realafrica

What to use for such a conversion to PCM. Saracon will only convert DSD up to 384kHz PCM It does not offer 2.8224MHz PCM.

.....sometimes I want to convert a single DSD track as a DFF or DSF file. I find that Saracon will not accept the .DFF format but is happy with .DSF. So please try whatever it is you are doing on your Mac and XLD with the DSF version of your file, rather than the DFF.

@ Norton, In my experience of PS3 ripping (over 850 SACDs) I find the average size is around 3 GB and that >4GB is unusual, but they do exist as you have found out. I respectfully suggest you rip all SACD to a FAT32 USB stick (compulsory) and then transfer all your iso dumps to a Non FAT32 drive, say NTFS if on Windows. Your main long term storage drive needs to be NOT FAT32! NB I imagine the rip/dump of the iso process via Oppo is the same as with the PS3, so when an SACD is over 4GB the dump to the FAT32 drive is in 2 parts. You can not join those 2 parts while they are on the FAT32 stick. Simply move the 2 parts to another (eg NTFS) drive and use HJSplit to join the 2 parts on the non FAT32 drive and hey presto a nice >4GB iso.

Of course there will be a difference on playback, BUT for the purposes of this thread, no, there is no difference when ripping. One ends up with a bit perfect copy of the original SACD no matter what machine is used to rip it.

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Whether there is any sound quality gain in ripping SACDs to send to a superior DAC? IMHO the 1st criteria to consider is if the 'superior' DAC is native DSD capable, if not, and it only plays PCM then that is a possible sound quality drop, because the conversion of DSD to flac is NOT lossless. Also if the source of your SACD was originally a PCM recording, and way too many of them are, then you have an initial PCM recording converted to DSD to make SACD, and then you convert the SACD's DSD to PCM flac. It is just too many conversions, none of which are lossless. Personally if I have an SACD that was a PCM recording (eg anything from EMI / Decca) I would prefer to find the 24/96 digital download of that, than to convert the SACD to PCM. EMI / Decca has archived all it's catalogue to 24bit/96 PCM and all EMI / Decca SACDs are made from those 24/96 PCM archives. A possible downside to this is if one enjoys Mch then these digital downloads (so far) are only offered as 2ch, but your SACD might be in Mch. On the other hand an SACD made by a label like Stockfisch is a direct to DSD recording, so ripping it to iso and playing via a 'superior' DSD DAC would give one a boost in sound quality in proportion to the difference in SQ of the ripping machine DAC and the 'superior' DAC. Remember the iso is a bit perfect copy of the SACD. It's possible you could play the SACD disc via a crap DAC and play the iso ripped from it via the best DAC in the world and then the copy would sound better than the original.

@ plp1965, You have, so far been given some good advice, but one other rather simple thing you might try is simply to change the file name to end in .dsf. BTW what does this mean on this forum: Your submission could not be processed because the token has expired. What is meant by 'token'? I have refreshed the browser. I'm logged in........ It took me several attempts to get it to work in the end, but it was very frustrating, not knowing what the issue was, nor what this odd terminology means.

As I understand it, this is not the issue. See comment 740. The singular unusual problem is with those rare beasts with NO info in the TOC. I'm not saying Foobar is superior and there is no need for anyone to be defensive about JRiver. It's just that in this particular case (with no info in the TOC) some people find a solution via Foobar that is not possible, nor transferable, to JR or any of the other players. This is such a minor niggle, I was not even going to comment on it at all. To get this ongoing saga over it is such a waste of everyone's time. I have nothing further to say on the subject. Peace brother.

Ted, Not I, but others, were complaining about other players not being able to read the tags Foobar can create to solve certain issues. See comment 740. I'm not saying other players can't play SACD iso! Just trying to accentuate the positive, where Foobar solves these particular problems then please be grateful for it solving the problem and ask the other players to do likewise, rather than searching for all kinds of work-arounds / kludges. It's a rather minor issue, 'cos if you have Foobar already to create these tags (for iso with no info in the TOC as discussed previously), then surely you can keep Foobar into the future to continue to read the tags it's created. Some people want the tags to be player independent, as an ideal; this is understandable but a relatively minor issue, and my thinking is: better to get the other players on board with reading such tags solving the problem in a similar way to Foobar, rather than any other clumsy work around, like creating & editing cue sheets.

As Foobar can create, save and use / read tags with an SACD iso surely it is better to be grateful that Foobar 2000 does it better than the other software players and encourage the others like JRiver to catch up to Foobar 2000.

All Mch layers on all SACDs are in DST, I believe it is part of scarlet book regs.. Some few stereo only SACDs are also DST compressed, but they are the exception.

A clear & concise definition I just lifted from Mariinsky website: There are three main types of Super Audio CD: Single layer disc - contains one high density layer of audio information Dual layer disc - contains two high density layers Hybrid disc - contains one high density layer and one standard CD layer Mariinsky SACDs are hybrid discs containing a high density stereo mix, a high density multichannel (surround) mix and a standard CD layer. The CD layer will play in any standard CD player but the high density mixes can only be heard using an SACD player

WiFi will always be slower and I would never consider using it for general music playback either, although it might manage 2ch, it just does not have the strength for Mch music. As for speed, 2.5 Mb/s is much the same as my years of experience with the PS3.

Yes, as you say, JRiver MC encodes DSD to dsf, not dst. But I was not talking about JRiver, nor any other player, when stating the other reason for converting iso to DSD. IMHO DST is a very efficient compression method/format, although it does not support tags; in this regard I would agree with you that it is a little more troublesome. As I've mentioned (in a comment, maybe a week ago), best practice might be to 1st convert one's iso to DSF which supports tagging, then compress the tagged DSF to DST. Whether it is worth the 'trouble' is up to the individual, but it will half storage requirements if the iso is stored elsewhere, eg on the original disc. BTW just to clarify, as I can no longer edit my earlier comment, when I said 'copied from Foobar' I meant the way to convert iso to DSF etc in JRiver, and other commercial players, was copied from the free Foobar2000. I just like to see credit given where it's due.

Copied from the original SACD/DSD software player and toolkit, Foobar2000. Another reason why one might want to make DSD files would be to reduce their size by encoding them to DST, if they are not DST already, as DST is a lossless DSD compression format which is slightly more efficient at compression than flac. It saves HDD space.