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manisandher wrote:

Unlike you, I've never heard 4-bit DSD. But whatever DSD/SACD format Soundmirror is using, it's pretty damn good - it sounds nothing like the 'woolly' SACD I've experienced. Could the sound quality be improved? Sure, in the ways that you've outlined. However, the criticisms that you voiced in your earlier posts don't seem to me to be down to the original use of DSD/SACD recording...

I am not a big expert in SACD. I never had and SACD machine and the only reasons for it is that any single double layer SACD/CD that I have seen had absolutely horrifying quality of sound in CD layer. Most of those recordings were re-mastered and if you compared the regular CDs from beginning of 90s to the CD-layer on the SACD for 2001-2003 then it will be very clear that the idiots who produced them deserve to be castrated without anesthesia. It is not the format itself that turned me off initially but the extremely barbaric mastering that I heard on CD layer. In fact I trash quite a few SACD because of that.

I did not have any negative feeling about the SACD per say at that time but knowing that the VERY same people who vandalized the 16/44 layers were responsible for the SACD recordings I was very cold to SACD. In a few year I asked a friend of my who know very well the depth of digital design and mathematics to look into SACD and after his research he informed me that it looks very strange as it has not enough of “something” to do what format is need to do. I do not remember what it was but he has very deep analyses done. In another few years, sometime in 2005-2006 I learned that the DSD was originals designed not 1-bit but 4-bit processing and what I heard in 1999 was the Meitner’s own 4-bit non commercial prototype. Whwn I passed the information that the DSD meant to be 4-bit to a friend of my who did the math  he was laughing – as according to him ONLY then the whole DSD idea made engineering sense to him.

It would worth to mention that Sony killed the 4-bit DSD as it was “expensive” and embrace the 1-bit DSD – the format that has no theoretical capacity to become “properly implemented”. It is surely better then any 16/44, so what it is still a half-ass solution and I would prefer to stay with high-res (88K-172K) PCM as any editing in DSD anyhow is made by conversion to PCM. I wish the stupid SACD never took place as so many recording were in a way fucked up by SACD...

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