PCM to DSD thought

[Ropet]

Recording companies like for example BIS make their recordings in pcm 24/96. They also sell those files for download. Discs are sold as SACD which means the files are converted to DSD64. This is also possible to do in many music servers like JRiver. Some can also do the conversion on the fly during Playback.

 

• Question 1: Generellay speaking are there reasons to beleive that it is better to convert the pcm file to dsd first and then play it versus do the conversion on the fly? Why?
• Question 2: Are there any differences between professional conversion  eqipment/softwere  (pcm -> dsd) and programs used by Roon, JRiver, Foobar etc? How?
• Question 3: More and more dac's convert all formats to dsd. Generally speaking, what are the big difference on their solutions versus use a pc/laptop/mac to do the same?
• Question 4: Conversion on the fly requires more CPU than playing "strait". In my case the graph shows average 10-12 % CPU versus 7-8 % without conversion on the fly from 16/44.1 to dsd64. In your opinion, how big processor is really needed? Celeron is known to very stable but can't match i5 and i7 in "power". 8GB or 16 GB?

[Miska]

4 minutes ago, Ropet said:

Recording companies like for example BIS make their recordings in pcm 24/96. They also sell those files for download. Discs are sold as SACD which means the files are converted to DSD64. This is also possible to do in many music servers like JRiver. Some can also do the conversion on the fly during Playback.

 

I would say main reason for this is that SACD is practically the only widely available hires physical media for audio-only. There's also some amount of music released in hires PCM on Blu-ray, but usually accompanied with video.

 

7 minutes ago, Ropet said:

Question 1: Generellay speaking are there reasons to beleive that it is better to convert the pcm file to dsd first and then play it versus do the conversion on the fly? Why?

 

No, it doesn't make a difference in itself. Both ways can end up with same output data, given same algorithms. If you first convert to DSD files, you can do away with lower performance computer. On down side, need for storage space increases and when there are algorithm improvements you would need to re-encode the files.

 

10 minutes ago, Ropet said:

Question 2: Are there any differences between professional conversion  eqipment/softwere  (pcm -> dsd) and programs used by Roon, JRiver, Foobar etc? How?

 

Yes, different pieces of software have different algorithms. That makes the difference, not just the target market of the tools.

 

11 minutes ago, Ropet said:

Question 3: More and more dac's convert all formats to dsd. Generally speaking, what are the big difference on their solutions versus use a pc/laptop/mac to do the same?

 

Hardware implementations are usually very resource constrained and thus the algorithms used are limited by the available computing resources. Hardware conversions usually also operate synchronously with the DAC data stream, limiting possibilities. For computers you don't really have limits on how much computing resources you could dedicate for the job, thus the algorithms don't need to be tailored to fit a constrained computational budget.

 

15 minutes ago, Ropet said:

Question 4: Conversion on the fly requires more CPU than playing "strait". In my case the graph shows average 10-12 % CPU versus 7-8 % without conversion on the fly from 16/44.1 to dsd64. In your opinion, how big processor is really needed? Celeron is known to very stable but can't match i5 and i7 in "power". 8GB or 16 GB?

 

You need as big processor as algorithms you want to use need. There's no straightforward way to define upfront what kind of CPU you need. If your current CPU can do what you want with the algorithms you want, you don't need to worry about it...