Why SACD is encrypted

[@machintelligence]

Sony was pretty aggressive early on. A scandal erupted in 2005 regarding Sony BMG's implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program's files visible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed, collected an email address from the user and introduced further security vulnerabilities.

[@musicman8270]

I lost a hard drive from that. It went into the boot sector and zi had to replacethe hard drive and reload everything. Took a few days out of my life. Meanwhile the Chinese and others were churning out bootlegs by the ton.

[@johnb6723]

So basically Sony was involved in cybercrime on a par with the likes of Lulzsec by dropping viruses into people's computers, and damaging apps. Someone should be doing federal prison time.

[@musicman8270]

I love my SACD player, was worried it would not make that big a difference, but the sound from my SACD collection is amazing. I really hate that this format has suffered so badly.

[@glenncurry3041]

How ironic that one of my other fav audio channels had a discussion about SACD today. "SACD, DVD-AudIo, Hi-Res, Multichannel Music..." Steve Guttenberg Audiophiliac. He obviously is not aware of your Octave Records and DSD Studios and your efforts to bring DSD to the Audiophile community. I posted some info on Octave and DSD. Thanks for all your efforts to increase the knowledge and awareness of an actual possible digital replacement for analog!

[@KarlHamilton]

Steve knows. He's a fan.

[@glenncurry3041]

@@KarlHamilton He sure neglected to take the opportunity to let the word out.

[@JonAnderhub]

Let's be clear. Sony did not implement encryption for the artists, it implemented encryption for its own greed. Sony attempted to do the same thing with its "Extended Copy Protection in 2005 wherein Sony planted rootkit viruses on computers when a Sony or BMG CD was placed in a computer. This virus disabled the computer's ability to copy CDs of any kind, including the user's own generated CDs. Sony was later forced to remove the virus from its CDs. On the other hand, at the same time Sony was bringing out the SACD, Warner records were throwing its support to DVD audio, which didn't contain any copy protection. Sony never released any new material by its artists on SACD and only released reissued material. Sony dropped SACD and DSD pretty quickly as there were simply too many issues with the format. It should also be pointed out that the largest selling SACDs weren't originally recorded in DSD but are DSD recordings of analog tapes with the limited dynamic range, compression, denoise filters, and harmonic distortion included on the SACD.

[@musicman8270]

That's what I want. The original analog recording. When I play my SACD player it is close to an analog waveform and sounds amazing. As for Sony ditching the Dsd codec you do realize that Sony archived their entire music library in dsd.

[@jsullivan2112]

Let's be clear: that Copy Protection wasn't a virus, it ended up acting like one. The word virus was only used because that's the only thing the average person would understand. Virus = bad! Did Sony cross the line? Yes. Was it foolish? Yes. Are they still paying for it? Absolutely. Did they do it with malicious intent to destroy people's computers? No.

[@sickjohnson]

Gotta like it when Paul says PS Audio doesn't do ehhh! :)

[@josexavierjr.5633]

Great video, Paul. I have about 10 SACDs, and the only way I could hear them is through my trusty Pioneer universal disc player. I bought this machine back in 2002, and it still works like a charm, since it doesn't get used too much. I never knew about the master DSD file that exists on the disc; it's sad that manufacturers except for PS Audio, couldn't get their act together to solve this problem..............

[@dajikbatarang1]

There are plenty of Bluray players including one's made by Sony that you can use to extract the raw DSD files from an SACD. Alot of these players can be found for cheap on the used market.

[@HongNguyen-my5oq]

We need a list of these models please

[@dajikbatarang1]

@@HongNguyen-my5oq the list can easily be found by doing a quick google search

[@luckyupyours]

You can rip SACD's with a PS3... If it wasn't possible to copy them we wouldn't be able to download the ISO's.

[@jsullivan2112]

Yeah but you're ripping it as 44.1khz CD audio format, not the original 96khz SACD format. And you don't even need a PS3 to do that, most SACDs I own play as both.

[@leonardopapantoniou4227]

​@@jsullivan2112I downloaded SACD iso files and with USB audio player pro and a good display Dac it tells me there is dsd 64inside

[@janinapalmer8368]

That was very interesting... thanks Paul 😊

[@The_Music_Sanctuary]

My Marantz SAKI Ruby sacd player is a remarkable 2 channel beast, and there are still lots of excellent sacd players on the market. I also use 2 Universal multichannel players in the Marantz UD5007 and UD7006 for home theatre and listening purposes. One day I will move up to an Esoteric sacd player, oh yes.

