Been racking my brain for some time now trying to find a way to rip SACDs without buying any new hardware. I do have a SACD compatible Playstation 3, but those things are climbing in price and hard to come by these day so I really don't want to mess around with that one.

Then I found this little item when cleaning out one of my company's offices:

They said I could have it since they don't need it any more. Turns out it can record WAV files up to 24-bit/96khz.

Decided to give it a shot with recording some SACD from my Oppo UDP-203 L and R RCA outputs through a well insulated 1/8" Y-adapter into this Zoom recorder.

After adjusting the input level along with the Oppo default volume level (which I'm so glad it has that option), the results are pretty darn good.

Now I know many of the DSD fans here are groaning reading this as this is defeating the purpose of having the music in DSD rather than PCM, but this is the best I could get.

Does it sound as good as listening to the SACD itself? Absolutely not. I never expected it to.

But for someone looking for an option to hear my SACD library on the go in better than CD quality, it does the job quite well!

I'm planning on trying to do the same with my HDCD's to see if they sound any better than straight rips of the same CDs (the regular releases, not the HDCD versions), since I can't seem to make Foobar rip HDCDs properly.

I imagine I needn't record in 24-bit/96khz. 24-bit/48khz should be enough since HDCD's were supposed to be like 20-bit or something like that, right?

HDCD are 16 bit 44.1kHz. HDCD encoder compresses the “20 bit equivalent” dynamic range into the upper most significant bit range of 16 bit PCM data stream then the HDCD decoder decompresses the dynamic range back to 20 bit equivalent. This works only for music with distinctive low passages followed by rapid high peaks (dynamics) like classical and jazz music. Dynamic range compression and expansion are only applied to the low passages and controlled by the cues points in the metadata. HDCD decoder also applies different low pass filter curves using the cues in the metadata. This pseudo enhances the frequency range to 48kHz. A typical CD player ignores (doesn’t understand) these cues and the dynamic range always remains in the compressed form. This “sort” of appears (heard) more appealing to most listeners because the recording “overall” simply sounds louder.

So the actual data is 16 bit 44.1 kHz but with advance DSP algorithms it is expanded to 20 bits and 48 kHz under certain conditions for certain portions of the music. The problem is there is no audio codec that supports 20 bits recordings. You either need to encode in 16 bits or 24 bits. If you encode in 16 bits then you hear the “always” compressed form. If you encode in 24 bits then the entire recording will be 6 db or so attenuated since missing the top 4 bits. I believe dbpower amp has an option to ramp up the entire recording by 6db when 24 bit encoding is selected for HDCD. I think this method is as good as it can be.

This makes no sense to me…

You say you have a SACD compatible PS3…why are you ripping anything? I’m confused.

Also, virtually any modern gear can record at least as well as this device…if you are comparing them only by the size of the files they generate. You’re still converting to analog and back again which means the quality of that conversion matters as much as the resolution of the file it creates.

In other words…you might as well have just recorded your stuff on anything. You’ve discovered dubbing, welcome to the 1970s.

So you're saying I'd have the same audio quality recording from SACD to 24-bit/96khz as recording from SACD to Compact Cassette or Minidisc?

This is something I plan to do one day.....



I already purchased the player in question for next to nothing so now it's a matter of finding the time to work on it.

Oh! They expanded the list of devices using the Mediatek chipset, nice.

Don't bother with the buggy JAVA GUI, the CLI is very straight-forward.
Also not remembering having to make the USB bootable, just putting the right files at the right place was enough.

The usual step were people fail is to adjust the firewall to allow these connections and get the player to use a static IP that is not in the DHCP pool of the local router.

Ripping on OPPO BDP-105 here, over Ethernet or Wifi.

Julien

He is saying you are recording the analog audio output of the Oppo hence it is no longer DSD neither PCM but analog sine waves. The Cirrus Logic DACs in the Oppo will convert the DSD to PCM first, do bunch of DSP including over and up sampling before converting back to DSD then analog. Will your capture sound good? More than likely it will, especially if captured in 24 bits 96kHz lossless. Is what you capture faithful to the original DSD file? Far from it. Does it matter? It is up to you.

I am curious, are there many SACD exclusives? Is it worth the trouble to do all this rather than purchasing the same albums in digital HD from HDtracks or similar service?

They usually come to SACD first, then later to HiRes platforms.

