____twoism

DSD offers incredible fidelity, and I think Boards of Canada’s music would be an ideal candidate for this format. Imagine their classic recordings sourced directly from the original masters and released in DSD, the sound quality would be impeccable.

I wonder if they'd ever be open to this kind of thing and what warp thinks of it. BOC music should be archived for the ages in such a picture perfect format.

AI-gen additional context: DSD offers exceptional fidelity, and Boards of Canada’s music seems especially well suited to the format. DSD, or Direct Stream Digital, is a high-resolution audio format originally developed for SACD. Instead of storing music as conventional PCM samples, like a CD or a standard WAV file, it uses an extremely rapid one-bit sampling process—typically 2.8224 million samples per second for DSD64—to represent the waveform with unusual smoothness and continuity.

The audible advantages of DSD are often subtle rather than dramatic, and the quality of the mastering matters far more than the file format alone. Still, a carefully prepared DSD release can be excellent for preserving the character of an original master tape. It can retain very fine low-level detail, spatial depth, texture, and the natural decay of sounds without encouraging unnecessary digital processing.

That would make it a particularly interesting archival format for Boards of Canada. Their music depends heavily on atmosphere: worn tape textures, soft analog saturation, hazy synth tones, faint background details, and subtle layers that can become more apparent on a high-quality playback system. A direct, minimally processed transfer from the original masters could preserve those qualities with remarkable delicacy.

Imagine Music Has the Right to Children, Geogaddi, The Campfire Headphase, or Tomorrow’s Harvest transferred from the best surviving masters and released as carefully mastered SACDs or downloadable DSD files. Even if the improvement over a good lossless PCM edition were not enormous, it would be a fitting way to archive the recordings for the long term.

I wonder whether Boards of Canada or Warp would ever be interested in something like that. Their catalog deserves preservation in the most faithful form possible.

I actually have a few SACDs and a player to play them on. I'd be up for this, with a couple of caveats.

The first SACD I got when I built my system was Dark Side of the Moon (partly just because it was super widely available). None of my gear or the room it's sat in was sufficiently high grade to really get the, you know, really super subtle HiFi details out of the thing but luckily being mixed in 5.1 meant you really didn't have to have that. That's an album that really lends itself to spatially placing sounds, it was clearly remixed with great care and it sounded fantastic.

But then it came to geting Depeche Mode's 90s albums on SACD and that's where the problem starts. Again, they're worth listening to for all the same reasons. But the 5.1 staging of the sound was CLEARLY an afterthought and nowhere near as carefully done. Songs of Faith and Devotion was great but Violator sounded gimmicky and disappointing. Then you know, a few other albums I found in that format really were just stereo mixes with the new quality side of things and at that point, were they really essential? Probably to some but not to me.

So that's my first gripe with this. It could, done well, sound like the definitive version of those albums. Hell, Inferno ALREADY has amazing stereo placement of sound, if they took the time to really dig into the mixes and do something intentional with it, that would be stunning. WOULD they? I can see Boards being into it, but do they even have enough of the source material in stem form any more to pull it off? You'd hope so! But some of these albums are from the 90s, that's a big ask. Not that they NEED to be remixed into 5.1 I guess, but it would be cool.

Second concern, and this is why I even bring up Depeche Mode cos their fan base is similarly rabid as ours is. Those SACDs went FAST when they were released. I didn't stress about it too much when they came out cos at the time I didn't have anything to play them on so I was only keeping an eye to see how they were selling. But tracking them down at a decent price years later was tortuous. "People who care about SACDs and have the gear" is a pretty niche market especially now, but it doesn't matter cos you're still competing against collectors who just want them to say "I have all the releases". What would Warp do? Print a bunch of them so everyone could have one? Course they wouldn't. It'd be a bunfight trying to get hold of one.

All that said, I'd love it if they did this, and I'd really try hard to get hold of one if they did.

Negamuse wrote: "People who care about SACDs and have the gear" is a pretty niche market especially now

It won't happen and this is why.

That said, it would be neat to have some BOC albums properly mixed in surround sound, Dolby Atmos, what have you. I've talked with a few people about how playing BOC in Spatial Audio already sounds pretty incredible in some cases.

I assume Boards of Canada already have high-quality archival copies of their masters. If true, those files would be like gold. Their music is especially well suited to this kind of preservation because the analog character has so much depth, particularly after all the processing, tape degradation, layering, and subtle manipulation that define their sound.

It would be fascinating to have definitive audiophile editions of the albums in the world. The music already exists and has a deeply committed audience, so it is hard to imagine there would be no market for carefully prepared archival releases. A premium physical edition—perhaps SACD, accompanied by high-resolution downloads and detailed liner notes, could be something fans would genuinely value and be willing to pay for.

I doubt anyone can tell the difference in a blind test between CD quality and DSD - it's just technical marketing guff to part "audiophiles" from their money.

44.1KHz already covers Nyquist range of human hearing (and if you're over 20, good luck hearing anything higher than 16KHz). 16bit provides for a 96dB noise floor - a range that you're just not going to exploit in the real-world, given that a whisper-quiet room is 30dB and + ~90dB = ~120dB is at the threshold of pain / nearby sirens / fireworks etc.

More info at https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate- ... eat-16518/ and https://www.soundguys.com/audio-bit-dep ... ned-23706/