[griz lee]

wow. that's a thread.

two things to add:

-- the best recent 1 bit stuff i've heard now uses multibit converters (4 bits wide, at lower rates) to do the D/A conversion.

-- yes, as was said earlier 1 bit causes major DSP headache. To get anywhere even with the best current 1-bit authoring environments, you need to convert to very high rate PCM anyway (well, it's kinda done behind your back in one system) or more openly in the case of Pyramix's DxD format. I know of only a handful of algorithms that work directly on the DSD stream, so I don't expect to see fully 1-bit vintage comp emulations any time soon - just changing the gain of a signal is a surprisingly involved operation in true one bit land.

-- i'm often told by mastering friends that an alarming amount of supposedly '1-bit' material out there was infact sourced on ProTools and recorded to one-bit on the mix output.

I think Pyramix got it right. Doing delta/sigma conversion to 384khz or higher at 24 bit gives excellent performance for processing a DSD recording using the tools which we all know and love largely without modification.

Then treat SACD just as a distribution medium, and convert back. Forget about trying to keep the chain of dsd for highly processed/produced music (at least at this point in history. I suppose it pays to keep an open mind...)


personally, i'll stick to multibit because i really love the sound of 48 kHz for some material.