Nail biting
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsWhen we start a design process for a new product there’s always a lot of high hopes and nail biting. Investing as much in the design as we do, it’s always a bit of a crapshoot how many times you might have to redo a design until it comes out the way you hoped for.
Such is the case with the new SACD Transport scheduled to begin its round of beta testing this September. Along the way, we’ve had a few chances to test our design assumptions—its galvanically isolated output stage, new Digital Lens buffer, opto-isolation, separate power supplies, new drive mechanism, etc.—and each time we were rewarded with good sound. Yet, in all this time we’ve yet to have a chance to listen to the final PC board layouts, the finished product.
That is until a few days ago.
Chief engineer Bob Stadtherr, the unit’s architect of bitstream and FPGA, brought in the final PCBs for Darren Myers and me to have our first listen to a full production-ready set of electronics. The command software modules are still not ready so Bob had to control the unit through its CLI using a laptop with commands like :SACD/Open etc. but, klunky as it might have been, the signal path has been nailed down and we were biting our nails in the hopes it wouldn’t disappoint. What if we didn’t like it? Start over? Could we tweak it?
It didn’t disappoint.
Man oh man alive. The new PS Audio SACD Transport has the quietest presentation Darren and I have ever heard from any digital source bar none. Yeah, yeah, all the superlatives you like are there: full-bodied, extended upper harmonics, open, natural, and perhaps most exhilirating of all was just how velvety perfect the sound was. On Octave Record’s next release, Clandestine Amigo’s Temporary Circumstances, Jessica’s opening piano notes were always good, but never remarkable—which is ok because when she and Giselle begin singing, your heart melts at the clarity, presence and just raw emotion that come through. But with the SACD Transport, there’s now not only a real piano in the room but the two ladies touch your soul in the most intimate way possible. I wish I had better words to tell you what we experienced. Darren turned to me with the biggest grin I have ever seen and said, “now that’s not even close!” I could not agree more.
Grins all around. Back slaps. Nails still intact. I can’t wait for you to hear this.
Stay tuned for details in early September of the beta testing program to begin. This is one honey of a new product.
My congratulations, Paul. However the new SACD transport probably will send the data to a big buffer – as known from the Memory Player. Thus I still wait for a PS Audio music server for my downloads and rips. Just add a SSD option or replace the drive by a SSD. 🙂
Thanks, Paul. Yes, the server has an SSD built right in.
Paul,
Since you are controlling the prototype with an outboard computer, would it still be possible to have a programmable remote control for your new transport? I had asked for one for the DMP to no avail. I think it would increase the appeal and marketability of the product and be a unique and additional source of joy for the users.
Well with a SACD Transport & the FR-30 Loudspeakers to be released in a few months we can collect the whole ‘set’.
That’s wonderful Paul; good for you!
When audio-heads can go from transport to loudspeaker all with PS Audio you will be able to sit back with a great deal of satisfaction.
And it all started with a $59.95 phono amp.
Now, start working on those 3 grades of ‘PS Audio’ interconnects & loudspeaker wires 🙂 😉
I have not been paying attention to developments at PS Audio, due to the obvious reasons…
New SACD Transport? Count me in!
Congratulations !
I love SACD. Ive been setting up a new Denon X6500H surround amp in the last few days and playing SACDs on my old Oppo player and even older, but beloved, Castle Inversion speakers. They sound fantastic.
I’m also trying to revive a moribund Shanling valve SACD player for use in my main stereo system, though I still have an old Pioneer 757Ai doing occasional duties.
SACD was a real wasted opportunity. Yes, I can stream DSD and high res files to my hearts content with my Auralic G2, but sometimes you just feel the need to fiddle about with physical media.
It’s nice to see a bit of a revival in good CD and SACD transports (often from China) these days. Great to hear PS Audio is getting in on the game.
Incidentally, maybe you should get some of that foul tasting stuff you paint on your nails. You will never nibble again…
Will it only emit the DSD data stream over I2S via HDMI, or will there be a way to get it to non-PS Audio DACs via DoP or some other method?
HDMI would work, but then I’d still need a GeerFab D.BOB.
Yes, we still have to limit the DSD datastream output to mesh with only PS Audio DACs through I2S due to copyright laws.
Given that many universal players can send DSD over regular HDMI (for example Oppo) I was curious as to whether it would offer that option – thanks!!
I call B.S. on the lack of HDMI output. You just don’t want to pay the licensing fee.