But a lot of the early SONY SACDs have not been re-released HiRes.

https://www.discogs.com/search?q=srgs*&type=all
https://www.discogs.com/search?q=srgr*&type=all

You can sometimes find them cheaper than HDTracks. It took 19 years for Leonard Bernstein's Dvorak 9th to reach HDTracks at $29.49 with a 2017 remaster. Just bought the 1999 SACD for $13.80, shipping included.

But, except for limited Classical releases, there are no multi-channel DSD legally available online.
These QUAD LP or new mixes are SACD-only.

The only new trend is ATMOS mixes on Blu-Ray.

=> https://www.thesdeshop.com/collections/spatial-audio

I got Tears For Fears - The Tipping Point, Prince - Diamonds and Pearls and Peter Gabriel - i/o.

They sound good, even down-mixed to 5.1.

Julien

“Modern gear” does not include Minidisc since it was designed 35 years ago and nothing is for sale anymore. I meant pretty much anything from ZOOM or TASCAM or for that matter any decent sound card. Pretty much anything sold today will be able to generate a file with those stats but will that file actually contain an accurate representation of a SACD? Perhaps. But what on earth would be the point? SACD as a format is so barely better than regular CD in practical use that buying into the format is really about doing everything you can at every step to ensure maximum quality and trusting that expert quality masters are worth paying for. Making Dollar General quality bootlegs of SACDs is…nonsense. You’re just taping stuff off the radio.

I didn't realize that a PS3 could do that. How would you utilize it if you had chosen to do so?

Only if you have the right model: https://www.instructables.com/Introduction-54/



Julien

I understand that completely. Hence the name of the thread "recording SACD." I know I'm not ripping it or anything like that.

I just wanted it to sound better than a ripped WAV or FLAC from a CD of the same SACD or the CD layer of said SACD. I even ripped a few FLACs from the same SACD's CD layer to compare and the 24 bit/96kHz WAV recording. And the recordings did sound better. Not a gigantic jump in quality. Just better. Which is all I was looking for in doing this.

Now if I can get my hands on another SACD compatible PS3 or one of the SACD/blu-ray players that allow you to rip/copy SACD's then of course, I'll be abandoning this process with haste.

Here’s the real question…when you record a standard CD the same way you recorded the SACD does it also sound better to you?

No since you can't squeeze water from a rock.

But since SACD is better quality than a Redbook CD, it would sound better recording it to a 24-bit/96kHz WAV than to a CD recorder wouldn't it?

You say “no”, but did you actually do it?

The reason I ask is because people like compression and distortion. With default settings this recorder should produce a very transparent recording but it’s still an analog generation down. The DAC in your SACD and the Zoom device have both hand their hands all over the signal. CDs extracted digitally have touched neither.

Maybe the process of recording it just gives it more drive and that’s what you like. You’ll never know unless you make copies from the same era master over analog to the Xoom in both CD and SACD.

What I’m saying is that the difference between the same thing in CD and SACD formats is *so* small that it should be very difficult to even ID them in a blind test. Therefore if you’re hearing any difference its at least as likely to be the result of your recording process as it is the quality of the original recording.

I think the Xoom goosed the signal, to cut to the chase. Can you do a spectrum analysis?

I totally understand that it's an analog generation down. In the very first post here, I said I wasn't expecting it to sound as good as the original. I will add that I never expected it to sound as good as a properly mastered 24-bit/96kHz either. This is just something I wanted to try out to see if it would give me the result I was hoping for (better than ripped redbook CD FLAC) and it did.

With that done, why bother doing any more testing if I'm happy with the result?

If you think I'm full of BS, well, I don't know what to tell you. Don't try doing this, I guess?

I’m not sure why you think I’m saying you’re full of BS. That’s not the point at all. I’m not doubting your impressions just your follow up.

You have re-recorded a SACD so that you’d have something better than CD. But since you never actually tested re-recording a standard CD the same way it may have nothing to do with high res audio whatsoever. You may just like the sound of things re-recorded onto a Zoom and you’ll never know if you don’t actually record both formats this way.

With both CD and SACD recorded this way you can make an apples to apples comparison. A comparison of two digital formats after being played out of the same outputs on the same player recorded the same way by the same Zoom device.

If it were easy to extract DSDs you could do the same thing with an all digital test.

Right now you’re comparing analog-ized versions of SACD and direct sterile WAV files from CD. There is so much different besides the original format that the whole test proves nothing.