SACD to digital format

[shredcaster]

how would I go about converting a 5.1ch SACD to a digital format (presumably FLAC?) and maintain multi-channel/qualit?

[Noahtuck]

As far as i know there has never been a way.

I have never heard of a PC drive ever being able to read the SACD 5.1 or multichannel layer, just the standard CD layer.

Granted i have not checked in some time, but if no one could do it when they were kind of a big thing i doubt anyone has lately.

[greymalkin]

if you want to back up dvd audio however you can do it quite simply using dvd audio explorer.

I wish I had a digital backup of my alison krauss & union station live sacd..I lost one of the discs and found it was out of print and going for
$100+ now .

[Noahtuck]

if you want to back up dvd audio however you can do it quite simply using dvd audio explorer.

I wish I had a digital backup of my alison krauss & union station live sacd..I lost one of the discs and found it was out of print and going for
$100+ now .

Yeah i have a pretty good SACD collection and it would be nice to be able to back it up

But no one touches them but me so they are pretty safe.

[shredcaster]

my DVD drive in my computer reads and plays it perfectly.
It goes through ac3filter and the config panel shows all 5.1 channels getting a signal (and my speakers play it correctly).
do you think dvd audio explorer will convert sacd to dvd-audio?

[Noahtuck]

my DVD drive in my computer reads and plays it perfectly.
It goes through ac3filter and the config panel shows all 5.1 channels getting a signal (and my speakers play it correctly).
do you think dvd audio explorer will convert sacd to dvd-audio?

Ummm... i don't think so....

At best it is reading the layer that is the standard cd layer and your software is making it a psuedo 5.1 like prologic does.

We used to talk about it a lot here and some other Audio only forums i am a member of and to anyone's knowledge there has never been a PC based drive that will read the layer that the SACD info is stored on.

SACD's are like DUAL LAYER dvds, the first layer is the standard cd info/music that can be read by any standard cd or dvd player.

The second layer can ONLY be read by a SACD player, not a cd player, not a dvd player, and not by a dvd player that reads DVD AUDIO disc's.

It is it's own unique format.

[Noahtuck]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=copying+SACD

"SACD has several copy protection features at the physical level which, for the moment, appear to make SACD discs impossible to copy without resorting to the analog hole, or ripping of the conventional 700MB layer on hybrid discs. These include physical pit modulation and 80-bit encryption of the audio data, with a key encoded on a special area of the disk that is only readable by a licensed SACD device. The HD layer of an SACD disc cannot be played back on computer CD/DVD drives, nor can SACDs be created except by the licensed disc replication facilities in Shizuoka and Salzburg."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD

So you would be the only person in the world with a drive that can read the second layer on an SACD

[shredcaster]

so you're saying it plays the 2ch audio across the 5.1 setup?
how is it then that the rear channels play different sounds and not just the stereo (I'm talking different instruments here).

[Cornucopia]

Dolby Surround/ProLogic/ProLogicII. A decoder will even decode to 5.1 a plain stereo CD track (although not as accurately, obviously). This can and does happen quite often, sometimes on accident, sometimes on purpose.

Regarless of what your impressions may be, SACD is for all intents and purposes a truly copy-proof medium. The "analog hole" is as close as one can get, and even that has frequency response restrictions, etc. You'll neve be able to get the raw DSD bitstream ripped or anything like that.

If you can live with lowered Freq. Response, you can take the Analog output and redigitize it.

Scott

[Noahtuck]

[jman98]

I've got an example from the internet of an SACD whose multi-channel sound was copied to WAV and converted to 5.1 DTS. But you're not gonna like what they had to do to make it.

As others have pointed out, there are no PC drives capable of playing the SACD layer. So that means that you can't rip the discs. The only way to copy the discs is to record 2 channels at a time of the analog output and then use some software to sync the 5 tracks together. As Cornucopia points out, this analog output isn't quite as good as the source.

No PC anywhere, not even in manufacturing labs, can play the SACD layer. Period. The original poster's PC is playing the optional CD layer, which does not have to be included but usually is (Sony SACDs were often an exception to this rule). There was a very expensive piece of PC hardware that could play SACD images and it was intended for manufacturers to use for checking, but there's never been any PC compatible drives. By never making any drives capable of playing the SACD layer, Sony and Philips ensured that the SACD layer could never be ripped.

Just for the curious, because DVD Audio discs can be played on PCs, they can be ripped. A few years ago some clever Russian guys figured out how to exploit a hole in playback software and they created a DVD Audio ripper. It's now very difficult to find, but it does exist.

[loster]

There are recording devices for more then two channels. There was an idea of modifying a player with hardware that would allow the extraction of the digital data over toslink or something but I don't remember the specifics.

[Rawit]

There are some SACD/DVD players (mostly the more budget models in the beginning of the SACD days) that internally convert the DSD stream to a format that could be used by the DSP's and processors in normal DVD players. The conversion causes a loss in resolution of course, but people have hacked these players to save the converted 5.1 output stream. This and sampling the analog output is the only way to "copy" SACD. There is no pretty way.

[El Heggunte]

Just for the curious, because DVD Audio discs can be played on PCs, they can be ripped. A few years ago some clever Russian guys figured out how to exploit a hole in playback software and they created a DVD Audio ripper. It's now very difficult to find, but it does exist.

Here :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdadecoder/