CD vs SACD in STEREO

@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 ...

@richardbrand - and followers of this thread more generally...

The majority of commercial digital recordings will go through a few a/d and d/a conversions. This is because most studios use lots of analogue outboard gear - so at tracking the signal will be converted to digital. At mixing it will go a/d to the outboard gear the d/a back to the computer. At mastering, it will go through the same process. 

There are studios and mastering houses which operate entirely "in the box" i.e. do all the mixing and mastering using the computer alone. But it's still a minority.

Back to Brothers in Arms - the DDD means that it was recorded digitally, mastered digitally and output on a digital storage medium.

But that cannot be taken as a guarantee that the signal was never in the analogue domain during either the mixing or mastering process.

The state of computer technology at the time would not have made it feasible to mix it digitally, and it wasn't recorded to hard disc in the first place anyway.

In addition to playing sacds, a sacd player will (in general) tend to sound better on regular cds, shm, blu-spec cds, etc as well.

If you have a notable collection of the latter, it would be more worthwhile to get a sacd player for all your cd playback.

@yoyoyaya Just curious: some of the best CD I heard were very simple (almost?), 'direct to digital' with a minimum or no mixing, mastering, etc. Ideally a few mics, volume mix, A to D conversion and 'burnt' onto disc. In this context, I remember one guy who experimented with digital tape recorder early on (40 years ago). One recording he played was in the middle of the night (low background noise level) recording a tripping faucet in a small bathroom, and then someone opening the door quickly. Played back from the digital recorder over a stereo with a 'bed' size sub (built like a queen size bed), the dripping was eerie, but when the door opened, the pressure increase in the small bathroom was noticeably reproduced by the sub. 

SO, are there some (obscure), maybe 'audio test' CD for SACD that make use of very little 'mix mash'?