Accessible, yet elite sounding, musical CD machines. Current vs next upgrade

@richardbrand 

"When evaluating dacs, I really recommend getting hold of their data sheets.  You then have to look for what is not there.  If they don't mention DSD, it is London to a brick they have to be fed digital down-converted to PCM.  Down-converting loses resolution or timing or both."

Again, I don't know where you get your facts but there is no support for mixing or manipulating a high-resolution recording whether it starts life as PCM or DSD as DSD. All of it is done in the PCM domain often DXD which is the most widely supported and then authored to one of the DSD or PCM formats for release. A you said, upconverting a lower resolution doesn't add anything but noise except maybe in the case of a Chord Electronics product (Hugo M Scaler) that uses algorithms in an attempt to simulate or fill in the missing data while upconverting to 768 Khz PCM.

Most SACDs contain information in their printed insert regarding the native format they were recorded in and the equipment used to mix and manipulate the original recording before authoring to whatever release format. Interestingly, you'll find most are recorded on 24 bit, 96 Khz PCM. At least all the ones I've collected though Reference Recordings has recorded some works in DSD.

One of my first DACs was PSAudio DAC3 and at first I was entranced by its upscaling results.  It increased the soundstage and seemed to create real space between the musicians.  Then after using for a while it seemed to otherwise subtly distort others.  Subsequent DACs with upscaling capabilities made much less of an impact, good or bad, and on my Bryston DAC3 I just leave the feature off

@faustuss 

I don't know where you get your facts

If you did know, you would not challenge them so often with your odd arguments 

I was talking about playback of DSD, which is the simplest bit stream to process (and understand).  DSD is just a stream of 1s and 0s which nudge the sound level up or down one level, but at a very high rate.  If a dac does not handle DSD natively, there must be a lossy conversion to PCM (unless the PCM operates at 2.8-MHz which I've never ever seen).

Even interpolation algorithms are lossy, as they try to guess the missing samples.

I agree with you that DSD is a pig of a format for editing and mixing.  It is hard for editing because there is no absolute sound level associated with each one-bit sample, unless you count back to the start of the stream. 

It is hard for mixing because there is no way to represent, for example, taking one-third of a bit and adding two-thirds of another bit and getting a sensible result while rounding to the nearest one or zero.

Maybe half my SACDs were recorded in high resolution PCM (for example Chandos with notionally 24-bit 192 kHz).  Others claim to be pure DSD (for example, LSO Live) while the very best from 2L.no are recorded in DXD at about 385-kHz and sometimes as 32-bit floating point numbers.

Floating point is a real game changer in my opinion because each sample can be represented by fractional numbers rather than being rounded to a whole number.

Even the extraordinary DXD, as used by 2L.no, samples eight times less frequently than the lowest rate DSD.  Can you hear the difference?  Not if your dac has to be fed down-converted PCM

@jbuddha882 

"This CD drive mech. is arguably one of the best designs in the industry, which is why you see so many high end transports with TEAC trays."

Are you sure they’re not Denon?

Has anyone heard the Shandling SCD-3.3?