I have a Meridian ID41 in an 861 and Roon on a Mac Mini.
I’m interested in buying a set of SACD but have no idea how to get them to playback through my Meridian gear.
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The short answer is that you probably can’t with the set up you currently have. You need an SACD player to play SACD. The Mac mini does not have an SACD player and the 861 you have is a processor and not a player. Not sure if you had an SACD transport of you could connect the data stream out of the transport to the 861 but I am guessing that you cannot.
Pluto
Just on the off chance, if you have a Sony blu ray player ( as will an oppo)then I believe they will play Sacd discs.
As he mentions Roon surely he’s asking about through Roon.
Rip to ISO, convert to DSF and import. Roon does the rest.
Ripping can be done with instructions from Google.
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Maybe , question is not very clear, but if he needs something to play them, the blu Ray will do.
Didn’t people use original play stations to rip in times gone bye?
Have you seen the thread re oppo blu Ray being roon ready?
Thx. I figured as much. I do have an old Oppo 93 that will play SACD but I don’t know of a way to use it to process the data stream from Roon. The Oppo connects to the 861 via HD621.
As was previously mentioned in order to listen to those SACDs you need to use that Oppo to rip them to a DSF file and then store the resulting file so that Roon can pick it up. Roon will not play SACDs from the Oppo.
I like that idea but no idea how to actually go about it? Thx.
Google is your friend. There are many articles on this web site and on others about how to accomplish this using free software from Sonore.
Good advice. Thx.
SACD requires an SACD player.
Some SACD players have been, well, “used” to pull the DSD (digitally encoded audio) into a DSF file. Additionally, you can pull the SACD disk into an ISO.
It’s not as easy as ripping a CD because one of the design goals was to make pulling apart the SACD layer difficult. But, as others have noted, there are ways to do this. It requires booting your, supported, SACD player using a USB flash drive loaded with some software and then using some software on a PC/Mac to pull the ISO or individual tracks as DSF (basically, DSD with metadata) back to the PC/Mac. Roon can manage and play the DSF files like any other file and will convert the DSD to PCM if your playback system does not support native DSD.
If you intend to get the DSD off of the SACD first identify if your SACD player is supported and you understand the process for pulling across the data into DSF. If you don’t have access to a supported player or are comfortable with the process then, sadly, the audio will be locked in the SACD disc and that will be the only way to listen to it.
Feels like there is a business somewhere in this. People ship that person a bunch of disks and that person creates the DSF files and then ships everything back to the owners. What is that worth? $1 a disk? $5? $10? Maybe $10 is too much.
Perhaps. Nobody in the non-third world would do it for a buck, and very few would fork over $10. So, $5 might be the sweet spot plus a couple/few bucks for return postage.
It, I think I’ll figure out how to do it with my old Oppo.
As an aside, I was sorry to see a Oppo exit the business.
I kept my old Oppo 105 after upgrading to the 205 just for SACD rips. Not sure if the Oppo 93 can rip SACDs or not–you’ll have to research that.
I use sacd_extract & sacd_ripper (I didn’t save the URL of where I got them from). My work flow is to rip to an ISO image of the disc. I archive that and then extract the tracks (DSF) from the ISO.
The extraction procedure is actually simple. The real work comes from having to add all the metadata.
Once you have the DSF files, Roon will play them.
Good luck!
Found this. Scroll down to post 16 for a list of players reported to work.
PM Tyson here: https://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=120710.msg1270154#msg1270154
He ripped my SACD collection several years ago. Note however that he ripped to ISO and I then needed to convert the ISOs to FLAC.
Personally I rip SACDs to ISO then to uncompressed DSF. Since Roon can transcode DSF to PCM on the fly to my ID40.
I’m covered if I ever get a DAC that can handle DSF directly.
I archive the ISOs on an old NAS in case I lose my main music library.
You do need to correct the metadata on the DSF quite often, as you end up with Album title in the Artist tag etc.
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l can confirm that the Oppo 103 works and can rip directly to DSF but don’t know about the Oppo 93. It revived its shelf life after its replacement by an Oppo UHD player. As long as the Oppo is connected to your network and set to read SACDs, it does not even need to be connected to a screen for it to work.
If you follow the quite straightforward instructions it is very easy to ddo with the Sonore software and I say that as someone not very technologically proficient. To play DSD directly (which my ears prefer to PCM conversion via Roon) you need to connect to an SPDIF input or, for greater compatibility, via the USB input on the 818 (and Roon will stream directly through your network: my DSPs SE show DSD format on display). The Sonore software will allow you to extract stereo or multichannel and the raw iso file if you want (ie one single file as opposed to individual tracks if you extract to Sony DSF). The main difference between DFF and DSF option for direct track extraction is that you can tag DSF files with. free programme like MP3Tag.
One note of caution I found out and which mainly concerns classical SACDs: they can have very long implied track files which when combined with the album folder are longer than what Windows will tolerate and then the rip to DSF will stop and fail for tracks with too long a name. You then should extract the raw iso file and process through a programme like AuI Converter (unfortunately not free but you pay by codec so only need to buy the DSD 64 codec the format of nearly all sacds). AuI automatically truncates file names and will thus then be able to extract individual dsf tracks from an iso file. I had a 5-10% failure rate to dsf from the Sonore programme that AuI has reduced to 0.
Also successfully ripped SACD DSD stereo and 5.1 using a Sony BDP-S4100 using methods outlined on HiFi Haven
The Oppo models are the 103 and 105 including the D variants. The 93 will play SACDs but not rip them.