Ripping SACD's can be done but has a couple of major drawbacks: 1) It takes expensive equipment (see below) 2) It takes a lot-of-hard-disk-space!!! 3) It is difficult to play the high resolution music.
Slimserver/Squeezebox/Transporter etc can't do it, you need other players. Even so, you may not get the full resolution when playing. How to do it: You need a SACD player with a digital out, this is the expensive bit. A dCS Verdi will sort it, but it will set you back a serious amount of money. The digital out will be a firewire. The format of the audio is not PCM, as pointed out above, but rather DSD and it is copy protected (that is a native feature of the firewire). So you need to shift it over to a non-copy protected format. To do this, you can use a digital filter like the dCS Purcell. That is a digital up/down sampler. The later versions of this will take firewire input (DSD format) and resample/reformat it to whatever you like and what you like here is "Dual AES". The AES format contains no copy protection, so the Purcell kindly removes the protection and puts out a 192 kS/s PCM formatted audio signal. Now, handling this signal is a bit of a nightmare. The "dual AES" means exactly that; It is two AES cables. You want to feed this into a computer sound card and record the digital signal to hard disk. Unfortunately, not many soundcards will handle a dual AES which is a pretty extreme format. You can find one though, but it will again set you back a lot of money. The whole setup of a dCS SACD player, a digital filter and a soundcard able to receive the 192 kS/s signal is - expensive. I don't know of any other consumer SACD player capable of producing digital DSD out, but they might exist. There is also some studio equipment, notably dCS again, that can do this. I've compared the quality of SACD to an upsampled 44.1 kS/s source of the same music (so the CD layer of an SACD recording) and the quality difference is there, but it is small. I haven't found it worth bothering really so I use streaming audio via Slimserver and 44.1 kS/s into an upsampler and very rarely actually play an SACD recording. Some general info on high quality streaming audio is here: http://www.lossless-music.net [/shameless plug] -- CarlOtto ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CarlOtto's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3581 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32976 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