[@michaelbeckerman7532]

Never lose sight of why it is that you are actually buying a new product. Are you buying it because it's a significant improvement over what you had before? If it is, then that's great. You're headed in the right direction and making progress. Don't worry about where that move puts you on the spectrum of "low-end to high-end" equipment (or about what anyone else's opinion of where your stuff is on that scale). Now, if you are buying stuff just to be able to say that you have it so as to try and impress your friends and sound more important/special than they are and be part of some exclusive club that spend a certain amount of money on something, then you have an entirely other agenda altogether. Also, never lose sight of the fact that all that really ever matters is having something that is good enough for YOU to enjoy. Don't worry about what others think about what you have. It's not their business and it's not their concern. Your objective should be to make YOU happy with what you buy and what you own - not someone else.

[@malcolmpercival5266]

There are options with HDMI audio extractors to get DSD (and Blu-ray audio at full resolution) out of a universal player and into a high end DAC. Kal Rubinson has just reviewed one in Stereophile. It's a kludge perhaps, but it seems it can work well. PS Audio of course has done great things with encrypted I2S, and Bryston even has a high-end DAC with HDMI inputs.

[@machrider2333]

He said yesterday to not lie to people. Today he doesn’t mention the Sony PlayStation 3 DSD copying option. EVERY SACD iso you see today is made with a PlayStation 3. Is that lying through omission?

[@TheDanEdwards]

"Is that lying through omission?" - no.

[@PhineasFreakUK]

Yep, modded my PS3 to rip my SACDs, works pefectly

[@garfycat2227]

It's not exactly in his company's interests to point out how to hack SACDs. "Lying through omission?" Get a grip.

[@machrider2333]

@@garfycat2227 he provides the .dsf files with his actual SACDs. He is probably just neutral on hacking SACDs or couldn't give a ...

[@VideoArchiveGuy]

Not true, there are lots of non-PS3 SACD solutions.

[@lights80088]

The same thing used to protect there investment kills their sales.

[@hugoromeyn4582]

Record / CD prices were way too high back in the 80's and 90's. I Own records from the early 1980's that have the original price tag on the cover. 34,95 Dutch Guilders. That's the equivalent of (plus minus) $17 in 1982. That's (inflation corrected) the same as asking $50 for a single record or CD today. No wonder that taping was a common thing in the '80 and '90 and that services like Napster were so populair. The music industry learned their lesson. When I buy a brand new LP it's around €20. And that's a fair price that I'm willing to pay for an original copy in 2022.

[@Gary_Hun]

I guess i never realized we can buy music at a supposed "highest possible quality for the masses", that through the act, becomes actually ours ----- because it is still crap compared to the real thing. The Sony chip with the limited DAC kinda defeats the purpose of hi-res doesn't it...

[@BericBuilds]

Great video sir! Question... for an up and coming new channel, that is looking to expand; what is more important in channel uploads in your opinion? The entertainment factor or the informational factor?

[@stevebennett9750]

The ability to extract the DSD stream off an SACD has been around since the Playstation 3. Certain Blu Ray players with SACD capabiliy have also been exploited and unencrypted DSD data extraction is possible as well.

[@jsullivan2112]

I thought the PS3 only did PCM audio? Do you have a PS3 running with DSD stream?

[@stevebennett9750]

@@jsullivan2112 I did a long time ag. Must the units that can be hacked also suffer from the "yellow light of death" issue (look it up). The earliest generations were the models that could before a certain firewire upgrade. I don't have all the details but it's on the internet.

[@jsullivan2112]

@@stevebennett9750 Whoops sorry I thought I was responding to a different post. That’s good to know! I knew that it has to be a first gen PS3 because they stripped out SACD entirely after that. I have one but it’s not hacked

[@leonardopapantoniou4227]

But what is happening with a russian web site that has sacd iso files apparently ripped with PS3?

[@AllboroLCD]

Real good one today!

[@boandersen3871]

So the PS Audio SACD player outputs unencrypted DSD, but only to PS Audio DAC?

[@gordthor5351]

They "ripped off" the people to start with by selling them a low quality recordings instead of the master.

[@jsullivan2112]

Spoken by someone who has no idea how any of it works. If we're talking purely analog, there is only one master, so you can't exactly sell it to everyone. The digital master can't fit on a CD, it's too big.

[@gordthor5351]

@@jsullivan2112 Master quality copy of course. The capacity of a CD was based on the low quality copy they sold to the public, but it could have and would have been made with higher capacity had they just sold higher res audio from the start.

