SACD ripping

[metalsculptor]

I just found the easily obtainable albums for 2 artists I like are only available on SACD, unless I learn a bit more Chinese. Digging a bit more and I find out it is a proprietry format and worse still encrypted meaning that when the manufacturer goes belly up or stops supporting it my music turns to junk due to a lack of player. Is there any easy way to rip it or would I be better learning some more Chinese and buying the CD's from China.

 

[gk7]

I´m not aware of any tool that would let you rip SACDs, but most SACDs I´ve seen so far
are "Hybrid Layer" which means they contain a CD layer too (playable on a regular CD player and can be ripped as such of course).
Drawback is you will pay "SACD" and get "CD" unless you play it on a SACD player.

 

[metalsculptor]

Thanks that explains the hybr designation in the music description CD quality is fine at least they are usable.

 

[okkyn]

Some modified SACD player (like Oppo) can output digital PCM 24 bit/96 kHz through HDMI. Try google "HiResOrNothing" 😉

 

[dwk123]

Actually the Oppo players (at least the dvd players, not sure about the Blu Ray) convert DSD to 88.2K pcm when playing over hdmi. If you get an 'Atlona Hdmi de-embedder', it will pull the pcm data off of the HDMI feed and send it out via toslink which you can then record on your PC. It's a manual process, but it works. The Selah Audio/AVA room at RMAF was using this device and reported that it worked well.
There are other ways to mod gear to get up to 176k pcm from DSD, but those are pretty pricey.

 

[Yves Smolders]

Same with old PS3 ("fat") units. They output the SACD to HDMI @ 176?6khz (at very high quality - there's a story out there on the net about the guys who wrote the conversion code) - a HDMI to SPDIF solution will allow you to make a WAV out of it...