How do you store and play back SACD files on a PC?

All my CDs are ripped to my PC and I like the convenience of PC audio. For consistency, I would like to rip all my SACDs to my PC as well - not just the stereo channels but the surround sound channels, too. My question isn't about how to rip an SACD - there have been plenty of other threads on that. My question is, having ripped an SACD, what's the best format for storing it on your PC? Some of the considerations are:

1. My media player is JRiver Media Center.

2. I want surround sound.

3. Ideally, I would like to be able to the SACD files in the Media Center library, which implies some method of tagging them correctly. This is probably the biggest issue. Can you even tag an ISO file, and if not, do you need to convert the ISO files to some other format?

4. The sheer size of the files is potentially an issue.​

I would be very interested to hear what methods people are using.

 

Back them on a separate hard drive first.

 

I use a NAS and stream to my Only amp or Oppo player.

Easy.

 

I'm a beginner but let me see if I've got this right - you store the rips as ISO files on your NAS and when you play them back through your Oppo, it's just as if you were playing back the discs themselves, yes? That's an interesting idea - I was only really thinking of playing them back through my PC but I do have a Sony UHP-H1 so maybe that's another option.

 

You can store them as ISO files or as album folders broken down in to tracks, or do both. Having them as individual tracks makes it easier to make playlists. You can play them back as ISO's or folders on your PC with JRiver . With a PC you will also need a DAC that can handle DSD or convert the files to another format that the PC can handle . The Oppo's DAC can handle DSD but I'm not sure if it will play back ISO files. Check the specs on your Sony too to see what it will play and what it won't.

 

Good choice.

Indeed. Same here.

Store them as DSFs because, although JRMC will play and use tag info, the ISO files cannot support tags and any such info is not transportable to other players. Also, it is more convenient to use.

Potentially but that cost can be encumbered incrementally. I began with an external HDD and now have multiple HAS drives and backups, along with much satisfaction.​

 

It won't play them directly. I will have to check if it plays them via JRiver (I play the extracted DSF files).

 

It's been a while and have all my ISO's ripped to individual dsf files. But pretty sure I remember being able to stream the ISO too.

Depends on the capability of your NAS though. I can check if I can stream ISO if you want.

 

OK, many thanks for these replies. Stereoptic, that thread is 86 pages long! But I will try to read it, in stages, over time.

First, I don't have an Oppo. My idea is to buy an Anthem MRX 520 A/V receiver

Anthem MRX 520 A/V receiver

and hook it up to my Windows 10 PC. I then hope to play multichannel SACD rips directly from the Windows 10 PC (using JRiver MC as the media player) to the Anthem A/V receiver and from there to a 4.1 speaker arrangement.

So, based on what you're saying, let's say I rip the SACDs as ISOs initially, then convert them to multichannel DSF files for playback purposes (storing the ISOs on a spare hard drive). I can then tag the DSF files nicely with JRiver and still have pure DSD playback.

Or can I? the next question is, how do I connect the PC to the A/V receiver? I don't think a PC can do DSD over HDMI. Is it feasible to use a USB connection instead? Is it normal for A/V receivers to accept multichannel DSD over a USB input? I've only ever used 2-channel playback up till now and have no experience in this field.

 

No answer to my last question so I'll bump it. Can anyone tell me if it's possible to play back SACD surround sound from a PC to an A/V receiver? And if so, how the connection is made?

It appears that there is no USB input on the A/V receiver I mentioned above. And as far as I know, no PC can output DSD over HDMI. So the way I'm seeing it, the only option is to do another conversion of the SACD files from DFS to PCM in order to play them back over HDMI. Is that what other people do?

 

If you want to use a PC to play back DSD you will need a DSD DAC to go between the PC and the receiver and you will be limited to 2 channel. You'd be better off converting the files to PCM as FLAC and playing them with whatever software you want over HDMI to the receiver. Another option is to put the files on a portable HDD or USB Stick and plug that in to your Sony blu ray player and use that as the transport provided that is connected to the receiver.

 

1. Get a multichannel USB DAC.
2. Convert the DSD to PCM in the server.

 

That is not true. However, there is some handshaking protocol that impedes transmission of DSD from most PCs to a prepro/AVR over HDMI.

