[mgalusha]

I've just had a dose of audio crack and I don't want to give it up...

Wayne from Bolder Cables let me take home a Slim Devices Transporter to listen to for a few days. Awfully nice of him.

So far I think my heavily modded SB2 has the edge in terms of musicality, soul if you will, but the Transporter is a very nice piece of equipment. In talking with Wayne yesterday we discussed the fact that it's able to play 24bit, 96KHz audio but of course there isn't much of that around.

This morning I was finally getting the last of my CD's put away after moving and I was lamenting the fact that I have about 50 SACD and high res PCM discs that I never play any more because I can't store them on my server and play them via the SB. This of course made me think about the Transporter sitting on the rack playing music while I was working... Hmm, I have a handful of the Classic Records 24/96 DAD discs. These were put out by Classic Records and contain 2 channel, 24/96 LPCM audio on a standard DVD.

So a little searching in Google, a couple of utilities and I was able to rip the tracks from the DVD at their full bit rate, confirmed by playing them in foobar. I compressed them with FLAC and copied them over to my music server and hoped for the best.

Oh yeah, hell yeah! Not only did they play, they sounded very very good. I have a very nice Denon 2900, which will play these discs, DVD-A and SACD and I can say with absolute certainty that it never came close to what I'm listening to. The transporter I'm listening to is box stock and brand new. If I could find a way to get more music in this format, that I could actually extract and store, I'd be trying to figure out a way to get one of these.

I've hit the audio crack pipe and I don't want to go back to 16 bit. 

[JoshK]

Sounds like you need the cracked universal player (Pioneer 578, et al).  On diyaudio there is a thread on how to do it and a dude that sells boards, etc.  This will convert DSD to 24/88 and DVD-Audio at whatever is native. 

[amplifierguru]

Hi Mike,

My Juli@ soundcard will do that and more. 

Certainly helps though for amplifier fine tuning

Cheers,
greg

[mgalusha]

I've heard about that but the bigger problem is I'm currently making two mortgage payments and buying a transporter and a Pioneer to hack up won't be in the budget for quite some time.

[mgalusha]

My Juli@ soundcard will do that and more. 

Yes, lots of them will but that means a PC in my listening room and that I don't want. I was talking about how well the Slimdevices transporter sounds with native 24/96 audio.

[Dokter_doug]

So a little searching in Google, a couple of utilities and I was able to rip the tracks from the DVD at their full bit rate, confirmed by playing them in foobar....

Hmmm...do tell which utilities?

Doug

[mgalusha]

I used vStrip to pull the LPCM off the disk to RAW files and then lpcm24 to convert them to WAV files.

It took a little digging on google to find a site with vStrip as it contains the css stuff. Since I own these disks and they don't have css, I wasn't worried about this but it's been removed for US sites. The lpcm24 program has instructions on how to use vStrip to extract the raw audio files.

The only thing I did differently was to have vStrip split the output based on the IFO tracks, that way I ended up with one .raw file for each song.

[Den]

Chesky did DAD's too.
http://www.soundstage.com/music/reviews/rev056.htm

Still a pretty limited pool of sources.

I read (probably in one of the SACD vs. DVD-A threads) that a lot of mastering is done in 24/96. 
We need something like iTunes with 24/96 files so we can bypass the disc format bottleneck and just mainline that sweet sweet high-res data.  Perhaps some of the 'audiophile' record labels could be talked into sporting AC a few tracks for DL as a pilot program. . . 


BTW, did you try 24/96 on your SB2, Mike?
I played a 24/96 sample of an LP on the SB, and it worked fine.  The PCM1748 is s'posed to handle up to 100KHz.

[mgalusha]

Den,

I actually have 1 of the Chesky disks as well but between the Classic records DAD and the Chesky's I have a total of 7.

I did try playing the 24/96 files through my SB2 and the result was a horrifying noise. Took me a bit to realize that the crystal that was removed to reduce (a little) jitter at 44.1KHz is needed to play 96KHz files. Fortunately I have one, I just need to get it reinstalled. I did try them via a stock SB3 and they played fine. I read somewhere that a SB2/3 down samples them to 48KHz, which is still a nice improvement over 16/44.1.

[Den]

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=27582&highlight=24%2F96

The 96k to 48k downsampling is just done by dropping samples, i.e. no filtering or interpolation. There's not enough CPU power to do more.

Ah yes, I foolishly assumed that playing a 96KHz file and hearing nice music flow from the SB meant that I was listening to the DAC running at 96KHz. 

Although the SB's DAC will handle 96KHz, it appears that the SB's 250MHz processor feeding the DAC chip lacks sufficient mojo to convert Ethernet to S/PDIF at 96KHz.  At least that's my guess for the reason to downsample.  He stated only that there was insufficient mojo to perform sophisticated downsampling, and I'm guessing that this is the same reason for the need to downsample. . .or maybe it's a limitation of the crystal.  I dunno.  I'm not intimately familiar with the entire process.

So yeah, those of us who don't get on board the transporter may have to make do with 24/48, but I like to hope that a 96KHz workaround can be implemented on the Slimserver or with a few mods to the SB.
 

p.s. you may find some 24/96 stuff to your liking on http://www.etree.org .