Converting DSD to PCM

[mansr]

Sox with DSD patches.

[mansr]

3 hours ago, Ron Scubadiver said:

Could you elaborate?

https://github.com/mansr/sox

 

There might be a pre-built package for your OS somewhere. I don't know.

[mansr]

35 minutes ago, Ron Scubadiver said:

I found a windows build somewhere, but haven't tried it yet. Obviously, your work.  I am leaning towards foobar, 30k lowpass FIR and SOX to down sample to 96k based on availability, convenience, speed and SQ.

You can do all of those in one pass with Sox.

[mansr]

8 hours ago, Ron Scubadiver said:

There doesn't seem to be any list of parameters for the DSD patches.  Do those pop up if I run the binary with a /? or -help or something.  Somewhere I saw there are scripts for batch processing.  I am sure it works, but it does get complicated.

To convert from DSD to PCM there are no special parameters. A simple "sox input.dsf -b 24 output.flac rate -v 96k" is all you need. If you want to do additional filtering, various options are documented in the manual. The "-b 24" flag is important since otherwise the output will be dithered to 8 bits as the default output precision is the closest available to the input, which is 1-bit in the DSD case. This isn't great, but it's a bit tricky to fix in a good way.

[mansr]

2 hours ago, klassikmann said:

Pre-built packages for various OS can be found at https://audiodigitale.eu/repo/sox/

Whose website is that?

[mansr]

9 minutes ago, klassikmann said:

Personally, I prefer to compile SoX-DSD from the GIT instead to use binaries from an unknown site. The man-page I attached in my earlier post has been generated during compilation for my Ubuntu 17.10 (64) installation.

@mansr: Do you know (perhaps more trustworthy) sites providing binaries for various OS of your DSD-enabled SoX?

I don't, unfortunately.

[mansr]

45 minutes ago, Ron Scubadiver said:

I don't know if it is right, but I see a lot of posts saying 88.2x24 has the same amount of information as  DSD64.

This is certainly true in the sense that there's very little music that has any content exceeding the DSD64 noise level at 44 kHz. In other words, anything that isn't drowned out by modulator noise can be represented in 88/24 PCM.

[mansr]

5 minutes ago, Ron Scubadiver said:

I converted a few DSD's to 48/24 using the 64fp multistage in foobar.  It has no lowpass filter.

Conversion to 48 kHz by definition has a lowpass filter at 24 kHz. There is no need for a DSD-specific filter.