Post by eesau December 1, 2006 (1 of 243)
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Hi,
the PS3 ability to play back SACD over HDMI has made it a possible high end SACD player ... in case you will be able to find an audio amplifier with DSD DAC for SACD playback and HDMI.
So do you really consider PS3 to be a true alternative to your present player?
Do you think the usability is OK?
Do you think a game console will provide with proper playback capabilities? Well ... in this case it would only function as a SACD disc drive (and some funny site was claming PSone to be a perfect CD player).
Do you think it would fit to your system? Also high end stuff is just consumer electronics, you know ...
If yes, this would be a business idea for somebody, don't you think so?
In a couple of year's time we would see "yet another 10k€ DSD DAC for PS3" ....
Esa
PS. I personally doubt this but I have been wrong in so many occasions before.
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Post by jesseb December 1, 2006 (2 of 243)
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eesau said:
Hi,
the PS3 ability to play back SACD over HDMI has made it a possible high end SACD player ... in case you will be able to find an audio amplifier with DSD DAC for SACD playback and HDMI.
So do you really consider PS3 to be a true alternative to your present player?
Do you think the usability is OK?
Do you think a game console will provide with proper playback capabilities? Well ... in this case it would only function as a SACD disc drive (and some funny site was claming PSone to be a perfect CD player).
Do you think it would fit to your system? Also high end stuff is just consumer electronics, you know ...
If yes, this would be a business idea for somebody, don't you think so?
In a couple of year's time we would see "yet another 10k€ DSD DAC for PS3" ....
Esa
PS. I personally doubt this but I have been wrong in so many occasions before.
I certainly plan to use it for SACDs (in addition to Blu-ray and games), with a Pioneer uni player to fall back on. But as you said, I need to get a new receiver first. When the Bluetooth remote comes out in December, that should make usability easier, and as for "fitting in", it looks very nice.
In terms of quality, here's a bunch of cool SACD on PS3 info taken directly from Beyond3D's forums:
*Though PSX (the DVD recorder) was too weak to decode SACD in software, it was expected that the PS3 would be able to. SCE began the development in a relatively earlier stage. But even at the beginning of this year the SACD decoder was 6 times slower than realtime to convert surround DSD sound into PCM.
* The manager of the Software Platform division at SCE who were in charge of software codecs and players estimated it'd be impossible to finish if they kept that pace. A developer from the Sony HQ who developed softwares for VAIO PC came to SCE and they assigned the development of an SACD decoder codec to him.
* SACD is stored in the DST format (= compressed DSD). DST changes compression methods and parameters every 1/75 seconds, which eats huge processing load when decoding. In the first 2 months the developer optimized it into realtime processing. Then he threw away the old source code and wrote a faster new codec in 3 weeks with the knowledge he had gained. It uses 5 SPEs - 3 SPEs for DST decompression, and 2 SPEs for DSD to PCM conversion.
* After that, he debugged it while consulting the professional audio equipments division of Sony that developed the DSD format itself. It took 6 months.
* Then the audio tuning specialist at the audio division of Sony began to use a PS3 to check the sound of the then unreleased HD receiver TA-DA3200ES. He pointed out where to fix in the PS3's digital audio processing to SCE. It was in the early October, and the dynamic range at that time was 140dB which was the initial goal set by another Sony developer who developed DSD. The PS3 firmware version 1.10 is this version with a few updates. The decimation filter of the SACD decoder outputs at 24bit/88.2kHz.
* However, last Friday, Honda went to a place for the interview with Ken Kutaragi for some audio/videophile magazine. They brought there an even newer version with a decimation filter at 24bit/176.4kHz. Also, the 64-bit DP internal data of the decimation filter is rounded down to 30-29-bit instead of 24-bit for the output. The dynamic range is over 170dB and the theoretical number reaches 180dB in 30-bit. Honda says its sound was really good even when compared with the sound of the 1.1 version firmware. The Sony developer attributes the goodness to the fact that the software SACD codec of the PS3 processes all data in 64-bit double precision. This new firmware version will be available when the BD remote is released in December.
* As for improving CD sound, upsampling is apparently easy by writing a FIR filter. But it is not yet in the PS3 software player as it takes some time to choose an appropriate upsampling function and noise shaping algorithm.
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jesseb said:
... the SACD decoder was 6 times slower than realtime to convert surround DSD sound into PCM.
Why would anyone want to convert DSD to PCM? HDMI 1.3 supports DSD, doesn't it? I don't get it.
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Post by braver December 1, 2006 (4 of 243)
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What's "BD remote"?
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I'm interested in using PS3 for audio playback. Hard to imagine it would sound better than a dedicated SACD player though.
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braver said:
What's "BD remote"?
The BD remote control is an optional accessory for PlayStation 3 that makes it easier to interact with Blu-ray Discs (and, presumably, DVDs, CDs and SACDs) than via the standard PS3 game controller.
I believe it costs ¥3,600. See http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20061003/sce.htm
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In the meantime I found the article referenced above: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=36188
Still, I'm stuck with the question: Why would you/Sony/anyone want to convert DSD into PCM (even if it's high-resolution) when the resulting signal is anyway carried across HDMI 1.3, which supports DSD transmission (see http://www.hdmi.org/consumer/faq.asp#q3_2 : "Support for One Bit Audio format, such as SuperAudio CD's DSD (Direct Stream Digital)"
Is the issue perhaps that Sony's AV Receivers can deal with hi-res PCM via HDMI but not with DSD?
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Post by braver December 4, 2006 (8 of 243)
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Is the issue perhaps that Sony's AV Receivers can deal with hi-res PCM via HDMI but not with DSD?
If Sony can't, then who can? What channels are there to clarify it with Sony directly? Is anyone here located in Tokyo, and able to meet with Sony SACD folks on behalf of the community and ask them a bunch of questions? We can compile the list here -- I'll start a new thread.
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Post by stefan December 4, 2006 (9 of 243)
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The Seventh Taylor said:
[...]
Still, I'm stuck with the question: Why would you/Sony/anyone want to convert DSD into PCM [...]
I also wonder about that, after reading the Wikipedia article on "Super Audio CD", implying that most SA-CD players (even the SONY ones) convert DSD to 88 KHz PCM before sending out the signal. The current article don't say that, but here follows an old version saying so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Super_Audio_CD&oldid=51788296
Quote:
"Because most of existing SACD players convert DSD directly to 88 kHz PCM,..."
(the quote is in the last paragraph).
After reading it, I tried to find confirmation elsewhere, but never found any hard proof. Perhaps someone here knows more?
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Well, I can imagine a player converting stereo DSD to the highest quality that SPDIF supports because otherwise this output would be 'dead' during SACD playback. (Actually SPDIF doesn't go beyond 48 kHz officially but can carry 88.2 and perhaps even 96 kHz in a de facto deviation of the standard).
The DSD-to-PCM conversion on PS3 is not about SPDIF, I presume. 176.4 kHz is well beyond its capability.
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