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.