GeorgeK

Guys a quick question regarding the TEAC UD 501. Anyone using it with windows 8? Is the supplied driver windows 8 compatible?

Just to let others know... I contacted John and he told me there is some slowness on these speeds. He asked me to contact him again after new year for some news on the field. I will post here when I know something more.

Just a quick question guys. Do you know if this DAC is capable (through any driver) of 24/352.8, 24/384, 32/352.8, 32/384 playback? I know there is not much content on these categories (though perhaps for the 352.8 converted SACD rips might work) but future proofing is always nice to have.

Just in case someone else wants to take a look at that DR situation. I retried with sacd decoder 0.5.10 on foobar 1.1.12a and it no longer happens. I get DR13 on the ISO (same as on the flacs) which at least makes sense. So I suppose something was "fixed" either on the decoder or on foobar. It would still be interesting to know if anyone else noticed this discrepancy (and more importantly if you hear any differences)...

Thanks for all the help :-) As mlknez pointed out luckily there are not many non-standard SACDs out there. I think I have only one more and that one is 3.0 I do have another puzzle though, so if anyone has any insights they will be greatly appreciated. I have been fiddling around with the dynamic range plugin in foobar. As I understand it, it works on the PCM stream. What is puzzling is that if I run the plugin against an SACD ISO I get a DR of around 15 or 16. I assume that behind the scenes this calls sacd decoder plugin (0.5.9) and runs the dynamic range calculations on the PCM outcome. If I convert to flac (using the same sacd plugin with the same settings) and then run dynamic range calculations on the flac files I get a DR of around 13. If I run the dynamic range plugin on extracted DSF or DFF files (again using the same sacd plugin with the same settings) I also get a DR of around 13. If I convert the DSF/DFF to flac using audiogate I again get a DR of around 13 on the final flacs. This is with foobar 1.1.11 and happens always (I have tried on 5 different SACDs with consistent results). Any clue as to why the ISO might get a higher DR rate? I should point out that I cannot detect any obvious sonic differences between the ISO and the flacs (I would have expected to at least hear something different say when moving from a soft to a loud passage) so the question is rather philosophical.

And yes mlknez you are indeed correct. The first SACD that I tried was indeed a 5 channel case not a 5.1. I thought that it was an inherent problem with multi-channel conversion but after eading your post I tried on another 5.1 (Jacques Loussier Trio, Best of Play Bach) and it worked fine. Thanks for the heads-up :-) Cheers, George PS: thousands?!?!?!?! (nice!!!!)

Hey Harald, I had initially considered wavpack but I can occasionally listen to 5.1 at a friend's place. He uses a media player and not a PC as the first source, which as you may have guessed does not support wavpack, so flacs it is for now. WavPack is a nice format but unfortunately it has not caught up in hardware. Cheers, George.

I am not sure if anyone has posted this conversion method before so here goes. After following ted's excellent guide I found out I was missing something about multi-channel audio and conversion from the DSD to PCM (unfortunately I do not yet own a DSD capable DAC much less a multi-channel one, heck I do not even know if one exists yet, so going through PCM is the only option for now). I am a Windows user and use foobar2000 as my player. By using sacd decoder plugin (Super Audio CD Decoder - Browse /foo_input_sacd at SourceForge.net) it is possible to convert the ISO image to PCM on the fly (works for multi-channel as well provided you have enough processing power). So what I currently do is get the ISO from the PS3 and take it through foobar2k. Fix the tags on the ISO (they are actually stored outside the ISO file, in a separate xml file, look for sacd_metabase in the link above for more details) and then directly convert to flac through foobar2k. This works quite well. It keeps all the metadata, you can adjust gain on conversion (or use regain which I think is better) and the final result (which largely depends on what settings you choose on the sacd decoder plugin) are very good. I listen through a Maverick Audio TubeMagic D1/A1 on Grados SR325is most of the time and I can detect no difference between the foobar2k flacs and the audiogate flacs (and I do not need to tweet anything for foobar conversions...). I cannot comment on what the final results sound like on a better system. It is possible that audiogate, or other pro software do a better conversion, but for me this is good enough for my current system (plus I keep the ISOs and can try different algorithms and conversions later on as technology progresses). What does not work as simple is the multi-channel conversion to flac. Converting to flacs directly from foobar does not work correctly, it produces flacs which do not have duration and bitrate properly set (I suppose among others), so you cannot navigate back and forth and say go to 1min 23sec, it also does not allow other plugins to operate correctly on the flac files (no regain, no dynamic range). They are playable though... What I do here is use foobar2k to convert to WAV and then use the command line flac to do the conversion without preserving metadata. I then fix the metadata on the final flacs through foobar2k again. Ok so this is not exactly straight one-click conversion but I think it is simple enough to know about. This process produces correct flacs. Perhaps this will prove useful to someone else as well.

For those trying the network rip method keep in mind that there may be something wrong when using winXP. Look at issue 41

Hi all! Just a quick question. I have managed after quite some effort to find a PS3 that can read SACDs and is at the right firmware version. Unfortunately it came without controllers. Do I need a sixaxis controller to proceed? Or can I do this with a compatible controller and a keyboard? Cheers, George.