Delta Sigma DACs

Jwm, nobody is trying to win anything (that would be juvenile).  Sound quality is a matter of DAC quality and not the architecture.  When you listen to SACD or DSD you're listening to the output of the Delta Sigma converter.

DSD has inherently a huge amount of high frequency noise which must be removed and contains no added audible benefit. Since PCM is what all studios use it is undoubtedly the closest and best distribution format to remain faithful to the product coming from the studios and the mastering process.

That’s why I prefer to listen to PCM, through a well implemented R2R Multibit dacs.
If I had and download DSD then I would have to go to a Delta Sigma dac and take a hit on the PCM, but then there are some very expensive discrete R2R multibit dacs that can convert native dsd, one day maybe the price of these will become affordable.
One of them is here, https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/denafrips-dac-owner-impressions-feedback-general-discussion-q...

Cheers George

AFAIK, studios use PCM not because of sound quality but because there is no equipment to do mixing on DSD.  Still a lot of people enjoy SACD and DSD in spite it went thru DSD => PCM => DSD transition.

Thanks everyone, that pretty much confirms what I thought.  Now here's the rub: I have a Cambridge CXU that I bought to play my CDs, and to play any SACDs and HDCDs I might want to add to my collection.    It has an onboard DAC with 5 Wolfson WM8740 chips, which use the Delta-Sigma decoding scheme.  I use it only for 2 channel audio, and have it connected to the line inputs of my preamp.  It plays Redbook CDs fine, presumably through the Wolfson DAC (the user manual is hopelessly incomplete).  I had wondered how that worked, but georgehifi's response addresses it, and makes sense to me.

So, you would think that it would be a cinch for it decode SACD's, right?  WRONG!  I recently got my first hybrid SACD, and when I put it in the CXU... nothing.  No sound.  After several email exchanges with their tech folks, they said that I could only play it if I set the "SACD output format" to PCM.  That does give me sound, but I can't figure out if I'm listening to the Redbook version or the DSD version on the hybrid disk.  Why on earth would they require me to use the PCM setting to play a SACD disc through a Delta-Sigma DAC?  Am I missing something here?

Again, SACD is a product of Delta Sigma converter and in order to convert it to analog you need filtering and not another Delta Sigma DAC. I’m afraid you’re stuck with Redbook layer. Your Cambridge CXU can output digital only as S/Pdif and this format won’t work for SACD.