Analogue Productions SACDs

I honestly wouldn't waste my money on SACDs unless you have a top quality player or a good transport and DAC.  A regular CD in a good player or transport/DAC will sound better than a SACD in an Oppo or entry level player that has SACD capability.  There may be some benefit if they have been remastered and improved.

@big_greg 

I could not disagree more, if the SACD was originally recorded in multi-channel high resolution and not badly re-mastered.  Most classical SACDs have superb sound.

By the way, hybrid SACDs have two not three recorded layers, one for the CD layer and one with much higher information density for everything else.  There is enough room for both 2-channel and 5.0 or 5.1 channel DSD versions.

I could almost immediately tell there was something wrong with DSD playback through my then-new Reavon player's internal DACs.  It turned out it was down-sampling DSD to CD-quality PCM.  It is fine when used as a transport with external DACs which decode DSD natively.

Note that by DAC I mean a chipset, not a box containing DACs!

I could not disagree more, if the SACD was originally recorded in multi-channel high resolution and not badly re-mastered. Most classical SACDs have superb sound.

I’m not sure what you're disagreeing with but if you like surround sound, cool. We like what we like. I think it sounds very unnatural and prefer stereo if there is a surround version. 

In my Oppo, it’s in the set up menu. You choose your layer priority. I had to switch it to stereo priority from multi-channel.. Also, had to switch it to DSD. It was converting to PCM.

@big_greg 

I disagree with the following statement:

A regular CD in a good player or transport/DAC will sound better than a SACD in an Oppo or entry level player

Sony and Philips 25 years ago introduced the SACD format, expecting it to replace CDs which they also co-invented.

DSD is much simpler to play back than PCM, and has much higher resolution than Redbook PCM.  

I do not know why SACD was so poorly received in most markets, but my guess is poor marketing.  It must be hard to improve on the "perfect sound forever" pitch which almost wiped out LPs.

If you find multi-channel unrealistic, my guess is you do not play much classical music.  In a concert hall, much of the sound we hear is reflected and it is the subtle hall sounds that add an extra tad of realism, if the recording engineer so chooses!