I greatly appreciate this channel and the info Paul shares but I think every person who considers themselves an audiophile should take a course to record and mix a couple of songs themselves so they can get a better sense for what actually goes on behind their favorite music. I see too many people commenting here that don’t seem to understand just how much gear and processing your favorite music has gone through before it reaches your desired format...and how much budget gear at that (beat up SM57s, gunked up old tube amps, countless pieces of rack gear both digital and analog and of all levels of quality through multiple busses and summing, etc etc etc). The music making process is not what I would call “pristine” even when great care is taken. The “magic” we hear and love is amazing performances put through gear that the engineers felt helped those performances. After all, what is art without its color choices? Mixing engineers use that gear like an artist uses their colors. It’s not about a “perfect recording” in the end. It’s about how it makes us feel when we listen to it and if it took a thousand pieces of gear to get it there, then that’s what it takes. I think we should all remember this when we listen to our favorite music. Modern DAWs can do 32 bit 384khz so I don’t think there is any limitation to PCM as a format anymore...I would be curious to hear a comparison of DSD and PCM in its highest resolution.

DSD is great but the quality of the artist, composition, instruments used and sound of the recording room is far more important. DSD recordings sound very real but if the reality is a crappy song recorded in a small rehearsal room with rented gear and mediocre musicians I prefer a great recording from great musicians in PCM.

DSD is better, ok, but why exactly? more accurate reconstruction filters, no time smearing? Please give infos, not only opinion.

What we do is we mixdown to tape one quarter-inch running at 15 IPS then we go to the DSD from the tape and master from DSD. That's gives us a dsd and tape premaster for archive. We usually master to pcm 24 96 but for our upcoming vinyl we will master back to tape. Wow this stuff makes your head hurt😉

Best format is PCM because it works through the entire plumbing of digital audio. The audio fidelity of PCM is as good as you make it to (higher sample rate and higher sample resolution). The problem with DSD is that it doesn't actually work with any codecs or DSP audio processing in modern audio architectures. DSD over PCM is a hack. It's fair to say that 44.1kHz 16 bits is not perfect, but PCM is not limited to that. Nowadays you can stream (e.g. from Amazon HD music) bit perfect 192kHz 24 bits. Besides modern DACs actually are not optimized for DSD but rather use a combination of sigma delta and other decoding principles in combination.

Unfortunately the format won’t matter much if the music is not interesting. Conversely, if the music is good, the playback format matters less. Find good music you enjoy and all the techie stuff just fades away.

@Ed Fort The big problem is that almost all music is recorded in PCM 48khz or 96khz and a lot of music is mixed and eq adjusted poorly! Proper adjustment of the EQ. and other tIng when making a song is more important than if it is PCM. or DSD. !

Are there any scientific studies to support dsd being better than pcm?

🤗 HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY …. But seldom popular 😉😍😍😍

All my DSD collection is direct from the original reel to reel tapes. Here I am looking at reel to reel and cassette tape to buy.

I wish we audiophiles can pick one based on ultimate sound quality, but in the end, we are at the mercy of the decisions made by major labels. Thank God for PS Audio's Octave Records.

Pure DSD256 is pure gold.

The DSD to PCM and back to DSD conversion reminds me of Sprockets on SNL when something was translated From English to German then back into English. Or was it the other way around?

DSD is digital and can hopefully correct for media/stream errors, so possible both signal values (bits) and the timing (sampling rate, pulse width or ...) _must_ be quantized in some way: that's just, albeit complex, physics. That also means that the digital information rate is limited. I can imagine that at the same price-point and information rate, it is easier to construct a better ADC or DAC for DSD when compared to some other formats. Studios often use internal formats internally that can contain much more information than DSD. However, recording the source in DSD might profit from a better ADC. And also converting it to DSD might improve playback at the consumer, because of the relatively better DAC. In general, however, I guess a studio "downgrade" to 192/96 kHz at 24-bit and a very good DAC also works for the consumer. Pay attention, however. A lot of equipment uses professional studio-grade ADC/DAC but a crappy analogue path and a shitty power supply. That gives good specs under ideal conditions. However, it might voice radio signals for you or require laboratory-grade cleaned power sockets. My advice: buy something else, even if you ditched your fridge already.

