is there may be something to this idea of DSD being superior to PCM with the downside being way less music is recorded in Native DSD. Secondly I am now looking at getting an RME ADI DAC to start recording my own guitar playing as DSD and I’ll start sharing those files. Just need to save up the couple of grand to afford it lol.
I am very much looking forward to my primary source of digital music supporting DSD in the near future. SACD rips are my preferred high-res releases, but the conversion to PCM isn’t truly lossless. I am looking forward to being able to get these releases in native DSD format, and my DAC natively plays DSD too.
I’ve messed around with oversampling to DSD with HQPlayer, but overall I prefer PCM played back on my NOS DAC. That’s really the only experience with DSD I’ve at at this point other than a single test track I downloaded for free to test native DSD playback on picoreplayer. It did sound really good though, but that’s always going to be more about the recording / mastering than the format.
DSD it is actually the result of a primitive implementation of what is sigma-delta modulation (SDM), which is now the industry standard in A/D and D/A conversion. The reason it became a “high end” standard is commercial, not technical.
As a transport encoding, it makes little sense, as you can retain most of the advantages of SDM when encoding the result in PCM.
Merging Technologies, that pushes a lot on DSD, even had to invent a new brand for high-res PCM and call it DXD in order to justify that… PCM is a better format for production after all (their whitepaper on this is fun to read).
Of course it is perfectly possible that DSD releases are on average better recorded, as there is very little room for editing afterwards. I believe they would sound equally good if stored as PCM.
From what I’ve heard from some of the few who attempted it, all the related software for multitrack DSD is pretty unusable, so there are very few albums that have been DSD all the way from start to finish. Typically it is/was only used in the mastering stage for the DSD release - basically just PCM or analog mixes recaptured to DSD (after whatever analog processing is being used) for that format release.
I love my DSD, most of the best sounding recordings in my collection are in the format. I do agree that it’s somewhat rare to hear the best that DSD can offer. You need to have an AKM chip that has DSD Direct mode to bypass the modulation and processing. I just got a cheap DAC with this feature (SMSL D-6) and it’s been wonderful. Doing a casual A/B between modes, I could hear a slight difference, preferring DSD Direct mode even though it’s softer. It’s smoother, but has more detail and refinement. Better and more carefully crafted master as well, so put it all together and it’s digital nirvana.
Yeah, that’s what I got. Topping E70 Velvet with the AKM. I swear even just vinyl rips to DSD sound unbelievable.
I like dsd because many were released with multichannel mixes.
Beyond that, ignoring the care that was put into mastering dsd releases, the format just eats gobs of space and doesnt really sound much better than formats like CDDA to me.