I came across the following interesting link today:
dCS Presents: The Spirit of Turtle Sampler (Download)
The download is in DSD256 and most dCS products only support DSD128. Is this on purpose?
I believe that when this came out, it was a physical disc dual layer SACD as a demo disc that was meant to showcase what dCS equipment could do. Bert van der Wolf who is the engineer of this recording has a long history and cooperation with dCS. I think now he has chosen to also offer it as a download up to DSD256, that is his choice as the owner of Turtle/Northstar. If you have Varese it will work
The reason is that, aside from Varese, other current dCS units use a third party produced streamer that only supports <DSD128 owing to the time of product design when there was no DSD256. To upgrade to a newer board would require a hardware change and that would be costly ( think of the upgrade to Apex). Given the limited availability of real ( not upsampled) DSD256 repertoire I can only guess that there may not be that many owners of V/R/B that are happy to pay several thousand £/$/€ to upgrade at least at this point in time.However no doubt Varese is a pointer that other future products may well ( read: will) include this feature.
Of course what the record label releases is up to them, not dCS.
From the disc booklet; https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0537/5288/9514/files/tr75538.pdf?v=1629482423
Bert van der Wolf
July 2013
It’s unclear what format it was originally recorded/mastered in, but based on the fact that it was originally mastered for multi-channel surround (both SACD-M.Ch & 5.1 DTS HD 192/24) , my guess it’s natively PCM.
As in 99% of DSD256 material, it wasn’t natively DSD256 (or even DSD for that matter). Personally, I wouldn’t download any of the DSD formatted versions
I think this discussion is a pure academic thing…pretty sure that 99% here don’t hear the difference btw. 64-128 DSD or even 24/192 PCM…(at least I can’t here)
Thanks for al your inputs, guys. What tickled me is the tagline “dCS presents - The Spirit of Turtle”, so dCS at definitely had a hand in this. The original production is from 2013, so in the meantime the album has taken a life of its own and grown beyond its humble roots (even samplerate wise).
My comment wasn’t meant to be a serious question by any means. I just thought it funny that something “dCS presents …” is presented in a sample rate that has been subject of intensive discussion on this forum. I think in the meantime we all know about the limitations of Stream Unlimited’s Stream800.
Must have been some Bert van der Wolf - dCS - More Music (Dutch importer) idea to showcase the Vivaldi no doubt.