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Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 - Tetsuji

Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 - Tetsuji

Exton  OVCL-681

Stereo Hybrid

Classical - Orchestral


Dvořák: Symphony No. 9

Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra
Honna Tetsuji (conductor)

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Comment by Scott A. - February 14, 2019 (1 of 14)

Got this yesterday. In addition to being a hybrid disc, it is an HQ disc and carries a "DSD 11.2MHz" logo.

Comment by Don_Angelo - February 15, 2019 (2 of 14)

Hello,
I started noticing this on several Japanese SACD and was wondering what it meant exactly. Should we expect these SACD to contain DSD256 files or does it refer to the mastering technique ?
All the SACDs I own so far are DSD64.

Comment by [Current93] - February 16, 2019 (3 of 14)

Don't know what exactly 11.2 MHz means under Exton imprint, but the Kobayashi/LPO 3 SACDs of the Russian music recorded in this technique are the best sounding physical domain I've ever heard in my 18 years of SACD listening. Incredible depth, soundstage and clarity unmatched even by analogue SHM-SACD.

Comment by hiredfox - February 27, 2019 (4 of 14)

If you do the math, 11.2kHz sampling rate is what you get from DSD256.

LSO Live record in DSD128 nowadays and these discs sound far superior to the 'old standard' DSD64 as I have noted on here several times in the past two years or so.

John Newton & co have used DSD256 for some recent Reference Recordings projects and they too sound superb. Leaving Jared behind now and whoever would have expected that?

Comment by Tony Reif - February 28, 2019 (5 of 14)

Just to be clear, SACDs can only contain DSD64. If you want to hear DSD 128 or 256 you'll have to download the files. The question remains why these SACDs would sound better than the best DSD64 recordings.

Comment by hiredfox - March 1, 2019 (6 of 14)

Recording at a much higher sampling rate results in more information in the recording. There is no reason why down-scaling for encoding on a disc will lose this extra information subsequently. Of course there will be other compromises.

Such discs sound better subjectively. I noticed improvement in sound quality in my system for certain discs before discovering that higher sampling rate DSD had been used so it wasn't a case of me knowingly looking for improvements.

Comment by Tony Reif - March 4, 2019 (7 of 14)

Specifically, the extra information is the result of the additional samples. A DSD bitstream as you probably know is a series of 1-bit values (one up or one down from the previous sample, if I'm not mistaken). How you could encode that additional information if you can't keep the additional samples is what I don't understand.

Comment by Scott A. - March 5, 2019 (8 of 14)

Just in case anyone is considering ordering this to see how it sounds, I should probably mention that it is a very "different" interpretation. I'm no musician or critic, so I couldn't say for sure whether the difference is because the orchestra & conductor are unfamiliar with the music, or they just aren't that good, or if they aren't encumbered by a lot of thoroughly entrenched performance traditions that Western conductors adhere to.

Orchestral balances are different. Though it may not be "right," it still sounds very beautiful. I'm hesitant to say it is being played wrong. Look how many folks praise Kubelik's DG recording of Dvorak's 9th, and that sounds very "wrong" to my ears.

The whole performance has a light touch, sort of the opposite of, say, Harnoncourt's somewhat violent approach.

As for the sound quality, it seems very good to me, but I'd be better able to tell if the playing packed more wallop.

Also, there are two other short pieces on the disc. One is an arrangement of a folk tune that is presumably Vietnamese, which is very interesting. The other is a more Western style piece by a Vietnamese(?) composer, which is fairly interesting. Other than some technical fine print, most all of the booklet info is not in English.

Live, but no applause.

Comment by Tony Reif - March 7, 2019 (9 of 14)

I'm still trying to understand why SACDs recorded at DSD128 or 256 sound better than those recorded at DSD64. I am so not an expert on any of this, but a knowledgeable friend of mine filled me in on some things. Without going into the technicalities of the DSD sigma-delta recording process, it generates a lot of noise that is “noise-shaped” during recording to move it above the range of human hearing – to around 50kHz for DSD 64, and correspondingly higher for DSD128 and 256. But noise-shaping also makes the noise much “louder”, and it needs to be filtered out on playback so that (ideally) no sign of it remains below 20K. Filters aren’t perfect – they “leak” sub-harmonics of the noise frequency (so for a 50K filter there will be some spurious amplitude at 25K, 12.5K etc.), but the higher the filter’s frequency (i.e. for DSD128 and 256) the less of this intermodulation distortion will be within the range of hearing. Plus, the higher the frequency of the filter the gentler (more shallow), e.g. 6dB/octave rather than 18dB/octave, it can be to accomplish this, which means the better the recording’s phase information will be retained. And thus you’d expect the sound of DSD128 and 256 to have more subtle ambient info as well as better harmonic structure; also, the higher sampling rate the greater the theoretical dynamic range. But can some or all of these gains be maintained when the recording has been downsampled to DSD64 for SACD, and if so does it depend on what kind of playback you’re using? – that’s what isn’t clear. Perhaps the greater information density of the original DSD128 and 256 recordings is relevant?

The best sounding DSD playback I’ve heard has been through “native DSD” converters which upsample the DSD64 stream to DSD256 and use DACs and digital filters which are made up of discrete components rather than off-the-shelf chips (such as my Marantz SA-KI Ruby and John's SA-10). Does playback through such DACs somehow allow filtering of the SACD’s noise at a higher frequency than through DSD/DOP converters?

