Extracting music from multi-channel discs

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You should see what a digital circuit looks like at that magnification.

So why does the analog sound better?
 
Wow, when I started reading this thread I didn't it to go this way. I don't have anything to say about extracting audio on a Mac as I have a Windows computer.

However, here is my take on the analog/digital debate: digital sounds better than analog. Even though I am young compared to others (44), I've experienced both and live though the transition from one to the other as I started to be interested in audio and music in my teens. It is HARD for analog to sound good. Everything has to be set perfectly, your signal chain has to be the cleanest possible and even then, the recording medium has it's limit. One word to sum up the problems of analog: hiss. To get rid of hiss, you have to maximize your levels to be above the hiss, but not enough to distort. Some analog components, by the way they work, make a soft distortion (tubes), but others don't.

There are several reasons people don't like digital (and they are right in those aspects), but it's easier to get rid of what makes digital sound bad than what makes analog sound bad.
  • Albums being mastered too loud makes digital sound bad. Because digital has more headroom doesn't mean it has to be filled up to the brim. If analog mastering techniques are applied to digital, digital sounds better.
  • Directly transferring masters optimized for vinyl makes digital sound bad. Vinyl has its limits for bass and high frequencies, so some albums were optimized to sound good on vinyl. When transferred to compact disc, they sounded thin. When an album is mastered correctly, the compact disc sounds better (I'm not even talking about high res here).
  • Bad compression/compression artifacts make digital sound bad. Strides have been made in this field. Early digital compression sound bad. Even with the same codec at the same bitrate, differences can be heard. I've heard Dolby recordings sound bad and I've heard some that sound very good, all at the same bitrate. I've also heard DTS recordings that sound better than high res MLP/LPCM, but that's just bad mastering (I'm looking at you Richard Chycki).
Honestly, for stereo, compact discs sound good enough, high res is just icing on the cake. I was listening to a vinyl rip in high res the other day (from the Yes - TFTO Blu-ray) and I feel I could hear the typical vinyl limitations in the higher frequencies. High res digital is that good: you can hear the analog format shortcomings!
 
Making shitty treble blasted volume war CD masters with mutilated audio that could be completely contained by an 8 bit format does in fact sound bad. I don't care if you use analog, digital, or something not invented yet. If you do appallingly bad work, it sounds bad. Don't drag the poor formats into your ineptitude!

Some of you "mastering" engineers out there with your names on the volume war stuff. WTF?!

You get it @fcormier :)
Analog is in fact hard!
24/96 digital with merely decent AD converters feeding it is a very complete container for audio. And no matter what has happened to that audio upstream. Any damage remains obviously but what I mean is that even any weird damage that might otherwise continue to snowball is finally preserved in its current state.
24/96 with boutique AD converters in the input is about as perfect as perfect can get on the highest level reference system in the most well treated listening space.

When you hear an analog source sounding like a cleaner more accurate copy of a master than a digital copy, it's a testament to the analog system setup and the analog domain mastering work that went into it for sure. But more so it's calling out an incredibly inept screw up with that digital copy in today's world of 24 bit happiness and light. You really have to screw up bad to fail like that!
 
Analog doesn't have to sound bad. Don't confuse analog with records or cassette tapes. Those are specific formats. I was kidding earlier about a Blue-Wave analog minidisc that uses FM modulation like laserdiscs, but in truth it should work and with a high enough transfer rate, it could easily sound as good as digital (It still wouldn't measure as well as digital), IMO. Laser driven analog storage!

The real drawback is editing, of course. If you have to use digital to make an album, what's the point of an analog storage medium? You could do it with old fashioned tape multitrack and splicing, but then you've got tape levels of hiss/noise. But for live (band/concert) recording, it could theoretically work.

They made laser record players, but you're then reading physical cut grooves and picking up the slightest bits of dust as well. The analog tracks on laserdisc rarely got much love, but I had more than a few that were virtually identical sounding to the digital tracks (in a good way) and imagine having more compact and precise laser cut FM modulation. Noise could be made inaudible. Tape has hiss due to random magnetic particles that don't fully align (audio equivalent to film grain particles that don't fully change to the correct color). Laser precision with a blue laser and a glass master could easily change that.

I'm honestly surprised no one thought of making analog music only laserdiscs even. They were the same diameter as an LP, even and with the full surface dedicated to audio only you might fit an hour on each side with CAV (constant angular velocity) discs instead of the more typical 30 minutes with video. With a blue laser, you could shrink them down to minidisc size and with multiple layers, they could easily run higher rates and/or hold more audio. Hence my idea for "Blue-Wave" analog discs.

Of course, there's zero point to it (although I find the idea fascinating on a purely hypothetical level) as digital at even 20/48 with oversampling is more than sufficient on the playback side for a anything you could actually hear and in reality 16/44.1 is more than sufficient for 99.9% of all albums ever made (8-bit is sufficient for these atrocities made for loud compressed volume), but somehow the allure of analog lives on today despite the fact it sounds like crap half the time.

I've had plenty of LPs made with recycled vinyl that were noisy on the first play even. No amount of cleaning will fix that.

If the audiophile market were big enough, it might be worth it as a money maker (impossible to store on a computer as well without converting to digital which defeats the point of keeping things analog all the way through the chain), but it's not and someone would claim vinyl sounds better anyway....