I just shelled out a little over $700 to oppomod.com to turn my oppo 203 into a SACD transport worth it by the way! I didn’t upgrade the clock tho that is highly recommended also. I’ll be curious to compare the new PS Audio transport. Put me on the beta list please. Thank you.
Congratulations to the team!
Is this the same interface/isolation technology as in the upcoming streaming devices?
Yup. Complete galvanic isolation using the same output board we’ve been working so long to develop. It was an extremely tough design since the communication is two-way and to be galvanically isolated it means we have to couple everything via light.
Given how much more music there is on CDs than SACDs, personally, I would be more excited in a new dedicated Redbook CD transport from PS Audio. One that extracts the most music possible from Redbook CDs and bests the top-flight CD transports by CEC, Audio Note and Jay’s Audio, to name a few examples.
As I mentioned, the performance with CD is extraordinary and, let’s face it, the majority of our libraries is CD. So yes, that’s one of the reasons we built this – to be a new reference standard for CD.
Great. If including SACD capability in the design does not preclude optimizing for Redbook CD playback, it may turn out to be a must-have.
Hi Paul, When will we see a red book CD player in the Steller line?
Roger
hrboucher,
As I’m sure you know although SACD is technically superior to red book CD it doesn’t follow that all SACD recordings are better. There are so many variables at play. Through recent equipment changes I have now lost the ability to play SACD through my main system. The improvement to red book is so marked I don’t miss it. SACD is a small percentage of the market and I’d guess sadly in decline. I have a few discs, thankfully nearly all are hybrids so nothing lost. It’s suggested by some commentators that making a dual purpose player compromises the performance. Paul would no doubt dispute this.
As most music is on CD, I’m with you and have decided to concentrate on red book. To this end I have just bought the Jay’s transport you mentioned above. It finally arrived yesterday after an over long (time wise) journey from Hong Kong so really too early to comment on performance. For anyone interested, according to the handbook, the PS Audio Directstream DAC is one of a few compatible with the HDMI-I2S output from the Jay’s. Apparently there is no industry standard for I2S.
hrboucher,
The ‘HEGEL Mohican’ is a dedicated Redbook CD player that has had some great reviews…just sayin’
Dear Paul,
With regards to your last post on SCAD. May I ask how you stand on Redbook, SCAD and HDCD playbacks please?
As there are more recordings on SCAD and your apparent standard of your new CD transport player. Should I trade-in release my NAIM CD5XS HDCD player?
I am trapped in PTSD, OCD and anxiety at the moment and making use of LEGO to relieve my symptoms and regain some use of my hands. As I would like to escape to my music, though my beautiful loving wife does not appreciate my tastes in music. Especially Christian Rock and Dire Straits. I still LOVE her to the ends of the earth.
Love, peace and blessings,
Mitch from Australia.
We tested with both Red Book CD and SACD and the results were breathtakingly better.
I believe Paul said his transport won’t have a HDCD decoder. I’ll take a look at the new PS Audio transport, but I’ll also keep my Oppo for HDCD. My small collection of Reference Recordings HDCD’s will be happy. One thing Paul didn’t mention was a projected price. I suspect it won’t be cheap, and an HDCD decoder would certainly make that more attractive for me. Hopefully Paul will consider a Stellar version of their transport, something complementary to the Gain Cell DAC.
You must have a 10x series Oppo, as the 20x series dropped HDCD decoding.
BDP-95. Bought it off eBay because I knew PS Audio wasn’t going to include the HDCD decoder. I may very well get the PSA transport at some point when finances allow, but I figured until that time, an SACD/HDCD Oppo would be the best all around value.
Sounds perfect for another 8 months of Quarantine!
The market for SACD recordings is infinitesimal. With over 3000 CDs in my collection I have exactly one. I also have a SACD player but never used it that way. I bought it for other reasons. It’s a 5 CD player with the Toshiba 192 khz 24 bit chip I like so much. I could arrange my bedroom 5 channel HT system for it but meh, it never interested me. It’s quadraphonic sound + a center channel.
There isn’t a manufacturer of audio equipment who didn’t praise the performance of his latest products to the skies. The problem is that each time they do that it’s the same thing they said about their last new product and the one before that and the one before that and the one before that and since they started in the business. What’s more the reviewers whose publications earn much of their money advertising many of these same products or hope to, agree with them month after month after month. If I took any of this seriously I’d be even more nuts than I already am. Go back and read what you said about your previous products and software releases. Don’t forget the Hypex amplifier before it confronted Sonic Frontiers. And then afterwards. It never even made it out of the car at Arnie Nudell’s house. IMO Sonic Frontiers was a failed design. $1400 to replace tubes every few months. The designers must have driven those tubes to hell and back.
