Explain to me dsd

Hi Joey,

DSD is a different way to try to digitally encode data than PCM. They both result in digital files, but DSD tends to be much larger than PCM.  SACD is a disk which contains DSD data. Unfortunately there is no easy way to rip  SACD, but there are many ways to rip CD's.

You can stream to several DSD capable DAC's over USB or using a hybrid approach called DoP (DSD over PCM) which allows some resolutions of DSD to be sent over a standard SPDIF connection. I'm not sure what the limits are. I think you need USB 2.0 to stream the highest resolution DSD files, like the highest resolution PCM.

Things get complicated though as some SACD players like Oppo will only send DSD over HDMI. Ugh.

For these reasons I never buy SACD disks, but will purchase music files to download.

Best,


Erik

I guess my question is that if my files are all flac, would I gain anything by buying an Aries to stream since it is capable of dsd streaming into my Emm dac2x that upsamples to dsd (if I understand correctly).

From what I can gather, it seems to me that the DAC 2X is doing what  DSP engineers call 'interpolation'. In practical terms, this means that the sampling frequencies for all your digital inputs are converted to ~5.6 MHz (or the equivalent of DSD128).

The Aries streamer appears to output DSD data according to the DSD-over-PCM (DoP) specification, v 1.1. This means that it's actually using the PCM format to send DSD data to a DoP-capable DAC (the DAC2X). This is probably ideal for your DSD music files. 

On the other hand, if all you have is music already in a PCM format, it makes sense to simply send that as-is to the DAC 2X and let it do the conversion to the DSD sample rate.

Of course, you'll probably get the best information if you contact EMM Labs directly. 

Yage I think your response is spot on

While all this tech is fun, I wouldn't say upsampling, or converstion from PCM guarantees one or the other is better. Your ears make a better arbiter than white papers. :)

Best,


Erik