CD vs SACD in STEREO

@kraftwerkturbo 

But quite surprisingly, the Oppo not doing ATMOS. Does that also mean no DSD? 

Not at all.  Dolby Atmos and DSD are completely different animals!  DSD is mandated on the SACD layer of SACDs, whereas Dolby Atmos is essentially high-resolution PCM probably delivered on Blu-ray disks.

Blu-Ray and SACD media are both high capacity, and they may share the same short-wavelength lasers in a universal player / transport.

A couple of oddities!  You can always exactly convert DSD to CD-quality PCM, but it does not exactly work the other way round.  This is because DSD samples at about 2.8-MHz and higher multiples thereof, whereas CDs samples at roughly 44-kHz.

Dacs that use sigma-delta technology are far more likely to natively process DSD than ladder-type dacs like R2R which are designed to mitigate PCM;s monotonicity problem.

To find out how your dacs work, you need to discover who makes them, and their exact model number.  Possibly from the user manual.  Then you can find their spec sheets, and start reading between the lines for what is missing.

According to ChatGPT your Onkyo uses AK4458 384 kHz/32-bit DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter).  

These converters are made by AKM and the datasheet says they max out at 768kHz PCM and 11.2MHz DSD.  They are 8-channel dacs as well.  Quite superb, in my opinion.

I look forward to hearing how the little Sony compares to the Oppo.  My prediction - no audible difference.

@yoyoyaya 

There have been at least 3 re-masterings of Brothers in Arms for SACD.  I only know the 20th Anniversary one and the original CD, which of course was so popular it really established CDs in the market.  I still have Philips’ CD sampler which also features Dires Straits Once upon a Time in the West from memory.

Recorded on a 24-track Sony 16-bit machine, possibly at 48-kHz sample rate, mixing was done digitally.  The resultant acoustic is far from natural, to say the least, with pin-point percussion effects.

Digital mixing is problematic, especially if only whole numbers are allowed.  You have to multiply by fractions (really, divide by a whole number), and add the results together.  Very quickly the least significant bits become totally screwed up because of multiple rounding errors.  The more original tracks you start with, the smaller the starting numbers will be on average.  I believe this is why classical recordings made in a natural acoustic have been excellent on CD from the get-go, whereas pop/rock is the opposite.

There’s almost no technical information on mastering for the anniversary SACD.  But the results are clearly better than the CD

Only very recently has it become feasible to use floating-point numbers for mixing.

On the Brothers in Arms CD: I agree, it is NOT an audiphile masterpieces, just a MUSIC masterpiece. I don't like how BRIGHT the mixing was done.

And now looking back 45 years when my friends and I were really into music equipment (built our own active crossovers using low noice OP amps, built amps (for our active 3 way speakers, etc) made our printed circuits, dragged the speakers into the backyard to MEASURE with fancy microphone, having BLIND A-B setups, etc), I am reminded why we listened to CLASSICAL MUSIC (on CD). NOT because we liked the music, but because the MATERIAL (recordings) were excellent. While pop/rock was playing with their multitrack and mixing it to death. 

@Richardbrand Brothers in arms was mixed in analogue on an SSL 4000 and transferred back to digital. 

But 32 bit floating point is not particularly new - I've been mixing with it with on Pro Tools 12 it for quite a number of years now. 32 bit floating point mixing is in Pro Tools since version 10 - late 2011 introduction.

@yoyoyaya 

It would help if the liner notes were more informative.  The original CD is labelled DDD which implies digital mastering, but I was not there.  Then there is the scandal that most analogue records have been digitally mastered!

Best practice these days for DSD mixing seems to be to use a multi-bit format at the original very high DSD sampling rate, thereby avoiding lossy conversions to PCM and back again. I am guided by Morten Lindberg of 2L.no - see:  Merging Technologies - Use Cases   2L packages often include every digital format known to man - well, hybrid SACD and Pure Audio with several multi-channel high res versions and Dolby Atmos.

To complete the discussion, I've just found out that Brothers in Arms has been released in Dolby Atmos!  I think I'll stick to 2L's immersive recording of Percy Grainger playing Grieg in 1921 ...