Yes, 'analog kid, digital man, DSD grandpa ! Thanks Paul. :-))

So you take the DSD files, then convert them to PCM for editing, then convert them back again to DSD? How is that better than just recording directly to PCM in the first place? Inquiring minds want to know.

Did he just say "Fucks wit it?"

When is octave records going to release albums on vinyl?

DSD all the way. I don't know all the techincal stuff, but since I heard DSD music files, even when I upsample my Flac and Wav music files to DSD, it just sounds better, clearer and easier to hear for my ears.

Octave Records DSD recordings are the best of the best. Silky where there's silk, gritty where there's grit. It's as real as it gets, for me at least. Whatever your taste in music, it's surely high fidelity.

So if you have converted the DSD to PCM for editing/mixing etc., why not just leave it as PCM, don't convert back to DSD as one less conversion stage is surely better. If you want DSD as a consumer/end user format, then do your mixing etc live (as the musicians performs) then convert the live analogue to DSD and leave it alone, basically the same as straight to disk. If the resultant DSD file has issues, delete it and get the artist back into the studio and do it all again.

What will it take for the industry to record in DSD again? What's out there in DSD is so extremely limited, it's massively depressing.

"Digital audio has used somewhat the same format for nearly 40 years, is there something better on the horizon?" How is DSD "on the Horizon?" SACD was launched over 20 years ago, and is now nearly extinct.

Paul is absolutely 99,9% right. DSD is magnificent. Truly amazing. Please start using DSD. There are devices for playback in many pricesranges. Thank you Paul and others advocating for DSD. Hopefully many start using DSD so more artists and labels produce DSD to enjoy.

What are the speakers in the background ???

They need to do what 3d modellers did and create a unified format like fbx...it alliws for interoperability between apps and its always the same no matter what platform you are viewing on...

Listen to DSD and you´ll never return to other formats. And right, the biggest problem is the volume without converting back. But engineers would find a way in the future, so we could listen to PDM GaN FET amplifiers.

Mmm what about these multi track tape recorders in the studios. If that’s the zenith well let’s have some of that please

The whole recording methods want changing to a much simpler approach to capture a live sound you would hear in front of you well rehearsed in one take only simple analogue mixing no editing but no big record companies do this pro tools etc rule

Compact disc-all the way, baby! 40K and counting!

So no link to octave records where we can purchase some dsd?

DSD is the future!

I had a costumer coming in for an audio system and did the obvious selling trick of playing a 96kbps MP3 vs a FLAC on a decent consumer-grade system. Yet, I could tell from the guy's face, he just couldn't hear the difference. He bought the set-up, so I did my job, but it's all so subjective in the end...

DSD is an obsolete and technically inferior format for music releases and is no longer supported by Sony. A good DSD recording and a good PCM recording are audibly indistinguishable. However, the DSD file will be enormous and so unsuitable for streaming. Converting DSD to PCM for editing then back to DSD is highly questionable. Why not leave out the last step and go with the PCM version? The answer is marketing. Audiophiles mistakenly think they are buying a superior DSD recording.

Hi Paul! I bought your Don Grusin album a while back and I have to say I don't like it. I used my CD player to play the album and it has some sort of nasty flavor to the sound. I don't know if it is the DSD format or your Sonoma DSD recording system that is adding that. I remember when I would play SACD's on my old Sony SACD player that I heard more resolution but really didn't enjoy the sound. Actually I have a recording of Carmina Burana recorded in DSD and it is the worst sounding classical recording that I have. It just sounds off. Like the notes aren't in the right place or something.

Is there any group/authority out there that sets universal standards for recording? From my small understanding, there was sort of a "gentlemens agreement" of sorts for some time until the early 00's when Rick Rubin decided to start the loudness wars. As other worldly the man is, its been sort of downhill since.

i got the sacd cranberries zombie and didn't like how they mixed it. I got the diana krall non-dsd quiet album and it blew me away. Sometimes having the sacd tech is good, other times, requiers good mix men to make good product. same think with pink floyd. the dvd was awesome. the sacd not so much.

