Building a DSD Collection, Where Do I Start?

[witchdoctor]

Witchdoctor

I’ve been collecting hi-res music files for the past 8 years after discovering locally stored files could sound better than my then state of the art Soulution CD/SACD player and at a much lower cost. Note I would not limit your search to DSD. It’s all about the best performance, recording engineering and best transfer to a high resolution format. A few suggestions:

High Definition Tape Transfers is an excellent source of jazz and classical downloads of vintage recordings taken from master tapes
https://www.highdeftapetransfers.ca/

Paul Ruston has written many articles on Positive Feedback on the virtues of hi-res music, the subtleties between DSD and PCM, and music reviews
https://positive-feedback.com/?s=Rushton

HRAudio.net is the best source for information on physical SACD’s if you’re willing to learn how to rip SACD’s. This might be important if the music you’re looking for is only available on physical SACD’s
https://www.hraudio.net/home.php#menu

HDTracks also has a more diverse music selection but most of their music is 96/24
https://www.hdtracks.com/

Hope this helps and good luck in your search!

Thank you so much for the advice and the resources before I bought a lot of duds. I will be careful, thank you and I look forward to shopping at these resources. I had my ah ha moment when I started ripping bluray movies and playing back with my Zidoo media player over how much better the PQ and SQ were over streaming. I have been buying a lot of concert blurays recorded in DTS and Atmos (The Who at Wembley with Orchestra for example).
Those files bypass my dac and that is what led me to start this thread about DSD. Better to get tips before buying duds and I look forward to using those links. As I continue collecting I'll post the albums/vendors here.

 

[ssfas]

Purely a mental exercise but - Wouldn’t a better release of an album still be better once upsampled?

I am curious. Does upsampling to DSD 256 (wow) make crappy recordings sound great?

I have an opinion / guess. But glad it’s working for you.

I use DSD256 because I’m using a fairly old Mac Mini that I had lying around. DSD512 seems more popular, but needs a more powerful processor.

I don’t really buy into this thing about crappy recordings and audiophile recordings. I listen to a wide range of music, both live and recorded. Very occasionally I buy a record that doesn’t sound good, for various reasons, and I just move on. If it’s a poor quality stream, I just move on. I favour music, not record labels, but like everyone I have a pretty good idea which labels can be relied upon to produce quality recordings. I don’t buy multiple copies of the same music, so the concept of better releases of the same music doesn’t really come into the equation.

 

[ssfas]

Witchdoctor

I’ve been collecting hi-res music files for the past 8 years after discovering locally stored files could sound better than my then state of the art Soulution CD/SACD player and at a much lower cost. Note I would not limit your search to DSD. It’s all about the best performance, recording engineering and best transfer to a high resolution format. A few suggestions:

High Definition Tape Transfers is an excellent source of jazz and classical downloads of vintage recordings taken from master tapes
https://www.highdeftapetransfers.ca/

Paul Ruston has written many articles on Positive Feedback on the virtues of hi-res music, the subtleties between DSD and PCM, and music reviews
https://positive-feedback.com/?s=Rushton

HRAudio.net is the best source for information on physical SACD’s if you’re willing to learn how to rip SACD’s. This might be important if the music you’re looking for is only available on physical SACD’s
https://www.hraudio.net/home.php#menu

HDTracks also has a more diverse music selection but most of their music is 96/24
https://www.hdtracks.com/

Hope this helps and good luck in your search!

When you talk about “the best performance“, you are almost certainly talking about classical music only. HDTT apparently do a really good job of effectively transferring a personal collection of historic classical and jazz tapes to a range of digital formats. I presume their age means they can be released without any concern as to having to pay royalties.

They certainly do release highly reputable recordings, if you go by the archival reviews in Gramophone. I’d not heard of HRAudio. There are loads of old classics I was curious to see that they include most of the Tennstedt Mahler cycle. That is one of my favourites because I enjoyed his conducting and heard most of the cycle live. The recording of Mahler 5 is a live performance recording that I probably attended. What concerns me is that these were recorded by EMI in the late 1980s and probably sourced from standard resolution digital masters.

I buy quite a lot of jazz vinyl for the same reason that people buy DSD tape transfers, namely the lack of good transfers available on streaming services. Fortunately that situation is improving and you now find quite a lot of the very high-quality Blue Note remasters available on streaming services at 24/192 PCM. Personally, for the same money, I find the Craft releases to be as good or better quality.

My music purchases are entirely driven by a musical choices, and as a result, I have only bought one DSD 256 recording – Tuttle Sola by Rachel Podger produced by Jared Sachs on Chandos. I have one DSD64 Bill Evans analog tape transfer that I like and listen to fairly regularly. It’s the famous one where the tape was rediscovered so was in pristine condition, which probably accounts for the sound quality.