[@jsullivan2112]

@@gordthor5351 I feel like that debate is a dog chasing its own tail or the chicken or the egg, since CDs actually go back way farther than what most people realize, pre-dating the pop music audio mastering format coming into its own. You could be right though if CDs had a 24-bit depth right from the get-go. But even then, would the master still sound as good in your living room? You’re (most likely) not reproducing the signal chain of high end outboard mastering gear. Or the acoustic space. It’s the same as guitar players trying to faithfully recreate the tone they hear on a record. It’s virtually impossible. Way too many variables.

[@AntonBogomolov]

Yes you sure can extract pure DSD from SACD via some modded players.

[@vylbird8014]

But why would you want to?

[@AntonBogomolov]

@@vylbird8014 to have it on your hard drive, take it to your portable player etc

[@vylbird8014]

@@AntonBogomolov You just need a sound card that can play DSD. Or a portable player. Hmm... or perhaps the only practical way to play DSD is to convert it in to PCM anyway?

[@SC515]

Interesting listening.

[@KarlHamilton]

The problem is Sony. The record company killed the technology. They did the same with Minidisc. Crippled the format. Utterly pointless.

[@nickwallette6201]

Yep. This is a lesson the industry _never learns._ And Sony sure has a knack for devising cool and innovative formats, and then slamming *hard* straight into a wall by suffocating users and IP licensees until nobody has any interest in it anymore. I don't know what's so difficult to understand. The more you work to prevent piracy, the more you motivate pirates. The more you lock down some new tech, the less likely it is to be adopted. People want to have some degree of freedom to use the equipment and media they purchase. Most of us are willing to pay for that privilege. Some won't, and they never will, so there's really no point trying to defend against lost dollars that were never going to come anyway. I will go to great lengths to rip every disc, data disc, data disK, and cartridge I own. Not because I'm trying to get something for nothing, but because if I want to listen to an album on an iPhone, or watch a movie stored on a NAS from a media streamer, or play a game on an emulator, or install software from a network drive, I'm going to do it. If someone implements "protections" to prevent that, I'm going to break them and do it anyway. I've got no problem paying for the license, but I'm going to use that media on _my_ terms. So I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for a thrift-store special on one of those bargain-bin Blu-ray players that I can use to rip my SACDs to DSF files. DVD-A, in comparison, was a breath of fresh air. Fire up DVD Audio Extractor, save the tracks to WAV files, done. High-resolution audio, on any player, at any time, no BS required. THAT'S HOW YOU DO IT, SONY.

[@lonniefarmer7067]

Thanks!

[@steveaustin7306]

Internet is full if sacd.iso files that can be played through a pc

[@ChiefExecutiveOrbiter]

Sony, their whole thing is pushing a proprietary format. Duo stick, Mini disc, UMD... There's a long list of items they've produced over decades.

[@nickwallette6201]

All interesting, useful, and convenient formats -- or would be, if they hadn't all been strangled to death by their creator.

[@Rodarwah]

nice sound "Eh!" :)

[@BDawgStudio]

My SACD player outputs through Denonlink. No point though... Not good quality really. Just DSD through an inferior way.

[@wilcalint]

The whole "Napster" thing forced an entire ( music ) industry to rethink how it distributes its content. Prior to "Napster" the music industry had a long history of graft, cheating and was just plain a mess. Now, the fact that pretty much any music content can be gotten free off the Internet that has had the effect to push the Music Concert circuits to the best that's ever been. So when an artist(s) becomes popular, and their content get blown all over the Internet, that promotes live Concert ticket sales.

[@captainwin6333]

Lets face, record companies were like a mafia operation.

[@wilcalint]

@@captainwin6333 Are you old enough to remember this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

[@nickwallette6201]

@@captainwin6333 _LIKE_ a mafia? The industry wasn't killed, it was suicidal.

[@vylbird8014]

They certainly dragged their feet though. The industry didn't rethink anything until they were forced to.

[@franscartoons]

“Musicians started getting no money” cute

[@nickwallette6201]