If I can't hear a difference on some top notch headphones, then I see no advantage. Has anyone detected a difference between DSD and 16/44.1 PCM or Hi-Res PCM?

👍

A question for the experts. Be it DSD or PCM are the files restricted to the cloud or can they be stored on physical media such as CDs or DVD? I frankly abhor the cloud. Call me a fetishist perhaps but I need to collect an object.

It's been shown pretty conclusively that 1-bit high-sampling DSD is not in any technical or measurable way better than 24-bit/96khz PCM - it's different, but it's not intrinsically better. Sure, you can (in theory) design simpler DACs when using DSD, but in practice that doesn't matter, because everyone has gotten really REALLY good at designing cheap, excellent PCM DACs. I collect SACDs, I don't pretend DSD is better than garden variety 96/24 or higher PCM cuz it simply isn't. PCM works great! Even 44.1Khz covers more dynamic range than any of us can actually hear, and the extra headroom you get from 96/24 and 192/24 is excellent at capturing ultrasonics in the analog source, if you believe those matter.

The problem is not the audio format but how the music is made and adjusted. A format does not get better than what you put into it if you understand?

44.1/24 PCM in a Flac container CAN be as good as it gets... Unless someone is trying to sell you something

For digital interconnects USB is everything anyone would ever need ever again. It's got bandwidth for all the channels you are ever going to hook up at any sample rate you ever need and it's got error correction in case a bit ever got lost. I'm not going to buy anything without USB ever again!

well mastered 44.1 kHz 16 bit digital CD quality audio is already perfect audio. but it must be well mastered and not "brickwalled to shit" and "de-noised to death"^^

This is not about music anymore. More of a huge waste of time.

It depends on what is meant by "better." Better sounding in terms of detail / density / preserved original signal? That has long depended on how much one believes in the placebo effect ("Of course I can hear 192kHz resolution. That's why I paid $120,000 for this German-built, Amish-finished passive amplifier art.") If by "better" one means the perfect reproduction of the original performance including its environment, as if sitting there, that will require more than just a different format or additional channels and speakers.

snake oil....mike drops.

Ill pass on Digital Audio ,,, Ive still got analogue ears.

Why is so much crap being thrown at DSD? Speakers and microphones create significantly greater distortion.

Yes but what does dsd sound like on vinyl can you not print some vinyl better for artists as well get more money! just put a download link in the record. What about a dsd player is there such a thing? It could be recorded on DAT I suppose what does that sound like?

DSD EXTREME!?

Here we go again. "DSD is a Form of PCM"....What? Paul PLEASE do a better job of explaining what PDM is. You can edit DSD without conversion though you cannot mix it like PCM because it isn't actually digital. Most people who record in DSD already convert it to a high rate PCM for mixing and mastering and then back to DSD - it's called DXD (PCM 352.8/24bit) and has been around for years! DSD is certainly the best most accurate and robust way of capturing an audio signal but you just cannot mix and manipulate it like digital PCM which is why PCM has become the ubiquitous format for music recording and distribution. The vast majority of labels that record in DSD convert to DXD and create their finished project (edit master) in that format. Many keep the original DSD captures as they consider them superior and hope to be able to release them in the future when proper tools are available to mix and work on this material. Also I am reliably informed capturing first to DSD then converting to DXD after recording can give a better result than straight to DXD (less 'on the fly' processing) The bottom line is there are very, very few pure DSD recordings available to buy - last count on nativedsd.com was 40 out of a massive catalogue.

No, there is no better digital audio format. There are all computerised manipulated sound. Listen to music as it should be heard in full analogue from source through processing and through analogue circuitry, turntable , tape player onto loudspeakers. No tampering.

And then there’s MQA … with MQA CD’s sounding better than SACD that in turn sound better than Redbook CD’s. Shhhh..,