Tascam DA-3000 PCM 24/192 & DSD Recorder ?


Tascam DA 3000 24/192 Recorder.

I have ordered a Tascam DA-3000. This recorder copies to PCM (up to 24/192) and DSD to Compact Flash and SD cards.
It also has a USB but it is mainly for playback but the description also says it can copy from the flash cards.

I will be taking the analog signal(that we listen to)from my SACD/DVD-A/Blu Ray player and record that onto a SD card in 24/192.
Then I will copy that into my external hard drive for playback through the Bryston BDP-2.

But, I'm not sure this will all work as I want it.

I have several hundred SACD, DVD-A,and Blu Rays,do you think the end result will be similar to the HD Downloads?
Tascam dealers are useless with this question.

Anyone with any experience with this recorder would be extremely helpful.
128x128ozzy
You can rip DVD-A and Blu Ray directly to digital. However, you need an original Play Station to rip the SACD. At 24/192 you will probably get audio pretty much equivalent to what your hear from your existing player. The advantage of ripping the digital data is that it is not in any way changed by the D to A conversion in the player. There is a program called DVD Audio Extractor that will take the data directly from the DVD-A and Blu Ray and covert it to flac. I would try that first. They have a 30 day trial and the software is inexpensive. It should be much faster and better quality than digitizing the analog. IF you want to try upscaling the results to a higher sample rate you can do that after you have ripped them. For SACD, the Tascam is probably a good way to go.

In general, DVD-A and SACD should be better quality than the CDs. Not sure about the Blu Ray (not much experience) but hopefully they have more dynamic range that current CDs. HD downloads are a crap shoot. Many are very good especially if they have been re-mastered or were originally done in a hi-rez format. The Sony SACDs downloads (Acoustic Sounds) should be identical to the SACDs. You might see if you can compare one of your SACD digitized files with the SACD download. If you extract the DVD-A and Blu Ray files, the only difference between those and the HD downloads should be the mastering, at least at the same sample rate.

I am currently digitizing a lot of vinyl with a Korg MS-2000 A to D and the results are very close to the originals. The Tascam is in a similar league (although I think the Korg is better, but what owner doesn't think that) so I would expect you will be able to be pretty close to your original analog source. That should be an easy test.

If you want to go further, Busman Audio will upgrade the input stages of the Tascam for not a lot of money.

My advice - rip the DVD-A and Blu Ray and digitize the SACD.
From Onhwy61

"Are you going to copy as whole albums, or break them down into individual songs? How are you going to handle artist names and titles?"

Not sure how the Tascam works, but on my Korg I find it easiest to record the whole album them break it apart. Of course, as a single file that means setting track breaks. I use Vinyl Studio to do that and to do simply tagging, It works with digitized files, as well as digital streams. It is one of the few such programs that has a album lookup feature that will return track names and timings. Not foolproof, but better than doing it by hand. It can also search for track breaks if it cannot find the album. There is a learning curve in doing this, but it is pretty easy to use. It takes 10 minutes or less to break apart a album into tracks, a little longer if you need to enter the track names and search for track beaks. But it is still pretty fast. The time consuming part for me is fixing clicks, etc. from the vinyl, but that is not an issue here.

The alternative is to record each track separately, but that gets to be a really labor intensive job. When recording the whole thing, you can just go away and let it record. If you do each track, you have to sit there and hit buttons for each track. Doing vinyl, I gave up on that pretty quickly.

I set a time for the length of the album and go about my business. When the timer goes off, I go shut off the recording and put the next album on.
Onhwy61, Dtc, Thank you for your help and comments.

What I am planning on doing is to play the SACD/DVD-A/Blu Ray on my players song by song pressing the record button when the next song starts to add the track seperations manually. These songs will be recorded by using the analog outputs from the players. Then, I will take that now recorded digitally 24/192 CF or SD card out and transfer that digital copy to my external hardrive.
With my computer I will type in the Album name and songs.

I know, I know, it will be a long process and I may eventually look into doing something more techno to abbreviate the process.

But, as I stated earlier, I'm not very computer savy.
Ozzy, it would be far, far easier and probably more accurate to split the songs using recording software. There are any number of programs and they are easy to use.
It looks like the Tascam does have an auto detect/break track feature. As long as the source disks have well defined tracks that should help a lot depending on how well it works.

If you have a computer with a DVD or Blu Ray drive, I would at least take a look at DVD Audio Extractor. It has a free trial version and has the potential to save you a lot of time for DVD-A and Blu Ray. The ripping is much faster than digitizing the audio and the splitting and tagging is automatic. I understand your apprehension, but a few hours trying may save a lot of time in the long run if you have a lot of DVD-A or Blu Rays.

Good luck.

Good luck.