DSD-Guide What's the difference between SACD and DSD?
Simply put… an SACD is a disc and DSD is a file type that can live as an audio file anywhere.. a hard drive, a disc, a USB drive, etc. DSD64 can live on an SACD. But, if you want to hear DSD256... you need to have a DAC (soundcard equivalent) that processes the sound from Digital to Analog.. SACD and DSD are not interchangeable words.
It's hard to understand why there is so much confusion over this... but there is. Probably because when SACDs were created it was used more for the surround 5.1 experience. Twenty and more years ago, no one was considering MP3's would take over the mainstream listening experience. CDs were still thriving as a way to sell audio on discs.
Then in 2010, Blue Coast Music began selling DSD downloads and several other companies followed. Selling downloads offered the ability to sell DSD in higher resolutions like DSD128 and DSD256. SACD (physical discs) were and are still limited to DSD64.
Reading at some forums and youtube channels, it’s clear that many people are confused. They use the word “SACD” as interchangeable with DSD. SACDs are discs. Say that three times if you’re confused. DSD is kind of format… similar to CDs.. remember them? Low grade PCM files? We now have higher sampling rates for PCM, too.
If you know the difference between SACD and DSD, please help chime in at the forums and youtube channels. The confusion being caused by the uneducated is not helping the DSD cause for higher quality sound. Even pro audio engineers are confused. :)
You can read more here….
https://dsd-guide.com/whats-difference-between-sacd-and-dsd
Thanks all!
By the way… Blue Coast Music is have a secret coupon sales. The discount is 40% through this weekend… use coupon code
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Enjoy your music!
Cookie Marenco
I just wanted to point out this comment that was made above....
"Reading at some forums and youtube channels, it’s clear that many people are confused. They use the word “SACD” as interchangeable with DSD. SACDs are discs. Say that three times if you’re confused. DSD is kind of format… similar to CDs.."
The last sentence you say, "DSD is a kind of format, similar to CDs..."
What I think you meant to say is that DSD is a kind of format that is similar to PCM, not CDs!? CDs are NOT a format, PCM is the format and CDs are only able to use 44.1kHz sample rate and 16-bits of depth, which is the PCM format that we are all familiar with that is used on the medium of a CD! A SACD uses a DSD64 format which equals 2.8MHz for a sample rate and only 1-bit for the storage depth, that's why SACDs, if we were actually able to hear that high of a frequency, it would be pure noise, and because we as human beings can only hear from 20Hz to 20kHz or 20,000Hz and that's at the time of birth and every day that passes by after you are born... you are losing a little bit more of those frequencies because your ears get old just like the rest of your body does! So by the time you are 50-60, you might only be able to hear from 80Hz up to 10kHz or 12kHz! That's another issue that no one thinks about either!? You can make the greatest sounding recording but not everyone who buys it is going to be able to hear every frequency that is in the music! And I may be wrong because it's been a while since I researched all of this info, but I believe that DSD256 was supposed to be the digital format that was pretty much a match for a good analog recording whether on tape or vinyl. The only difference between SACD and DSD is that one is a storage medium and the other is a file format that just happens to fit on that particular SACD medium, but only up to 2.8MHz (DSD64)... any higher than DSD64, you will need a hard drive, flash drive/thumb drive to store the info on!