What about DXD? DSD was originally mostly used for editing DSD recordings rather than for recording – even now it’s difficult to do complex editing in DSD. But DXD (32 bits/352.8K) is actually much less accurate to the analogue waveform than DSD64 – I believe it has up to 8x less information because the sampling rate is 8x lower (forget the relative file sizes, they have nothing to do with the amount of information encoded – a “raw” bitstream recording is way more parsimonious than a multi-bit (PCM) recording). So labels that record in DXD and upconvert it to DSD128 or 256 for release are I believe playing a numbers game. According to this 2016 article

https://medium.com/@jolon/my-recent-experience-with-various-dsd-music-formats-f23c7431bd33

Reference Recordings does this, but, at least for Soundmirror’s Pittsburgh recordings for them, RR states that both recording and post-production have been done in DSD64 or, more recently, 256, and I believe it's the same for their Utah Sympony ones

Comment by Mark Werlin - March 9, 2019 (10 of 14)

Thanks to Tony for posting a succint and informative summary of the advantages of DSD recording vs. PCM. Too many articles I've read on the subject were either technically opaque to the non-engineer, or partisan and self-serving.

A label might choose to record in DSD 128 (5.6 MHz) or DSD 256 (11.2 MHz) not only for technical reasons, but for commercial reasons, as a way of future-proofing the product. In addition to selling the album on SACD, they could license the album to vendors or sell it from their own website at the original, higher DSD resolution. Lots of DACS and some SACD players, even the Marantz SA8005, can play DSD 5.6 MHz.

Comment by hiredfox - March 10, 2019 (11 of 14)

This was a regular topic of discussion on the SA-CD.net forum before it was summarily closed down by the site owner. These discussions are no longer active but are still retrievable to be read by those who have a deeper interest in the DSD v PCM argument (and many other subjects surrounding our hobby).

Needless to say as ever in these matters, commercial interest and convenience has impeded the pursuit of absolute sound quality which is the raison d'être of audiophiles.

In my view it all went wrong when Sony / Philips launched SA-CD to exploit the advantages of single bit recording, without incorporating DSD as the recording standard in a set of regulations as was the case for CD in the form of the "Red Book". The Red Book defined the recording regime for CD as 44.1kHz and 16 bit depth.

I am very clear in my mind that DSD recording is far superior in every way to PCM recording based on nearly 20 years of exposure to the SA-CD media. The recent introduction by Marantz of the SA10 that reads the disc encoded SACD single bit data stream and keeps it in that form throughout without any (other) form of PCM processing or conversion only serves to emphasise how wide the SQ gap is between DSD and PCM. It's a pity in many ways that it has taken 20 years to perfect a domestic replay technology that exploits the ambitions of those early one bit recording pioneers.

Even today 'though we have commercial interests haranguing audiophiles into their standpoint that nobody can hear the difference between even (say) 48kHz / 24 bit PCM recordings and DSD64 citing 'double blind testing' and myriad other distracting arguments to muddy the waters. We have no control over these commercial interests other than not to buy their products, which is for many akin to 'shooting ourselves in he foot" but this audiophile made that decision a couple of year ago. The few recordings I do buy now are DSD and I shall be eternally grateful to the stalwart few recording houses that have persisted with DSD despite the pressures not to do so.

Comment by Tony Reif - March 10, 2019 (12 of 14)

It's not clear what more Sony and Philips could have done to promote the DSD system. For several years they supported the production of SACDs by other labels. Songlines was one of many that took advantage of this through the loan of DSD recording equipment (which wherever needed included sending a DSD engineer to set up the equipment and supervise the recording) and subsidies on the manufacturing costs. Sony/Philips initially projected that after a few years SACDs would account for at least 60% of discs sold. But the mass market went the other way, to MP3s, or stuck with CDs. It turns out that only audiophiles heard and/or cared enough about the sound improvement to pay for it.

I don't know what kind of additional standard setting or regulations would have made any difference. As a delivery medium the system is defined by its technology as much as Redbook defines CDs, with the additional advantage to the producer that the bitstream can't be readily copied by the public (turns out it can be hacked, but that's another story). As a production medium, native DSD has inherent technical disadvantages, mainly that it is difficult/inconvenient to do much editing/mixing/post-production without converting to DXD (only the Sonoma, Sony's own DSD recorder/editor, allows you to keep the bitstream in DSD, though it has to be converted to multi-bit DSD at the point of edit). If you want to get a sense of how complicated it all is try reading this:

https://samplerateconverter.com/educational/dsd-dsf-dff-editor

Comment by hiredfox - March 10, 2019 (13 of 14)

Hi Tony. Thanks for the link which I have saved as a pdf to read at leisure.

Don't forget Grimm do a DSD editing suite as well that is successfully used by Jared Sachs @ Channel, arguably the best sounding of all SA-CD discs. Indeed much that is very good in SA-CD is still coming from The Netherlands.

Comment by Euell Neverno - March 12, 2019 (14 of 14)

Doubtful this was actually recorded in quad DSD, as it could not be edited unless converted to DxD (32bit 384 khz PCM) and back. More likely this was recorded in DxD and then converted to quad DSD, although an unedited master could be quad DSD. Have not seen the claims on the album. Channel Classics records some of their surround tracks in DSD without edits, but the stereo tracks are said to be edited in DxD. Frankly, the issue is one of resolution without artifacts or distortion. Both formats are capable. One comment here suggests that taking a DSD 256 master down to DSD 64 doesn't lose musical information, but, of course, it does. How much difference you can hear is entirely another question. But, to another point made here. The vast majority of SACD's have been recorded in PCM. BIS, for example, records SACD's at 24bit 96khz PCM, but don't turn up your nose; BIS has produced many fine sounding SACD's and their recording standards and acumen are quite high Frankly, recording technique is a lot more important than format.