And how does this differ from when you discover that an amp (or whatever) sounds better from Company B than Company A? In the evolution of my system, sometimes an improvement comes from a newer model from the same company while othertimes improvement comes from switching companies. Innovation and improvement are not the sole consequence of competition between different companies. Sometimes, (quite frequently, I believe) the principal competition comes from within. Hey, evolution happens!
The electronics in my system are now all PS Audio, other than my CD transport (Rega Saturn) which I run through my PS Audio Directstream DAC. I recently added the new Stellar 1200 monoblocks and my system has reached a new level.
So I would also like to volunteer for the Beta testing of this new product. I too would like to know the projected price range.
Thanks.
Paul,
I presently use my DMP transport with my DirectStream DAC to play my SACD collection and Redbook CDs which I haven’t ripped to my music server.
You didn’t mention the design of the outer shell or box which the new transport will reside? Will it match the DirectStream DAC in looks and will it fit on top or bottom of the DirectStream like the DMP does if the stock footers are removed? I appreciate your reply as I am interested in your new Transport since I have a rather large SACD collection. I’m also interested in being a beta tester. Thank you, Bob
SACD was designed to replace CD with multi-channel audio and slightly higher dynamic range. This failed, because the market did not take up multi-channel to any significant degree and many tests have shown that most people can’t reliably tell any difference in quality. In 2019 SACD sales in the USA were $400,000, compared to $8.8 billion for streaming. I never even tried SACD because I had the same CD player throughout the period that it was launched and failed commercially, and my next format change was from CD to streaming (in 2009). My impression is that audiophiles like to go against commercial trends on principle, as if the market is wrong. I think the market is always right.
SACD is a classic example. Besides there being little interest from a technical standpoint, its fatal flaw was that it could not be copied or ripped. The audio industry was obsessed with DRM 20 years ago, and SACD has more DRM than any other format, but now virtually all music can be listened to for free.
From what I understand, SACD died when Oppo stopped making the drives a few years ago and only came back to life after Marantz created a new SACD drive, which they sell OEM, and I presume is the drive used by PSA. They also released their SA-10 streaming SACD disc spinning pre-amp with headphone amp.
So PSA now has a replacement SACD spinner, but for the same legal reasons why SACD failed it has to played back through a PSA DAC.
Which makes perfect sense to anti-market audiophiles, but none to me. PSA still does not have a streamer or streaming DAC, more than a decade after their launch, a delivery system that now accounts for 79% of all music revenues.
P.s. I do not accept that a spinner can sound any better than a properly implemented streamer.
I fully agree here. When I learned that tracks played from a notebook’s internal HDD had a better sound quality than the original tracks played from the CD spinning in my Audiolab CD transport having lowest jitter values comparable with the top end Mark Levinson CD transports I was shocked – and convinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with real-time CD replay. And the Audiolab transport was modded having a clock input sullied from my DAC!
We learned here that bit-perfect is no rocket science and thus a PS Audio streamer shouldn’t have a performance poorer than the performance of the CD transport. The only logical argument for a SACD drive is the thesis that DSD recordings sound better than PCM – unless they haven’t been converted to PCM via the mastering process – and are only available on SACD. However there are MP3 tracks sounding better than poor recordings in high-res formats!
Because you can’t rip SACD, unlike CD, you will always need a spinner. So you either have to concede that it was a failed format and, as will probably be the case, stream the same music online. Otherwise, you just have to hope there is a functional SACD player available.
Today Paul sings a merry tune about spinning discs. I wonder if his tune will change when PSA finally release a streaming product?
Steven, not that you care, but you can rip SACD’s. http://www.goldeneardigital.com/sacd-dsd-audio-extraction.html and, properly done, they sound fantastic.
I am aware that you can rip SACDs using a Sony PS3. I am also aware that it is illegal to do so. I have never owned a P3 or any other Playstation.
@Steven 8/7/2020 Paul’s daily post
Thank you for your reply
1. You state that you never even tried SACD and said, “I never even tried SACD because I had the same CD player throughout the period.”
So how can you be an expert on SACD’s sound if you never tried it?