SACD couldn't cut it even with multichannel support and rave reviews. There is simply no significant market for a new physical format, IMO. The convenience of digital files makes any physical format moot, really.
 
So in 2021 is it now possible to rip a 5.1 SACD disc to multi-channel on a newer MAC desktop computer? My dvd rom on the MAC plays Blu-ray fine. My issue is the songs show up fine on the MAC (can be scrolled, clicked on etc) but when I try recommended ripping software like DBpoweramp and DVD Extractor they will not highlight or load up to do any processing. A friend said the disc probably has to be ripped as an ISO image on MAC first? How would I do this? thanks
 
Jimfisheye and others,
Why the DSD to PCM conversion? I mean, yes, if all you have is PCM playback, but many of us have DSD-capable dacs. What am I missing here; the conversion is lossy (kudos for describing the "least lossy" way of doing it). Summary: I am not seeing anyone talk about leaving DSD as DSD and it is misleading.

I keep both the origional DSD, and I convert that to FLAC. The convenience of FLAC combined with the lack of processing available with DSD, means the PCM conversion usually wins out. I don't use bass management or room correction but I do use time alignment.
 
I keep both the origional DSD, and I convert that to FLAC. The convenience of FLAC combined with the lack of processing available with DSD, means the PCM conversion usually wins out. I don't use bass management or room correction but I do use time alignment.
All great points. Good plan. I will use an exaSound dac for multichannel (file-based) and currently I don't do bass mgmt in that mode either, only via pre/pro sources (Atmos streaming, movies, etc)
 
So in 2021 is it now possible to rip a 5.1 SACD disc to multi-channel on a newer MAC desktop computer? My dvd rom on the MAC plays Blu-ray fine. My issue is the songs show up fine on the MAC (can be scrolled, clicked on etc) but when I try recommended ripping software like DBpoweramp and DVD Extractor they will not highlight or load up to do any processing. A friend said the disc probably has to be ripped as an ISO image on MAC first? How would I do this? thanks

No you need an Oppo, Sony or Pioneer SACD player and you rip over a network (mostly). Not every model number works.
 
No you need an Oppo, Sony or Pioneer SACD player and you rip over a network (mostly). Not every model number works.
Or one of the original 4 PS3 models designated CECH-A, B, C or E. I still use mine to rip, although few and far between now. I can't believe it's been ten years since I wrote the first SACD ripping guide. That thing needs significant updating, but in general it still works. :)
 
Or one of the original 4 PS3 models designated CECH-A, B, C or E. I still use mine to rip, although few and far between now. I can't believe it's been ten years since I wrote the first SACD ripping guide. That thing needs significant updating, but in general it still works. :)

I remember looking for a working, old, PS3 just before the Oppo/Pio method became available. Thanks for your part in saving me both cash and the grief of owning an old PS3. :)

Edit...What year was that?
 
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Edit...What year was that?
2011 I wrote the guide. In 2016 (july) I started the long thread on CA (now AS) about how ingenious folks figured out how to do same on Oppos, Pioneers and other Mediatek 8560 or 8580 players. I've still never used that approach, but..knock on wood...never needed to. :)
 
I was studying up on the PS technique when I ran across the MediaTek thread on HiFi Haven. I really did not want to hunt down a PS because the last game console in this house was a Sega Genesis and the boys in question are now in their thirties.

I managed to find, very inexpensively, some applicable Sony BD players and the method works great. But I am very greatful for all the techo types that cook these methods up.
 
Has anyone tried the "brute force" method of digitally archiving content (I'm super old school, I still play the actual [MCH] album with an appropriate decoder/player)?


1. Use the appropriate decoder (DD, DTS, [MCH] DSD, Atmos etc.) and a power amplifier (may be combined as an A/V receiver)
2. Connect a resistor network to each of the speaker outputs (to reduce the amplitude to line level)
3. Digitally capture the result (using one of the standard digital audio file formats)

There would likely have to be some experimentation as to a suitable volume setting on the amp (loud enough to mostly overcome the inherent noise of the pre-amp + amp), but not loud enough to cause audible distortion on the loud portions of the content.

https://groupdiy.com/threads/speaker-level-to-line-level.38491/

Kirk Bayne
 
I would expect the brute force method to work better using line level rather than attenuated speaker level signals.
You would probably need at least a six in audio interface. But why not just do it digitally? It can be done for SACDs with a $40 sony Blue Ray player and for DVDs using your computer drive and various programs. Probably the same with Blu Rays too. There are many experts here who seem very willing to help.
 
There may not be line level outputs available, for example, my Pioneer VSX-534 (decodes MCH SACDs via HDMI) doesn't have line level outputs for the output (of the DSD decoder or other decoders), only speaker outputs of the fully decoded content.


Kirk Bayne
 
I managed to find, very inexpensively, some applicable Sony BD players and the method works great. But I am very greatful for all the techo types that cook these methods up.
Same here, salute to all the folks who reverse engineered the methods to rip these guys.
The cheapo old Sony method was a game changer for me. Made ripping SACD's fast, easy, and CHEAP. :LB
 
There may not be line level outputs available, for example, my Pioneer VSX-534 (decodes MCH SACDs via HDMI) doesn't have line level outputs for the output (of the DSD decoder or other decoders), only speaker outputs of the fully decoded content.


Kirk Bayne
but still, why bother with all that when it can be done more accurately and more easily in the digital domain?
 
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