Here is an interesting anecdote. I cannot get anything other than a hiss when I try to send DSD from my JRMC-Win-based server (on a bootcamped MacMini) to my Marantz AV8802a via HDMI. However, I can send it from the same server to an Oppo 205 (via HDMI or ethernet) and have the Oppo 205 feed it to the Marantz via HDMI. So, it is not an absolute hardware limitation.

I prefer to use a multichannel USB DAC.

 

Thank you, JackBNimble and Kal Rubinson.

Personally, I don't want to use a USB stick plugged into my Sony UHP-H1 because my aim is to have everything centralised on a single PC and operate it using JRemote. The USB DAC idea isn't good for me, either, partly because of the expense, partly because it's another box and another bunch of wires, and partly because I think the extra digital-to-analogue and analogue-to-digital conversions would negate any benefits of adopting this solution. So for the sake of simplicity, I will do as you suggest and convert all the SACD files to PCM so that they can be played back direct from the PC to the A/V receiver over HDMI. I will use JRiver to convert direct from ISO to 24 bit/88 kHz PCM.

Kal, I'm puzzled when you say you can send DSD over HDMI to your Oppo because I've spent a lot of time researching this today and opinion seems to be unanimous - it's impossible to output DSD over HDMI from any known PC, including the Mac Mini. You'd think if an Oppo could overcome this limitation, word would have got around by now - it would be big news for DSD mavens. But who knows? Oppos are funny things and I'm certainly no expert. Anyway, I don't have a particular thing for DSD and am very happy to use 24/88 PCM, so thanks again for confirming that this is the way forward.

 

Does the Anthem MRX 520 handle DSD over HDMI ? I can't find any reference that it does, so you'll need to do the DSD to PCM conversion on the PC end, if the MRX 520 is your choice.

 

Ha! You're absolutely right - the Anthem doesn't support DSD anyway so if I'm going to use an Anthem A/V receiver, DSD isn't even an option. Thinking about it, I'll definitely be using room correction, too, so even if I had a DSD A/V receiver, the DSD would have to be converted to PCM for processing. So everything is telling me that storing the SACD files as PCM files makes the most sense.

It would be different if it was only for stereo. In that case I could feed pure DSD to my USB DAC and listen to it unprocessed. But for multi-channel, it has to be PCM.

 

I am certain that I have done this in the past although I have no reason to have done it recently. Of course, my memory might be faulty but, since I have just received a 205 for review, it is encumbent on me to confirm it. So far, I have been sending DSD to the Oppo by ethernet and the Oppo does output it to the Marantz. I will run it via HDMI as soon as I can and get back. It will take me about a week since the 205/Marantz are at my country place.

 

I was thinking about this last night and I remembered how, in connection with another thread, I spent a lot of time working out the best way of ripping SACDs (laser-dropping them, really) using an HDMI de-embedder. One problem with using an HDMI de-embedder is that you have your SACD player on one end of the HDMI cable but there's no HDMI device on the other end of the cable and therefore there's nothing to return the HDCP handshake, without which HDMI will not work properly. However, it emerged in the course of doing this that Oppo players did not require an HDCP handshake and would pass anything via HDMI regardless of what was (or wasn't) on the other end of the HDMI cable. This would appear to be a glaring breach of the HDMI protocol but as I said before, Oppos are funny things.

Now if we apply this knowledge to the case of the PC's HDMI output: I think it's been widely assumed up till now that the limitation on outputting DSD is a graphics card limitation. The HDMI output on any PC is primarily intended for video output and is controlled by a graphics card, not an audio card. Since the optical drive on a PC can read DVDs and Blu-ray discs but definitely not under any circumstances SACDs, it was never expected that any PC would ever output DSD and therefore the graphics card supports the Dolby and DTS formats but never the DSD format.

But suppose this thinking is wrong? We know that HDMI does support DSD so HDMI itself is not a limitation. Maybe the graphics cards are themselves capable of passing DSD but for copyright protection reasons are designed not to offer this as an option when carrying out the HDCP handshake with any HDMI device they're connected to.

