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Thank for the additional info!

Posted by Charles Hansen (M) on November 5, 2017 at 18:53:13

In Reply to: RE: Marantz SA-10 Plays SACD-R discs? posted by DewDude on November 5, 2017 at 17:18:42:

I would have thought that Sony would have relaxed the restrictions once they dropped SACD and essentially made it open source. To the best of my knowledge, the earlier generation players would play a disc just fine if there weren't pit-width modulation, but the content on a disc was scrambled and needed the "key" hidden in the pit-width modulation to decrypt it.

I think here was also some sort of "keys" hidden inside the normal physical inner radius of a standard DVD mechanism, but am not too sure about that. The point is that the data on a stamped DSD is scrambled and only yields noise if played without the proper "key".

That way if one tried to burn a copy of an SACD, it wouldn't have the key to unscramble the information. But all of the ripping methods devised, using either the early PlayStation 3's or the new method that uses specific Oppo and Pioneer players, would extract the data AFTER it had been decrypted. This does not require decryption, but does require a disc with enough capacity to hold the data - eg, a DVD-R.

I see no reason why any SACD player would not play this, as the data is not encrypted. It is possible that the company made the firmware so that it would detect DSD data and refuse to play if there weren't pit-width modulation, but I would be surprised at that, especially since Sony abandoned SACD and DSD and basically gave it away to the world.

The only part of SACD that doesn't exist freely (to the best of my knowledge) is the lossless compression scheme used on SACDs. This was basically "FLAC for DSD" and was developed by Philips. Even though Sony made everything open source, Philips did not. So when you rip an SACD, the resultant file size is nearly double what is on the disc, as it is not only decrypted, but also decompressed.

Without a way to re-compress and subsequently de-compress, one just has to live with large file sizes for DSD - the equivalent of WAV instead of FLAC. But as storage prices continue to fall, this is of little import to most users - about the only place it would help would be with streaming of DSD, where if that technology were available, the required bandwidth would be cut in half.

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