Beware of SACD Transports -- they probably will not work with your favorite DAC


Hello, I just learned a painful lesson. I'm guessing that not many people will know this so I'm going to put it in here.

The audio on a SACD is encrypted.
If I were to purchase a SACD / CD player I have nothing to worry about. The Audio is un-encrypted inside the player.
However if I were to purchase a SACD / CD Transport made my brand Z, I would have to purchase a brand Z DAC???
Apparently Sony who owns the SACD format mandated that the audio on the SACD itself is encrypted and
the digital output from a SACD transport is ALSO encrypted. It looks like the actual un-encryption is done in the DAC.
There is no standard for doing the un-encryption so every manufacturer has their own proprietary way of doing this.
So I cant use a Esoteric SACD transport and an Auralic DAC which is what I tried to do?
londontk

Showing 1 response by cheeg

I had a similar issue with my Cambridge CXU disk player. The explanation from the tech support folks at Cambridge was that the Sony license prevents them from outputing the digital signal from the SACD on anything but an HDMI cable. Their approach to playing a SACD disk is to send the digital stream to their digital signal processor, which converts it to PCM. They then send the converted PCM signal to their internal DAC, which outputs to the Analog Output ports. Seems very klugey. They said:
"If you want to bypass the internal DAC, you’ll need to use the HDMI output and select DSD as the SACD Output. However, DSD can only be selected as the SACD output providing your HDMI cable is connected to a DSD compatible device, so you would need to be sure that whatever DAC you have has a HDMI input and can process DSD."  My DAC does not have an HDMI input, but even if it did, I’m not sure their solution would work. The .iso solutions posted by others sound interesting -- good luck, and if you try it, please let us know how it turns out.