If that was true, then if you connected an A/V receiver to a PC via HDMI, you'd never get DSD because when they carried out the HDCP handshake, the PC wouldn't offer it as option to the A/V receiver even though the A/V receiver was telling the PC that it was happy to receive it. Therefore the A/V receiver would automatically switch to PCM mode and tell the PC to send PCM.

BUT... if you connected an Oppo to the PC, then that wouldn't happen because the Oppo seems to ignore the need for an HDCP handshake. So if you had the Oppo set up to receive DSD, the Oppo would completely ignore the options being offered by the PC and demand DSD. And so that's what the PC would deliver.

All that is a very roundabout way of saying what you've already said, which is that it's NOT a hardware limitation, but a handshake issue. If this is true, and your experiment confirms it, I think this would almost be worth a thread on its own because it would open up new possibilities for outputting DSD from PCs via HDMI. I think it might even be possible to hack into the HDCP handshake on the PC and insert DSD as an option and if that were so, anyone would be able to output DSD from any PC without even having an Oppo. I've hacked into HDCP on other equipment quite easily and I know this can be done.

So please do report back on your experiment! I'm very curious indeed to know what happens, even though I've no need for DSD myself. Or if anyone else has an Oppo, maybe they could try it - they may have closed this loophole on the latest Oppos.

 

I have ripped many of my SACD's to ISO files using my Oppo 105. This works really well, although it is a bit time consuming.

I know that I can convert the ISO files to DSD or PCM files, create cue-sheets or individual tracks or whatever, but this is rather time consuming.

Is there any DAC/streaming device with an USB connection to which I could connect a HDD which contains all the ISO files, and where I can directly play the ISO files from the HDD, using the respective DAC/device.

My Oppo 105 does not play back the SACD ISO files directly. I know I can load the ISO files into foobar2000 on my PC and play them back, but I don't want to stream the music from my PC to the Oppo or any other DAC. I don't like to use the WLAN connection to stream music in my house, I prefer a setup where I can physically connect the HDD to a device and play back directly on my stereo.

I use my Oppo player that way for regular WAV files, and the Oppo app works fine to select the music I want to listen to on my smartphone or tablet.

I would like a similar setup where I could use the ISO files directly.

Does such a thing exist?

 

I've never heard or owned a SACD

 

P.S.:

I have used foobar to convert ISO files to PCM files, and it works fine, but I am not able to get a clean WAV file where there is no tiny click between each track. Whatever conversion I use, there is always a tiny click between the tracks, and manually editing these out is a pain.

I am hoping it is possible to play back the ISO file without a click between the tracks.

 

I have used ISO2DSD to extract all of my SACD ISOs to DSF files, which sit on a USB hard drive connected to my Oppo 103D. They play, but there are gaps between tracks. The Oppos will not play ISOs directly. I believe they used to be able to play home made SACDR discs but this functionality was removed in a firmware update.

The only way I have been able to get round this is to go back to my ISOs and extract a single DFF file with a CUE file. This allows gapless playback and track selection. Note that if you do this you have to check the box to remove the DST compression (“convert DST to DSD”)or you just get a static like noise.

Older thread that may be of use:

DSD........still unclear how you can play and stream this

 

I have recently done this... "ISO2DSD to extract all of my SACD ISOs to DSF files"
I extracted using the multichannel option but I don't seem to be getting multichannel playback.

The PC issue is the output device. My graphics card does shave HDMI but no DSD native support. So JRiver..etc converts to PCM
before sending it to my AVR unit (a Yamaha TSR-7850) and it does play, just not multichannel.

I was thinking a DLNA configuration might work better. Connect using the AVR unit to the PC for playback via Ethernet.
Media Streaming services can be enabled in Windows 10 and default folder configured.
Most AVR units have a media server option these days and might skip the whole hard device limitations.
Has anybody tried this option?

I do have newer audio card from EVGA (EVGA - Articles - EVGA Nu Audio ) installed also that does support native DSD,
but still testing that setup and might be limited to 2 channel DSD as it has no HDMI out and only has a right and left channel outs or optical
out for running to the AVR unit

 

jRiver settings should indicate the problem. Check output settings and the same window will show attributes of the DSF file. Double check that the Convert DST to DSD box is checked in ISO2DSD.