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[psam]

I am thinking of converting all my SACD .iso files to flac tracks at 24/176 so that I can manipulate the individual tracks with more flexibility from within MC, such as creating playlists that are burned to audio CDs or transferred to portable devices in mp3 format and so on.

Media Center does not provide such conversions at all so I am using foobar.

Foobar can convert to 176 or 384 samplerates. My current DAC goes up to 192 kHz PCM, no DSD.

With 2 channel stereo, will there be a loss of audible data when I play the flac files on Media Center instead of the SACD?

[InflatableMouse]

Why don't you use sacd_extract to convert to individual dff tracks?

[psam]

Why don't you use sacd_extract to convert to individual dff tracks?

I haven't heard about it. Is this another software program? Off to Google!
Thanx!

PS, and what do I do with these dff tracks?

[InflatableMouse]

These are the individual tracks extracted from the iso. Like with a regular audio cd, the wav files are the tracks on the audio cd iso.

[astromo]

A thought I had was that you could potentially use a tool like this to check:
http://losslessaudiochecker.com/
Not sure how good / bad this is. I note a particular lack of write up explaining the theory realised by the software.

There are probably other options out there if you can't rely on your ears. Let us know what you find.

[kstuart]

Any conversion from SACD to FLAC is lossey, because you are losing the super high frequency rate and single-bit encoding of the original.  They are two different systems.  That is a different situation from when you convert FLAC to APE - in that case, both are lossless PCM systems, so the conversion is lossless.

Whether the converted files sound audibly different from the original is a different issue, which is generally felt to be off-topic here. 

[InflatableMouse]

A thought I had was that you could potentially use a tool like this to check:
http://losslessaudiochecker.com/
Not sure how good / bad this is. I note a particular lack of write up explaining the theory realised by the software.

There are probably other options out there if you can't rely on your ears. Let us know what you find.

That isn't going to work. I'm pretty sure it's designed to detect mp3 or similar lossy compression which were then converted to wav/flac/ape/etc. Going from dsd to flac will lose ultrasound as kstuart already said but I don't think that tool will consider that "a loss" as its far above what humans can hear.

[Henglander]

Going from dsd to flac will lose ultrasound as kstuart already said but I don't think that tool will consider that "a loss" as its far above what humans can hear.

Err... do you mean noise? Isn't the problem with DSD that the noise increases as the frequency increases, which is why one needs to apply a low pass filter to stop the tweeter from frying?

[InflatableMouse]

Correct. JRiver applies a low pass filter @ 30 kHz for DSD playback.

I thought ultrasound sounded way cooler though .

[JimH]

I thought ultrasound sounded way cooler though .

[bulldogger]

Oh yeah. Us dogs like good music!