Post by Eric K February 2, 2011 (1 of 6)
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Greetings,
Newbie here - both to the forum and high-fidelity (electronic) audio.
For the last 17 years I've been listening to CDs through a small Aiwa bookshelf system. I play Classical Guitar, Steel String Guitar (Bluegrass) and Jazz Drums, and have a fair CD collection of these genres with a few hybrid SACD's, and a decent CD collection of classical chamber music mostly on the Telarc label. Being that making acoustic music is such a core part of my life, it finally seemed very strange to me that I don't have a "proper" stereo.
Financial constraints withstanding, I recently purchased a Sony STR-DN1010 receiver with Sony SS-F7000 speakers. I'm middle aged and its the first "component system" I've owned. It is a quantum leap for me. I realize its a low end system to many of the readers and posters here, but I just want to give you a sense of "where I'm at" so you might be able to help me.
To keep costs down, I'm (re)using a Samsung BD-2500 Blu-Ray player (that we already had) as my CD player. To eek out maximum performance from that Blu-Ray player I'm using it in its "Audiophile" bitstream mode over HDMI, to HDMI port 3 on the DN1010, which the DN1010 manual states has the highest audio quality.
Finally having the system in place, I was listening to Diana Krall's "Love Scenes", a hybrid SACD, last night and was really taken by the quality and warmth of the sound - though the DN1010 was reporting "LPCM 44" in the display which I take to mean that I was only hearing 44.1 kHz - still it was a quantum leap in every way from what I've been hearing. Really enjoyable and relaxing to listen to.
All that said... I'm wondering what my best quality, and most affordable, options are for playing SACD given that I must deal with the limitations of the Sony STR-DN1010 - given that I can't do DSD to the receiver: Is an SACD player with HDMI a waste? Should I buy a used SACD player for less than $100 with RCA stereo out jacks? Or with the DN1010 could I "get/hear" better quality from a better SACD player?
Thanks,
Eric.
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Eric K said:
Finally having the system in place, I was listening to Diana Krall's "Love Scenes", a hybrid SACD, last night and was really taken by the quality and warmth of the sound - though the DN1010 was reporting "LPCM 44" in the display which I take to mean that I was only hearing 44.1 kHz - still it was a quantum leap in every way from what I've been hearing. Really enjoyable and relaxing to listen to.
All that said... I'm wondering what my best quality, and most affordable, options are for playing SACD given that I must deal with the limitations of the Sony STR-DN1010 - given that I can't do DSD to the receiver: Is an SACD player with HDMI a waste? Should I buy a used SACD player for less than $100 with RCA stereo out jacks? Or with the DN1010 could I "get/hear" better quality from a better SACD player?
Thanks,
Eric.
Replace the Samsung player with a Sony. Most of the current Sony BR players will also play SACD and output high-res over HDMI. And they are inexpensive.
Kal
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Post by Eric K February 2, 2011 (3 of 6)
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Kal Rubinson said:
Replace the Samsung player with a Sony. Most of the current Sony BR players will also play SACD and output high-res over HDMI. And they are inexpensive.
Kal
Can you tell me what's happening in that processing chain?
I think I know the preferred/best method which is to let the SACD player stream the content "unrendered" to the receiver where a top notch receiver's DAC's would render the sound and assign channels appropriately based on the information from the SACD.
I can't do this with the DN1010 but I'm wondering what happens then, say if I upgrade the Blu-Ray player to the Sony BDP-S570. I think... based on limited knowledge... that the player would then render the SACD into sound through its DAC's and pass that along to the receiver, where the receiver would assign various sounds to various speakers based on a generic algorithm, not one from the SACD information. Is that correct?
When you say the "Sony BR player will output high-res over HDMI" do you mean more information (presumably smoother, fuller sound) will be sent to the receiver than would come from a CD? So even though I can't do SACD the preferred way I'd still get a benefit from playing SACD's through an SACD player on the DN1010?
Thank you,
Eric.
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Eric K said:
(1) .................. I'm wondering what happens then, say if I upgrade the Blu-Ray player to the Sony BDP-S570. I think... based on limited knowledge... that the player would then render the SACD into sound through its DAC's and pass that along to the receiver, where the receiver would assign various sounds to various speakers based on a generic algorithm, not one from the SACD information. Is that correct?
(2) When you say the "Sony BR player will output high-res over HDMI" do you mean more information (presumably smoother, fuller sound) will be sent to the receiver than would come from a CD? So even though I can't do SACD the preferred way I'd still get a benefit from playing SACD's through an SACD player on the DN1010?
(1) No. The player will transcode the DSD to PCM and send it out over HDMI. I do not know what you are referring to in your scenario.
(2) Yes. CD = 16bits/44.1kHz sample rate. HDMI/PCM output from SACD = 24bits/176.4kHz sample rate.
Kal
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Post by Eric K February 3, 2011 (5 of 6)
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Thanks Kal. Much appreciated.
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Eric K said:
I think... based on limited knowledge... that the player would then render the SACD into sound through its DAC's and pass that along to the receiver, where the receiver would assign various sounds to various speakers based on a generic algorithm, not one from the SACD information. Is that correct?
I think you may be confusing multi-track recording with multi-channel audio. There's no assigning of sounds to channels happening in SACD players any more than there is in CD players i.e. not at all. That happens in the studio on the mixing console by the producer or the recording engineer. On SACD, the channels are stored entirely discretely and all the player needs to do is reproduce them. No algorithms involved.
> So even though I can't do SACD the preferred way I'd still get a benefit from playing SACD's through an SACD player on the DN1010?
What makes you think you can't do SACD the preferred way on an SACD player like Sony's current BD players?
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