DSD vs PCM .. Truth or Myth

DSD (SACD) is a 5.0 5xfull freq format. PCM is a stereo format. L-C-R-RH-RR would be much better sound image than 2 channel.

@junzhang10  
 
You can have 5ch LPCM. Some anime Blu-rays use it instead of paying the liscensing fees for Dolby/DTS, same with some video games.

DSD vs PCM .. Truth or Myth

Excellent article, this is the part that rings true to me, every time I come up against it.

" When a PCM file is played on a native DSD single-bit converter, the single-bit DAC chip has to convert the PCM to DSD in real-time. This is one of the major reasons people claim DSD sounds better than PCM, when in fact, it is just that the chip in most modern single-bit DACs do a poor job of decoding PCM."

Cheers George

Most SACDs are SQ compromised IMO because they are converted from PCM originals, or PCM intermediate stages even if they are originally recorded in DSD. That is because mastering is a practical impossibility in DSD.

So the best sounding SACDs are often directly from analog material, all the mastering having been done in analog. AAD disks with no PCM involved.

@melm

There is not a single DSD recording that did not start off as PCM. Even if worked on in DXD, that’s still PCM (24/352.8). You can’t transfer analog straight to DSD either, at least not to my knowledge.  
  
Still, my claim about it not being better over PCM still stands. There are no downsides to listening to PCM that DSD can fix, as PCM is 100% transparent (given a good enough bitrate/bit-depth/sampling rate of course; a 128Kbps AAC track on YouTube is different than a FLAC transfer from CD).