I wonder what Mike and Dave's takes would be on CD/SACD hybrids in Urd, whether they feel like the SACD layer might negatively influence the read quality of the Red Book layer.
My utterly naive guess would be that any potential reflective/refractive interference or any focus issues from the SACD layer shouldn't be anything a good drive's error correction wouldn't be able to handle. But if I wanted some random opinion from some half-wit on the interwebs such as myself, I could just google it. So I'd rather hear it from the horses' mouths.
Of course, mastering will also play a part - if the SACD layer was mastered from a bog-standard old PCM file, well, don't expect miracles.
Well, since you can't really mix DSD, I'd assume (for my credentials on the matter; see above) that everything that wasn't recorded directly to DSD will have taken that PCM detour.
I know that Octave Records has been working on a way to mix DSD for a little while, but I don't know how far they've come with it. Since we all know how particular Paul is about DSD, it's pretty safe to assume that anything Octave Records has been putting out in DSD has in fact been recorded directly to DSD.
But most stuff you can buy has probably been piped through the standard mixing and mastering process at some point, which would mean it's been converted to PCM and back at least once during that process.
The Berlin Philharmonics sell SACD recordings
through their own label, and they very much pride themselves for their attention to detail during recording and mastering. But even with these guys, and even with me being a hopeless Berlin Phil fanboy, I sincerely doubt that their recordings are DSD all the way from microphone to master.
For stuff like rock or pop that pretty much
must be mixed before it can be mastered?
Well…
Or to put it differently: SACD/DSD seems to be a nifty thing in theory, but in the real world that's dominated by PCM (and PCM-based studio and production pipelines), Urd + Yggy should probably get you some pretty decent results.
Mike and Jason can sometimes appear a bit abrasive with their refreshingly direct yet a bit reductionist "because it's not worth the effort"-style answers to questions like "why don't you guys support DSD?!"
But then you start looking into things in a bit more detail and you eventually figure out for yourself that it is, in fact, not worth the effort. Turns out: They do know their Schiit. Who knew?!