Thank god we're pretty much over that nonsense, the whole time MP3s were getting all the hype, I personally noticed that the music not only sounded like garbling, metallic, artifacts with horrible quantization that made everything sound plain, bland with ZERO dynamics! And whoever got people into this whole terrible world of garbage can sounding music, ended up sucking the life out of music! For a while I started to lose hope and I was never excited about anyone putting out anything new because I knew that it would eventually be squashed into little fragments of 0's & 1's with absolutely no life and I was starting to worry that crap was going to start becoming the norm.... and I don't care how many songs you can store on your laptop or iPhone, etc., because every single one of those songs sound like total crap and aren't even worth the trouble of listening to. It was like listening to one long song because of there being no dynamic change in the song, nor from song to song! I'm so happy it's almost completely rubbed out because that is just a waste of time and money to take your band into a studio, cut an album and it sounds like you recorded it on an old school 424 Tascam.... And even the Tascam at least had the tape compression and picked up the bass and drums fairly well considering you were mixing drums, bass, 2 guitars and vocals all onto an 1/8th inch piece of tape and if you knew what you were doing, you could actually walk out of your basement with something that sounded WAY better than a thin, flat MP3. So anyway back to the reason I even started typing this... SACD is DSD, it's just a smaller amount of information than your DSD128/DSD256 and DSD512! SACD is still a disc that can only hold so much information, similar to a Blu Ray DVD, a SACD has more than one layer on it because most SACDs are made with the DSD64 format and also the PCM 44.1/16 red book CD standard and I'm sure that if they could figure out how to make a disc that could hold more information, they would be releasing SACDs that held a DSD128 or DSD256 format, but unfortunately we do not necessarily have that, though I believe Neil Young was messing around with trying to record to a multi-layered disc similar if not exactly like a Blu Ray disc. DSD = Direct Stream Digital and SACD = Super Audio CD! It's just the name that Sony Phillips had to patent to make more money! SACDs use only 1-bit for depth and it's the sampling rate that makes it sound smoother and more like it's linear instead of a bunch of samples, or snap shots of the frequencies as they pass by, which is PCM. And though 192,000 samples per second sounds like an incredible amount of information that's being collected, it's still a sample, just a piece of the frequencies and dithering is what fills in those gaps between the samples by creating another sample that is compatible and comparable with the surrounding sampled frequencies, so it's not pure. Like a record or tape... that's linear, it never stops or takes a picture of the current frequencies passing through. And the idea of the SACD was to create a sample rate that is so much, so fast, that it resembles the idea of a linear recording. A SACD or DSD64 is the equivalent of 2.8 million samples per second! I know it sounds impossible but that's the idea, to have so much over sampling that you will never be able to detect any loss of the recording in the sampling that you have with PCM Pulse Code Modulation! I personally have about 4-5 SACDs and I feel that when I'm listening to them that they have more of the characteristics of a linear feel to the music. I'm probably just imagining it, but I swear, especially with older CDs, if I focus in enough that I can actually hear the sampling happening!? But that's also me listening to a standard 44.1/16 CD, when I listen to something that was recorded at 192/24, that becomes a lot harder to tell apart from the DSD64 SACD format! Really it's a personal preference but let's just make sure that we NEVER EVER go back to settling for that pathetic excuse for a music file called MP3 or any other lossless digital audio formats! We don't need to store a million songs on our systems anymore, if you need more space, external hard drives are not that expensive and even if you have that many songs.... are you really going to listen to them all? Not a chance in hell, you most likely won't even remember what it is you have in your library!? It's completely unnecessary and ridiculous to have that many songs on your person at any given time! It's just stupid and again, so completely unnecessary because you are usually hanging out with your friends and they all have cell phones or digital music players and they all have a zillion songs on their hardware!! YOU DON'T NEED ALL THOSE STUPID WASTE OF SPACE SHITTY SOUNDING MUSIC FILES! Personally I have never been confused about understanding DSD and SACDs! DSD is a format and SACD is the type of disc that is used to store the DSD64 information on! Because a lot of people, including myself, enjoy the actual physical look and feel of a CD and sometimes you don't want to mess around with streaming from some app or off one of your devices, you just want to slap a disc in and let it play through the whole album, instead of interruptions from the service you are using, or having to scan through a million song titles just to find what you're looking to listen to, you just want to open the case and put a disc in, and I do recommend a SACD over a regular CD anytime! But the most important thing to remember is that if the recording was not done well, it doesn't matter what format it is in, because I have a Derek and the Dominos SACD... and I don't know what happened with the final transfer or mix down because even on the SACD it sounds slightly thin and like it's coming from way in the back of the room, which leads me to believe that someone missed something when transferring the analog to the DSD64 format? Maybe it wasn't normalized or the amplitude was set too low for the transfer...? I don't know, but you can always have a crappie sounding recording even if it's in a Hi-Res format!