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Beware of SACD Transports -- they probably will not work with your favorite DAC

Hello, I just learned a painful lesson. I'm guessing that not many people will know this so I'm going to put it in here.

The audio on a SACD is encrypted.
If I were to purchase a SACD / CD player I have nothing to worry about. The Audio is un-encrypted inside the player.
However if I were to purchase a SACD / CD Transport made my brand Z, I would have to purchase a brand Z DAC???
Apparently Sony who owns the SACD format mandated that the audio on the SACD itself is encrypted and
the digital output from a SACD transport is ALSO encrypted. It looks like the actual un-encryption is done in the DAC.
There is no standard for doing the un-encryption so every manufacturer has their own proprietary way of doing this.
So I cant use a Esoteric SACD transport and an Auralic DAC which is what I tried to do?
londontk
mahler123
633 posts
 
I should clarify that I play my Oppo 105 and Sony SACD Player over HDMI into the Bryston DAC3
dgarretson
2,394 posts
 
Equipped with the software extensions outlined in Ted's guide, an early Playstation will convert an SACD into an ISO file on a USB stick.  Transferred a PC, this file may then be converted by Sonore's ISO2DSF freeware to the native rate of SACD as a DSF file.  The Sonore software captures all metadata and track sequencing.      
junzhang10
166 posts
 
You can convert SACD to *.iso file. Then using Foobar2000 together with Oppo105  USB DAC in to play SACD. Uncomprssed and super HiFi.
cheeg's avatar
cheeg
80 posts
 
I had a similar issue with my Cambridge CXU disk player. The explanation from the tech support folks at Cambridge was that the Sony license prevents them from outputing the digital signal from the SACD on anything but an HDMI cable. Their approach to playing a SACD disk is to send the digital stream to their digital signal processor, which converts it to PCM. They then send the converted PCM signal to their internal DAC, which outputs to the Analog Output ports. Seems very klugey. They said:
"If you want to bypass the internal DAC, you’ll need to use the HDMI output and select DSD as the SACD Output. However, DSD can only be selected as the SACD output providing your HDMI cable is connected to a DSD compatible device, so you would need to be sure that whatever DAC you have has a HDMI input and can process DSD."  My DAC does not have an HDMI input, but even if it did, I’m not sure their solution would work. The .iso solutions posted by others sound interesting -- good luck, and if you try it, please let us know how it turns out.
jafant
10,525 posts
 
mahler123very interesting topic here guys. Do you like the Sony ES/ Bryston DAC3 combination better than the stand alone player?
Happy Listening!
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