I for one can usually tell the difference between a CD and SACD of the same music, but I’m a trained listener. However that doesn’t matter for those of us who have large libraries of SACD disks which were lcllected long before streaming became available.
2. Your stats from 2019 are not reflective when SACD was first released when in 1999 by Sony/Phillips when SACD was strictly a 2 channel format as reflected by their first Commercial Sony SCD-1 SACD player which I’ve owned.
3. Can you submit credible references to your statistics along with footnotes to back up when SACD was released? That would be appreciated as your numbers reflect 2019.
5. Some older audiophiles prefer spinning disks, CD/SACD to streaming. That is just the way that it is and will probably be for a while yet. Think of the resurgence of vinyl.
6. What is a “anti market audiophile?
7. The bottom line is that for someone like you who has never compared SACD to CD or doesn’t own a large library of SACDs, how can you make a blanket assumptions which you’ve made about spinning disks; CD or SACD? As to which sounds better, there continues to be a debate. There are so many variables in one’s system, differences may sway spinning disks to streaming/ripping disks as sounding best
8. BTW, what gear are using now? High resolution enough to really compare the different formats for sound quality?
The bottom line is not to criticize a format if you haven’t tried it. Just my 2 cents.
I have never spent money on SACD hardware. I have some Alia Vox dual layer SACDs, but have only ever heard the stereo layer.
I have tried a DSD DAC and purchased DSD downloads. They were from Pentatone and some jazz tape transfers, and I compared to there 16/44 streams.
All the statistics come from RIAA. https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ I specifically stated USA as the RIAA data is USA only, but SACD survives in Japan and to some extent Europe, where they are made.
I sold my DSD DAC and purchased a Devialet Expert. It processes everything in 24/192 PCM. It can handle my two phono inputs at the same time and has a brilliant streamer. It is incredibly user friendly and the whole family uses it via Roon.
Vinyl is very much for younger people these days, including my son aged 23 – big collector. I went to four vinyl stores this weekend, bought a 1992 Solomon Richman reissue and 4 x German dub techno, here https://worldofechomusic.com/collections/new-releases
In 2019 in the USA vinyl LP/EP sales were about 17m units, SACD about 50,000. Vinyl makes sense as there is so much good used vinyl around, not so for SACD.
I consider anti-market audiophiles to be people who think people should use formats and manufacturers should make hardware for those formats purely because they think they sound good, irrespective of whether it is commercially viable.
Marantz, who make the SACDM-3 spinner in the new PSA transport, have almost kept affordable SACD alive singlehanded. They released the £6,000 SA-10 globally and then a further KI model for Japan only. That went well enough to develop it further and the SA-12 is to be released in Japan and Europe in the next few weeks. It is being packaged with a matching PM-12 integrated amplifier (but sold separately) for a total cost of £6,200. (The transport/DAC is £3,000, compared to about £10,000 for the PSA version.) It has transport/DAC galvanic isolation, PCM-DSD upsampling, phono input, usb input, headphone amp and separate pre and power supplies. So you get a lot of features even if you don’t have an SACD collection. It is 100w/8ohms, plenty to make it viable in Europe, probably too low powered for the USA market.
It’s a good example of a manufacturer making sensible market-specific decisions, moreso as Marantz is a USA-owned brand but these products are not being sold in the USA.
Paul, Congratulations on this milestone. I have over 600 SACD’s and currently use the PS Audio DMP and DS DAC as my digital source gear. Would love to be a beta tester. What do I have to do to be one?
this is exciting news. i am one of the old fashioned audio guys that likes to use physical medium for serious listening. At work i stream Spotify though Sonos, but at home it is a different story. Using an entire PS Audio system feeding Thiel 3.7 speakers gives me unbelievable sound. i have owned the DMP player since late 2016 and there was only one event that would make me give it up, and now that has occurred. Granted it has been glitchy at times, but the sound was worth the problems. With a new player on the horizon i am very hopeful that the sound in my system will get even better.
I truly think PS Audio is the best audio company in existence and i hope they “live long and prosper”.
Paul,
I would like involved with your new SACD player as a beta tester?
Sign me up!
I have around 75 SACD’s.
I was using a Sony Player until a few years ago for the SACDs.
Thanks in advance for the opportunity,
Ken
Hi Paul,
Just wondering if you an reply to the question I and others asked:
What’s a ballpark idea on the price of this new transport?
Thanks!
In the U.S it’s $6499.
Too expensive!!! Not for the middle class audiophiles!!!
Yup count me out 🙁