a review of my new dvd player says the reason plain cd"s sound so bad is because it's not converting PCM to DSD before converting it to analog. What is DSD?

DSD is the digital format that is used in SACD digital srorage.

Here is a link to some Sony info about SACD/DSD:

http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer/dsd/dsd.pdf

If it is true that your DVD player does not convert PCM to DSD for CD playback, this fact alone would not be a sufficient cause for the sound of CDs to sound bad.

There are PLENTY (probably most) of CD players that have nothing to do with DSD and yet manage to sound excellent, even musical when playing CDs.

Paul

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the 1derful1

[This message has been edited by Paul J. Stiles (edited May 24, 2003).]

Apparently my understanding of DSD is faulty if that review is correct -- why on earth would you want your player to convert standard CD's to DSD before converting to analog? Isn't DSD's benefit based on creating a native DSD recording (which is then provided to the consumer on SACD only) from the original master?

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gonk -- Saloon Links | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | 950 Review

Gonk,

You are quite correct. The very best you could hope for in such a conversion would be for it to sound the same as the original; likely, it would sound worse.

The reason SACDs sound so good is, as you pointed out, they're encoded in DSD from the beginning.

Jeff

I suppose that if there was a DAC that was clearly better than anyting else and it only accepted DSD, then there might be an advantage to converting from PCM to DSD, especially if the PCM was oversampled and the conversion from PCM to DSD resulted in artifacts/errors that was well below the noise floor.

Paul

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the 1derful1