For some time now, the audio sector has undergone different transformations and advances, mainly in relation to the quality and sampling of the audio itself. But the basis of these advances continues to be the way to process and encode the audio that has taken us to the famous High-Resolution , where a technology like DSD has been an important part of this industry and a key piece in the advances, but what is it? exactly?
The story behind DSD is quite curious and as a rule little recognized by the industry and especially by users, but it is what usually happens when you lose a battle, that the loser is not remembered as optimally as the winner.
DSD: when SONY and Philips worked together for the audio industry
That’s right, DSD or Direct Stream Digital was a joint project of SONY and Philips that in 1999 was considered the nirvana of audiophiles worldwide. As neither company had separate potential to improve CD-Audio and its quality, their alliance was seen as a step to increase the quality of sound on CD and DVD in those years.
The preferred encoding format at the time was PCM which sampled 44,100 times per second and 16-bit channel. This meant losing certain harmonic frequencies to the detriment of the so-called musicality, something that the most purists did not accept.
So they released SACD, much more advanced than CD-Audio, but ran into another problem: people began to consume ultra-compressed audio in MP3 and AAC. SACD brought with it the Delta Sigma technology and with it the DSD, which is still in force today thanks to high definition digital music.
The solution came from the hand of ordinary users, who found a way to extract DSD from SACD and later convert it into the PCM standard (most used in the common industry) using 24-bit FLAC files.
DSD remains purist and requires high-end hardware
It is not impossible to listen to music on DSD, far from it, but it will require specific hardware for it, since we will need a DAC that knows how to decode this type of format in real time.
As this is very expensive as a general rule, the PC audio industry integrates in many high-fidelity sound cards a DAC that is capable of processing signals from DSD to PCM, that is, a real-time conversion is performed.
The loss of quality is negligible in this case, so the sector continues to work with PCM and it is the manufacturers that allow this type of conversion. The problem for DSD is that some time later PCM DxD appeared, which apart from being more used in base provided better characteristics than this, to the point that today the industry masters with it and in any case, later it is converted to DSD for those users who want to continue enjoying this type of coding.
Therefore, DSD is increasingly residual, PCM has won the battle and even in the most defining places of the Internet in terms of sound professionals it is difficult to find albums in DSD. In any case, there are still users who say that in its new versions it will end up imposing itself on PCM, something that looking at the industry seems unlikely.
