Universal Players that do not convert DSD to PCM?

Listen to the new John Coltrane blue note reissue!
I mean a 40 years old recordin! It sounds insane good!

Eldartford! you are wrong on most being mixed digitally!
The matter of fact is the the process mostly involves a PCM workstation of some sort for edit and clean up, and then the outputs are going into an analog desk mixed (usually a Neve, SSL or euphonix) to analog 8 track and then DSD'd. Roxy Music, Franky Goes to hollywood, DOTM, all done like that.

DVD A crowd is a bit different, there are some studios like 5.1 entertainment who use PCM desks @96/24.

For PCM sourced DSD stuff, listen to Peter Gabriel So. Or Sting. None of them have the "emotinal" levels of analog sourced or pure DSD. They sound clean as any record can, but they don't make me purr.

Izsak ... most mixing desks may still be analog, but the huge success of Alesis ADAT and similar (and the high cost of analog tape) means a very large percentage of the music of the last 10-15 yrs was recorded in PCM. Much was then mastered onto DAT, or CD-rom, again due to tape and equipment costs.

I remember playing with a roland digital multitrack recorder about 10 years ago. It recorded 16 tracks onto hard disk. Ancient digital PCM technology. Should have sounded terrible. But using quality (Neumann) mikes and a good room we made some recordings that sounded absolutely stunning played direct through my hifi. Better than any of my LPs or CDs.

So I maintain that the quality of engineering and the shortness of the signal path is more important than PCM vs analog vs DSD.

Izsakmixer...I guess I used the wrong terminology, "mixed". I didn't know that you guys distinguish mixing from other kinds of processing. I am going by the markings that I see on CDs, for example "ADD" meaning a digital release, processed digitally, from an analog master. Most of my discs are classical, and mixing practices (pardon the term) may be different.

By the way, it seems to me that mixing would be the one process that would benefit most from digital, because the exact timing would make it possible to combine multiple tracks without the usual multitracking phase bluring problems.

Eldart,.

You are so in in theaory, but it is exactly the timing that makes it so bad. Let me explain.
There are no PCM mixing solutions out there that have proper "delay managment", meaning that all inputs arrive at the output different times depending on processing used.
(Like EQ, Dynamics all will add a few samples of delay to the processed tracks.)
In other words, PCM MIX is never time coherent.

Many companies have tried to fix this, with no avail.
It is a complex issue. But this is exactly why PCM mixing is out of question when it comes to proper sound.

Mastering is different becouse your apply processing in the same manner to all tracks.