Explain to me dsd


Ok so I understand dsd was a way for sacd to be computer storage friendly...

But I have a dac (Emm Labs Dac2x) that somehow uses dsd (I'm confused as to whether it up samples to dsd)...

Can someone explain to me what this is about and whether I would benefit from a streamer like auralic Aries that is able to output dsd vs a bluesound node 2 that outputs only pcm?
joey_v

Showing 1 response by yage

From what I can gather, it seems to me that the DAC 2X is doing what  DSP engineers call 'interpolation'. In practical terms, this means that the sampling frequencies for all your digital inputs are converted to ~5.6 MHz (or the equivalent of DSD128).

The Aries streamer appears to output DSD data according to the DSD-over-PCM (DoP) specification, v 1.1. This means that it's actually using the PCM format to send DSD data to a DoP-capable DAC (the DAC2X). This is probably ideal for your DSD music files. 

On the other hand, if all you have is music already in a PCM format, it makes sense to simply send that as-is to the DAC 2X and let it do the conversion to the DSD sample rate.

Of course, you'll probably get the best information if you contact EMM Labs directly.