Why SACD is encrypted: Paranoia. Let's be real about this. The recording industry was terrified of copying to tape already. They didn't just allow it because generation loss would cull the number of serial copies. They "allowed it" because they had no recourse. The source media and the destination media were both too dumb and simple to provide any means to stop it. When digital came about, suddenly there was an opportunity to store, transmit, and process sideband data that could identify when a copy was being made. THIS is the reason analog video is well and truly dead. It was a liability. Quality was a far, far, far, far, far distant second motivation. Merely a marketing bullet point. Convenience? Since when did the consumer media industry care at all about what you find convenient? Good old VGA survived a lot longer than component video, and the reason for that is because: Nobody was trying hard to kill it. So yeah, I've heard the "oh noes, people can make bit-perfect copies now" argument, and it's just a smoke-screen. "People" would be perfectly happy with a 6th generation cassette, duplicated on Cousin Steve's store-branded boom box with bad Dolby NR level calibration. Out of the 5,000 people in the world that could distinguish a wax cylinder from a Blu-ray Audio disc, probably 3/4 of them would have been happy to pay a reasonable price for a legit copy anyway without having a metaphorical gun to their head. Ironically, the discs could've been cheaper, and at a higher profit margin, if it weren't for all the stupid DRM licenses that had to be paid to "protect" it from Cousin Steve's would-be SACD burner (had one existed.) And had it been an option to pay CD prices for SACDs, perhaps the whole 3/4 plus an extra 50 of those 5,000 people with minimal wax buildup in their ears might've decided to purchase any given album as an impulse buy. Had SACD technology been all but given away to other equipment manufacturers, it could've been the de-facto physical media format for audio. Instead, the entire consumer base just threw up their hands and said, "Forget it. I'll just stream everything from Spotify at 128kbps." Yeah. Generational loss. If most people today listened to music on something that sounded as good as a copied cassette tape on a ghetto-blaster, that would be an improvement. The only loss over a generation I see is that of high fidelity.

[@nickwallette6201]

Just wanted to add: "We know copies will be made, but that's OK - we've got a great community." It's that kind of mutual respect that actually inspires people to ensure financial support is there. I don't want to rip off artists. I don't want to rip off studios that invested in equipment and cultivated engineering experience. I don't want to rip off manufacturers, or publishers, or distributers, or anyone else. I just want to know that, when the laser croaks in my multi-format disc spinner, I don't lose access to $3,000 invested in content -- _and_ it would be nice to do my own conversion to low-rent copies for use on-the-go. That's all. So, to all the companies out there investing tons of money into blocking my ability to ensure future and mobile playback, and then charging a tax on everything I buy to cover that cost... take a cue from this soft-spoken gentleman in the video.

[@vylbird8014]

And in cases where they could disallow it, they did. In the UK, CBS sued Amstrad Electronics over their introduction of the first dual-deck cassette player, arguing that such a device would be overwhelmingly used for copyright infringement and Amstrad was encouraging this crime. The introduction of DAT in the US was long-delayed by legal threats - the RIAA made it very clear that the first company to import or sell DAT equipment in the US would face immediate legal action, making the technology unavailable there until 1992, when congress mandated that all digital audio recording technology must incorporate support for the the SCMS no-copy flag technology. Even then, knowing how easily the technology would be broken kept most labels away from the technology so there were almost no commercial releases in DAT format. We all remember the lawsuit against Napster, but that wasn't the only one of the time: There was also RIAA vs Diamond Multimedia, manufacturers of the first MP3 player to be successful in the US market - the RIAA wanted to block that technology as well. The music industry did eventually modernise and accept digital sales and streaming - but they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and they fought against the changes with every resource at their disposal.

[@Roof_Pizza]

Sony has always been tougher for copyrights that's why you buy other brands.

[@andrewjackson9417]

I wouldn't necessarily say SACD players tend to be low end, I have 2 blu-ray players that'll do SACD, one's an Oppo the other a Pioneer Elite. I wouldn't call those low end.

[@captainwin6333]

They have to use the Sony produced decoder DAC that costs about 5 bucks. Cheap

[@carlstineman274]

I got an OPPO UDP 105 to see what SACDs and DSD were all about. After a while I bought the Direct Stream DAC hoping to get the DSD layer out of the OPPO and into a better DAC. The OPPO can export the digital signal 3 ways, optical, USB and ??? but all use some flavor of SPDIF and none export the unencrypted DSD layer. Frustration. I finally popped for the PS Audio SACD transport which transmits the unencrypted DSD stream to the DAC via I2S and a secret handshake with the caveat that that is the only thing connected to that signal path so that nothing capable of recording the unencrypted DSD data stream is in the signal path. SACDs originally recorded in DSD sound amazing.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@captainwin6333 That's not true. There are more than a couple DACs (DACs = ICs, not full-fledged products) to choose from that will play DSD. Although, to be perfectly straight-forward about this, not many these days actually play them as 1-bit streams. DSD was a cute idea, but multi-bit PCM is just far, far more convenient to deal with. And when everything these days has some DSP involved, it doesn't make any sense to maintain 1-bit DSD from source to analog. One way or another, it's going to get converted to high-resolution PCM, and then it doesn't matter much what DAC you use. The only "Sony produced" stuff you need is whatever licensed glue is required to read the disc, decrypt the contents, and output the DSD stream. From there, assuming you've met the license requirements for "security," you've got lots of options what you do with the raw bits.