Schiit/DSD Question

A PCM only style of DAC such as a Schiit would be unable to play a DSD file.  However, presently, the only way you would encounter a DSD file would be if you purchased DSD downloads or played rips of SACDs.

Here are Mike Moffat's comments on DSD from a Headfi article. Mike is the cofounder of Schiit and developed the first ever standalone DAC back in the 1980s.  
   
"I have never published my DSD opinions. Here they are. I say opinions because the design of audio gear should adhere to hard science. The user's response however, is totally in that user's psyche. When I worked in Peru, there were tribes in the Amazon region who spoke in vocabularies limited to grunts and delighted in eating insects they found under logs. Then there are people like myself who prefer meat, coffee, dairy, sometimes things green or fruity, starches, and lots of salt. 

In the early days of digital audio, multibit reigned. It was suitable, but expensive, derived as it was from weapons guidance and medical science. Note the use of the word science. Analog numbers were converted to digital, and the reverse yielded the same number. Nothing was averaged, no noise was added, no economic engineering geniuses were allowed to make anything cheaper with smoke and mirrors.  

The earliest DACs were pretty marginal, but natural selection led to the Burr-Brown PCM-63, an amazing multibit DAC, still pretty good today. About that time, Burr Brown was sold to Texas Instruments. There began to appear delta-sigma dacs, which is a fancy name for reduced bit width DACs which used the above alluded to tricks of averaging and noise shaping to make up for the data they threw away. Soon we had TI, Wolfson, Crystal Semiconductor, Phillips, and many more manufacturers of these (now marketed as audio - read dogschiit) DACs. Why stoop to make them?? Simple - they're cheaper! Never mind they can't be used in medical imaging or defense applications because of their inherent data loss/hallucination. Too late, the audio customer had far cheaper gear. The chip makers sold lots of parts.  

Enter DSD, the ultimate extension of this idea. More noise and less bitwidth. You get for free with the bargain, the elimination of the nasty anti-alias filter effects used in the recordings. Cool, huh. This idea works well just as soon as every recording studio on the planet switches over. When that happens (right), what about the old recordings like all of those from SACD days of yore!! Oops, they are already recorded with the filter in place... Unfortunately, they are the bulk of the current DSD catalog available. Can you get DSD from iTunes?? Download DSD from Amazon?? Oh... 

What about 1, 2, 4, or 87.6x native DSD recordings. Yeah there's a few - I really loved the Folsom Prison Castrati Singers doing Handel soprano motets. My all time fave is the Orkney Island shepherd's Poems and Cries of Ecstacy with the sheep. The plaintive cries and bleats of all involved were immaculately suspended in perfect panoramic image. Even the subtle sounds of the shepherds gently placing the sheep's rear legs in their boots were clearly audible.  

Nobody ever explained to me how to design a multi-rate 1x, 2x, etc DSD DAC without a real expensive adaptive filter. Do you optimize it for 1X? 2X? 5.76X? Trouble is, then all of the other rates are compromised. Maybe the over $10K DACs do that. I haven't figured out how to make an over $10K DAC yet, maybe someone will teach me.  

In conclusion - this is opinion, mine with respect to DSD: How can I express just how underwhelmed I am. Adjectives such as stillborn, faith-based, and ludicrous come to mind.  

But wait - I actually built the Loki DSD DAC! How can I be such a hypocrite! The answer is that I will try almost anything once. If I don't like it, I won't do it again. But I could be wrong - if servers ever get big/cheap enough that iTunes and Amazon offer DSD downloads AND major label music providers begin to provide native DSD recordings in substantial numbers - then I will cook and eat a crow at RMAF. Meanwhile, all you DSDers - enjoy the grubs!! Buy a Loki!" 

I have long thought DSD is a great format. You can take that incredibly high sample-rate one-bit stream, filter it, and you have an analog waveform. Doing this with discrete components or FPGAs gives wonderful results in my experience.

In addition to a lot of nativedsd.com downloads, I have my entire vinyl collection ripped to DSD128 by a Korg pro unit. (No listener was able to reliably distinguish the recordings from the live vinyl, on a ~$20K analog setup.)

But, it turns out, DSD is largely dead as a format. It was never big, of course, but streaming killed it, as it can't be compressed.

I have now a PS DirectStream and Schiit Yggdrasil. Both are truly stupendous DA converters in their own right, both, IMHO within - say - "10%" of the best you can get at any price.

And I discovered this recently: Feeding my DSD128 files to the DirectStream natively, or allowing my Innuos server to convert them to FLAC and send them to the DAC - which then converts them to DSD as it does all input - results in only the most subtle differences.

So it doesn't really matter. DSD->PCM conversion is not lossless but it doesn't necessary sound worse either.

And then there's this: With PCM material, which is the vast amount of what is available today, including high-quality recording, the Schiit DAC has a naturalness of timbre and pace that takes the cake. IME.

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Aside: How cool is this? Schiit has a linestage preamp on Stereophile's Class A list. Preamps on that list go to $30K and beyond. The Schiit Freya+ price? $900!

Why would anyone spend $30,000 on a preamp?

Schiit is about the coolest firm in high-end audio, maybe ever.

PlayBack Designs (guy involved in early DSD) uses a very high DSD sampling on their DACs. I think everything is done in DSD, including PCM data. The designer invented the first FPGA DAC, so it is some complex software implementation to do all of this DSD.

The new Schiit Yggdrasil+ Less Is More is my best DAC. The Schitt Mjolnir v3 (own it) is a good preamp and I think better than the Freya+ (sold it). I do not listen to the Mjolnir v3 all the time but when I do it is very enjoyable.

To add some color to my comments above:

I'm listening now to Blakey's classic "Keystone 3" on my Yggdrasil (+ Kara). I listened first to the Redbook version - it's a textbook example of the horrid mastering (likely dropping bits and creating nasty jaggies) that gave 16/44 its undeserved bad rep. Yuck. It's crap.

I'm listening now to the SACD version. Its sublime in comparison: horns are silky-smooth, with decay trails fading into blackness, and dynamic as heck as well, with snare hits that startle.

Only I'm not listening to DSD, but to the DSD64 transcoded to 4X PCM by my Innuos server and fed to the DA converter.

I must admit that I've forgotten what algo/process the Innuos uses for DSD->FLAC conversion. But the lesson is this: Recording quality/mastering is what matters most.