One of favourite and most beloved films of all times is The English Patient. It was also the first DVD that I bought in my life (I think it was in 1999).

Anyway I was very fortunate when my SACD of The English Patient arrived today via mail from Australia (I couldn't find it anywhere else for sale).

When I inserted the disc into my Technics SACD player I already had a bad feeling when it was telling me that the disc had 0 tracks. Fortunately, after pressing the play button it would start playing the disc however each track on the disc has nasty dropouts and other audible defects. However the very same disc plays just fine on my Oppo clone both 5.1 and 2.0. The CD layer works just fine on my Technics without any issues whatsoever. This is a real bummer as the mastering on this release is really nice indeed. The CD layer sounds very nice, too.

Now the next title on my list is the fairly SACD release of The Last Emperor. Hopefully it won't cause the same issues as my last purchase.

I wish I could find a way to rip the SACD so I could listen to the .dsf files via a USB stick on my Technics.

Wouldn't that point towards an issue on the Technics SACD player?

Never had a SACD not playing, and I've ripped them all (over 200 of them).

Looks like the Technics has issue reaching the SACD layer on the disc?

Julien

Yeah. It’s interesting that he has two players that run this disc fine and one that won’t….traditional trouble shooting logic tells you that the one player that doesn’t work is the issue.

I do have to admit though that with the complexity of things more advanced than CD/CDROM it is possible to produce discs only some players like. Usually this points to both the disc and player in question being less than perfect and their flaws lining up to produce issues.

I have a Sony BR player well over a decade old that won’t play certain discs sometimes (1 out of 300 maybe). Every other player in the house can play them…and this player has been like this since new. If I didn’t have so many movies I may have never even discovered this problem.

I stand corrected !!! I didn't say the full truth !!

Unlike Julian I don't have 2000 SACDs in my collection but I got my Technics SACD player in 2022 and I have only bought 6 SACDs ever since
that I found at a flea market for 1 € each.

AND I have another SACD that has the exact same issues on my Technics as the English Patient SACD.

And I can tell you now why both SACDs don't play in my Technics well at all: They have SACD Multichannel only and no SACD Stereo track on them.

I thought the English Patient had 2.0, too, but that's not true. If I set the "SACD priority" option to Stereo in my Oppo clone the player still only plays the
disc in multichannel mode. But with 3 other discs I have the player changes to stereo or 5.0/5.1 depending on how I set the SACD priority audio option.

The other disc in my collection that doesn't have a SACD stereo track is this one:

https://www.discogs.com/release/1565610 ... c3Njk2Mjk=

(if you look at the disc / packaging it only mentions SACD Surround same as the English Patient SACD )

The discogs entry page actually mentions that in the notes:

"The SACD layer contais only the AMSI II 5.1 surround mix of the recording."

And I can tell you something else:

I know that there is an ISO of the English Patient SACD floating on some Russian torrent sites and this ISO file has DSD 5.1 audio only.

So that's the definite proof that the English Patient SACD doesn't carry DSD 2.0 which is a bummer. I thought the person who ripped the disc
somehow thought it wouldn't make sense to include DSD 2.0 so that's why he got rid of it.

If I had known I don't think I would have bought it. I am disappointed. Yes multichannel is nice, too, but my Denon AVR has a run-of-the-mill DAC.
It's a nice addition to my collection but still I am disappointed.

Doesn't it defy the SACD standard if a disc doesn't carry DSD 2.0 audio ? I guess that's why the Technics is desperately looking for some DSD audio and is
putting out some garbage and showing 0 audio tracks.

I have one disc in my collection that has DSD 2.0 audio only and that one plays just fine on my Technics same as 3 other discs that have both DSD 2.0
and DSD 5.1.

That's interesting, I don't own any of such SACD oddity.

I think I remember that the SACD specs requires AT LEAST a stereo DSD track, optional multi-ch and optional CD layer for "hybrid" discs.

Someone decided to bend the rules a little and Technics -- probably implementing the official specs -- will not look for a DSD multi-ch stream if no DSD stereo information is found in the TOC.

I'm sure this must have been reported before if you google with your Technics' model.

This still points towards the Technics player being the issue here.

Julien

It's weird that 2 out of my 6 SACDs have that same issue and it's also confirmed for one of them on discogs. Especially considering the fact that they both Audio CD layers.

I still feel cheated a bit.

I will contact Technics and ask them about it. I couldn't find anything on google and I couldn't find anything about SACDs that do not carry DSD 2.0 sound like a list, either.

I think they should be made aware of this. In my opinion the Technics player should simply come up with an error message notiying the user that the disc is not a compatible SACD disc.

It's a fantastic player and also has spdif input which I use for my laserdisc player.