I’m with you, I’ve wanted and am happy to pay for many things, but it seems the record companies are restrictive. Especially as I live and work in both Germany and U.K. constant issues with regional restrictions. 
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Perhaps it depends on your tastes, or albums, or maybe as you say the new streamers decode dsd a bit differently. However the dac inside the Nds is better vs the dac inside the Ndx2.
Mike uses the Ndx, and finds Carmen Gomes better sounding on Dsd. Meni and I prefer 16/44 for that album.
But as said Thomas, he discovered it recently, Naim dac don’t read native DSD, but decode to PCM.
For me all this doesn’t really matter, because for my music, there are very very few dsd produced. The big availability is for old albums from 70’s or 80’s remastered in DSD. I much prefer listening to that albums in vinyl.
Not really…
I’m aware of that since… well, ever since I bought my first Naim source/DAC.
I bought Yamina - How deep is the ocean some years ago.
Found it in here at dsdfile.com
This should be a native DSD recording.
Right, I thought the NDxxx streamers did read DSD through a DoP process. It appears not being the case, if it is indeed a conversion than it results being somewhat lossy.
The NDxxx documentation lacks clarity for that matter.
When I was posting that Naim don’t read native DSD but convert in PCM, you were laughing at that time…
You might be crossing the beams here. DoP is simply sending DSD data in framing constructs used for PCM data… but DoP is pure DSD bit stream data.
One the Naim streamer has received the DSD bit stream data via DoP it then proceeds to convert it to PCM as @Stevesky has described.
Couldn’t find the real meaning of “crossing the beam “. So can’t understand what you want to say.
Maybe you are saying that we are a bit both right?
Crossed wires perhaps?
Points de vue croisés?
The final process is conversion in PCM, not? Not decoding directly DSD .
Does your Hugo decodes directly DSD, without conversion to PCM?
Yes a colloquialism meaning mixing two separate matters…
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Crossing the beams: Imagine deux gars qui pissent et les jets d’urine se croisent.
Vous êtes un poète Daniel !
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There are no tools to record and mix in DSD, it is a dying format. I think there are currently only two products still on the market and I had a demo of the Pyramix - they could do basic crude cut and paste, anything else was done in PCM.
The only customers are probably other makers of DSD products.
Personally I don’t understand why hifi.manufacturers spend development resources on it.
Yamina-How deep is the ocean… source comes as SACD and not native DSD
The link in my last post says:
The music is a combination of songs what is normally known as the “American Songbook”, plus Yamina´s own compositions!
This is also our first album recorded in 8 channel native DSD128 and of course mixed 100% analogue, i.e. it has never been in the PCM domain which is also what “native” stands for.
As some of you might know, Opus 3 Records was the first record company in the world to offer download of native DSD128 already in February 2013!
This is also the first album that will be both released as an SACD and offered to be downloaded in DSD64 & 128 at the same time.
Anyway, it sounds really good.
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A rather damning summary, but I suspect you are right… I guess consumer audio replay manufacturers will address DSD if it helps sell their products… for many customers it’s perhaps a compatibility tick box rather than required predominant use.
I think in the early days with predominant R2R DACs, achieving accurate linearity was challenging and I could see the advantage of DSD… but technology has moved on with oversampling and DAC tech generally… so perhaps belongs to a by gone era
I regret I read this thread too late. I purchased two DSD albums today on NativeDSD website; one from Patricia Barber and one from Gabor Varga Trio. The latter is also available as high-res Flac on Qobuz.
First of all I need to put the volume higher then I am normally used too. When I however compare the DSD version of Gabor vs its Flac equivalent on Qobuz, the latter sounds better to me
Also with DSD purchases from the past, I am far (!) from convinced they sound on par with their high-res Flac equivalents
Iver
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Agree… in my opinion,on most cases PCM is better than DSD
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