SACD


I have Denon SACD player.  The player has a digital output.  I have an external DAC, a Topping d90III.   Am I correct by thinking that I won’t be able to get a digital output while playing the SACD so I’d have to use the analog outputs of the player to my integrated to play an SACD?

opathy

Plug the Denon's digital output into the digital input of your Topping.

Then using the Topping's analog output, plug that into one of your integrated's inputs.

The Denon needs to be able to output the SACD signal (not many do) via i2S or maybe USB?, and I believe you’d need the d90III Discrete version to process the full SACD signal as well (could be wrong on that tho).  Without both those things you’ll either get no signal or a downsampled/standard CD version if anything.  If you can’t get the full SACD signal through your DAC you might be better off running the analog outs from the Denon at least for SACDs.  Just some things to consider/check FWIW, and hope this helps at least somewhat. 

I don't think it's possible to get the digital signal out from an SACD directly to that DAC. Some of their higher end old models used to have a thing called Denon Link which I believe used an Ethernet format to carry signal from their players to their matching processor. I had the set back in 2009 I want to say? Each component was around $7k at the time, sounded pretty great. 

You would need an external device to extract the signal, like the one linked above. There have been a few other models over the years but I can't remember the names. They aren't very common.

ghdprentice's chart is correct.  Unless you have an HDMI digital output in the Denon (and input in the DAC) you won't get the SACD layer to play through your DAC.  However, you can get the CD layer of the disc (as well as a CD) to play through the DAC.