Able to rip SACD to mp3's

[irjason]

Just wanted to make this known. Today I purchased my first SACD (super audio cd) The Police - Every Breath You Take. It plays in my car cd player and I was able to convert the songs to mp3's easily with the following setup:

Windows Media Player 9 and the Intervideo mp3 plugin
Windows XP Home
Lite ON CD Burner LTR-4015S

I have not tried it on the iPod yet, but the mp3's play back on my pc so I should be set.
Seems like this might be the format to support for iPod owners. I don't know if this is possible with the DVD Audio disks.

EDIT: I just found out this is a hybrid SACD so it also contains a layer with the normal cd on it. Evidently some SACD's can only be played on an SACD player. My above comments may not apply to all SACD's.

[jC!]

What you were ripping was NOT the SACD portition of the disk. That would be impossible as there are no SACD CD-ROMs.

What you ripped was the CD-Audio layer of the disk. The same information you would rip from any 2-Ch PCM Audio CD.

SACDs most often are Hybrid Disks meaning that the lower layer of the disk is the SACD information and the layer on top being the CD-Audio (PCM) information, readible by most all standard CD-Players.

Layer technolagy can be most seen in DVDs where a movie can fit 8GBs on one side of the disk using 2 layers.

[saratoga]

Even if you could rip SACD to MP3, it would have worse audio quality then plain CD because you'd need to do the lossy conversion to PCM while throwing out any advantage it had over PCM in the first place.

Check this out for more info:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=3390

[Wolfman200]

I just ripped my new Tito Puente SACD with iTunes without a problem. It was a "hybrid" CD and like jc! said, it was ripping the CD layer of the disc. It sounds just fine.

[laurenglenn]

At least with DVD-Audio discs, you can extract the DVD LPCM or AC3 soundtrack using DVD Decrypter.

I don't use SACD any more because I thought it was a dead format. It's too bad though, because it did sound good until I couldn't find many artists I liked on the format.

Lauren

[bobb-mini]

Am guessing for these high resolution formats to be worthwhile, the artists would have to re-record the sessions using high-res equipment and mixing. Too expensive or too much work or not enuff sales.

[Galley]

Am guessing for these high resolution formats to be worthwhile, the artists would have to re-record the sessions using high-res equipment and mixing. Too expensive or too much work or not enuff sales.

SACDs are created from the original studio masters, just like CDs. They use DSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Stream_Digital), a more advanced technology than PCM.

[mnhnhyouh]

I would love to see some evidence of anybody being able to pick the difference between SACD and a normal CD in a blind listening test.

h

[Galley]

I would love to see some evidence of anybody being able to pick the difference between SACD and a normal CD in a blind listening test.

h

Please tell me you're kidding! :shake:

[kornchild2002]

Please tell me you're kidding! :shake:

I take it that mnhnhyouh is talking about the general audio community of which cannot distinguish between 128kbps AAC and the source CD. Then yes, SACD and DVD audio are just not needed. I have a couple of DVD audio discs (they were free as part of being on a street team) and they are nice but I just don't see what the big deal is especially since they seem to be mastered above what the human ear can perceive anyway. I have yet to sit down and conduct a blind test using my headphones (as speakers just aren't good unless your room is acoustically tuned) but I already know that I would fail it. First off, my PC's soundcard is limited to a 48KHz output at 128-bit which would mean that my soundcard would have to re-encode the music on-the-fly while sending it out to my headphones. Secondly, I don't have any headphones which could properly handle anything above 44.1KHz as the higher frequencies aren't needed since audio CDs are mastered to the limits of the human ear. Now, an audio CD can sound crappy when compared to a SACD/DVD-audio disc if the audio CD was badly mastered. Normally, SACD/DVD-audio discs contain the final mastered copy of the music before the engineer makes it fit audio CD specs. Technically speaking, there shouldn't be an audible difference when going down from 96KHz to 44.1KHz as modern day lossless/lossy encoders can do this better than expensive software. However, many audio engineers think they know better so they like to do it manually and not let the encoder do its job. That is when you can observe clipping or other audio defects on the audio CD that aren't there on higher resolution versions.

Hence, if a CD is mastered by a good audio engineer, there shouldn't technically be a difference other than the audio CD is standard stereo while the other versions are 5.1 audio.

[Galley]

Listen to Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" on SACD and then get back to me.

[kornchild2002]

Listen to Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" on SACD and then get back to me.

Ehh, that is alright, I can just take your word. Though I take it you want me to conduct a blind test, right?

[Galley]

Now I'm not saying that there aren't some SACDs that barely sound better than CDs, because there are a bunch of them out there. Sony's initial releases were rather poor. Universal releases have been phenomenal.