Hi Resolution Audio article which may be helpful..

[RGA]

for those trying to figure out which DACs to get.

Audial :: USB 2010 (page 1)

As an aside some of the big designers in this field - the head of AMR "DSD is a single bit, 128 times oversampled format with extreme amounts of noiseshaping added. Some people (including myself) consider it "defective by design".../...DSD is precisely such a 2-Level system with 128 possible values for a 22.7uS Sample period (that is CD), in other words it is a 7 Bit - 44.1KHz equivalent natively, without noise-shaping. This is well below what CD is actually capable of.

And noise-shaping in Digital systems is equivalent (but much larger in magnitude especially for single bit systems) to what I like to call "fuzzy distortion" in looped feedback circuits.../...Many modern DAC's do replay DSD/SACD, however most add digital filters to the DSD stream to clean up at least some of the noise, with predictable results. Anyway you need a DAC Chip that is designed to handle DSD in order to play back DSD.

Or you need to convert DSD to PCM, which to me suffices with 88.2KHz sample rate and 20 Bit to contain all actual information in DSD (as opposed to the all the supersonic noise from the noiseshaping), but is considered by the current bunch of DSD advocates a major lese majesty and utter heresy (Ed Meitner took the same view and some of earlier SACD Players in fact converted DSD to double speed CD Standards PCM).

At any extent, you can now use 176.4KHz and 24 Bits, so you are guaranteed to loose nothing except the ultrasonic noise, which seems to be what DSD fan's really like (I know, another utter heresy). Several Software Players now exist that can transcode DSD on the fly to PCM during playback, so no need to convert the File itself. The same can now also be applied to decoding HDCD, though I personally transcoded all my HDCD's to 20Bit/44.1KHz PCM."



I'm getting a headache.