DSD is one of the most misunderstood formats in audio, and the thing that confuses people most is this: why some SACD players convert it to PCM before they play it.

That feels like a betrayal. You buy a format specifically designed to avoid PCM's limitations, and the player quietly converts it anyway. Why?

DSD — Direct Stream Digital — encodes audio as a rapid stream of single bits rather than the multi-bit samples PCM uses. It's elegant in principle: a simple 1-bit signal at a very high sample rate, with noise pushed up and out of the audible band. The challenge is that working with DSD directly is genuinely difficult. Filtering, mixing, and other processing operations are all designed around PCM mathematics. Most downstream hardware assumes it.

Some manufacturers take the practical path: convert the DSD to high-rate PCM internally, apply whatever processing is needed, then convert to analog. It sidesteps the engineering difficulties at the cost of adding a conversion step that wasn't supposed to be part of the design.

And then there are the licensing issues if there's a digital output—PCM isn't the master, so they are safe from the potential wrath of the legal beagles sniffing around.

The DSD format was designed around a beautiful simplicity. Getting that simplicity all the way from the disc to your ears is harder than it looks. But it's why at Octave Records that's what we record with. Always.

Sometimes things are hard. I get it. But honestly? I don't care. When it's right it's the way to do it.

Anything else is a compromise.