sony s380 as sacd player

For SACD you have to use HDMI or, if available, analogue outputs. Coax or optical will NOT carry SACD (either as a DSD signal or converted to PCM) on that player.

^^^

i think it is very unlikely that your tv will even accept multichannel pcm, let alone pass it via arc...

check the owner's manual for your tv, as well as the thread in the display section...

Are you 100% sure on this for the S380 because the previous year's line up x70s do pass SACD (tested with non-hybrid SACD) as 2.0 PCM (but downsampled to 44.1kHz) via SPDIF? I know 2CH is not what the OP wants but this 'no SACD via SPDIF' dogma just isn't always true.

I was not aware that Sony had players that did such a conversion. However, to anyone who wants a MCH output, the restriction still stands (HDMI or analogue--there is no FireWire output on these Sony players). Moreover, leaving aside the issue of audible differences, converting SACD output to 16bit/44.1 is a downconversion (actually, IIRC, anything less than 24bit/176.4 is a downconversion).

As you have a player that can send a converted SACD signal via SPDIF, I will amend my statement to say that it is ALMOST NEVER available via SPDIF for 2 channel and NEVER available via SPDIF for MCH.

That's always been my view, one of the major reasons I don't buy the O brand.


If you have a moment, could you verify the S380 2ch output for SACD just for my curiosity?

The S380 is a good and cheap replacement for SACD purpose, as it matches the PS3 for the ability to output PCM at 176.4kHz via HDMI. The PS3 I believe does not output SACD via SPDIF.

This article raises some interesting points about DSD to PCM conversion (though I doubt I could hear a difference).




That is odd. I have an 80gb PS3 (fat) with SACD playback (the last model they made with SACD playback). Via optical (until January 2012, I did not have an HDMI equipped AVR), there was a brief moment when SACD was transformed to DTS MCH on the fly but subsequent firmware updates eliminated that. Outside that brief timespan, I was never able to get SACD to play via optical at all.

Regarding the above linked article (did he see some previous chat here? ), I'm very aware of the points raised but that's not really the real issue because noise can be filtered off and higher sample rate allows more gentle filtering. I understand in broad sense that is something similar in the common DAC design to have oversampling. If you read the DAC data sheets different incoming sample rates can be handled differently with different algorithms and clock, for example a 44.1kHz is 8x oversampled and a 192kHz is 2x oversampled. So the end result could be rather similar.

Charles Hansen did comment on filtering in the Ayre BDP thread and he concedes that 176.4kHz is preferable. The other point I've seen raised elsewhere is DSD is equivalent to about 100kHz in resolution - I can't remember where I read this or if this is correct. There is a graph done by someone showing DSD and 24/96 PCM have very similar waveforms on a test tone. Now you can argue 88 is close to 96 and 80 is close to 88 and you're on a slippery slope.

All in all, it is a safer bet to have higher rather than lower sample rates to start with. I'm not saying that's the only thing that matters. Even to this day AFAIK many AVRs/pre-pros can't process 196kHz. Sending DSD to AVR is a complete mystery because you just don't know what the AVR does to the PCM conversion.

I hear you. The vast majority of my serious music listening is actually CD. Most of the artists I care for are not available in high res and I'm artist and music driven, not format.


Thanks, nobody expects coax to pass MCH PCM but the fact that it's passing something from SACD at all is significant.

Are you positive that what it's sending via coax is data from SACD layer? Did you play a single-layer SACD?

I ask only because the Sony XA5400ES apparently passes ONLY CD layer data via digital coax.

digital coax can transfer 2ch PCM, if you want to use 5.1ch, then have to be HDMI.