As an owner of a PS Audio Perfectwave Transport and a DirectStream DAC, I have created DVD Audio discs from CD’s by:
- converting the CD to WAV files on a PC computer hard drive, then
- burned the WAV files from the PC hard drive to a DVD Audio disc.
The resulting DVD Audio disc was definitely an improvement over playing the original CD with the PWT. In fact, the DVD Audio sound quality was great.
Then recently I experimented by:
- converting a CD to WAV files on an external USB Solid State Drive (SSD), instead of the internal PC hard drive, then
- burned the WAV files from the SSD to a DVD Audio disc.
The result was an incredible DVD Audio disc. I am not going to pretend to be a verbose reviewer so I’ll just say to my ears and through my audio system, this DVD Audio disc was the clearest, cleanest sound I have ever heard from my system.
I also tried the same approach with a few downloaded FLAC albums, first
- copying the downloaded FLAC album from the hard drive to the external SSD, then
- converting the FLAC files on the SSD to WAV files in another folder on the SSD, and finally
- burning the album WAV files from the SSD to a DVD Audio disc.
Same result as before, clearly superior to using the hard drive, especially with FLAC files. I am posting this method for creating DVD Audio discs because I read this forum regularly and have not run across a posting about using an SSD to produce DVD audio discs, though there are some postings about using SSD’s in a NAS for better sound quality.
To my ears with my modest system, using an SSD to produce DVD Audio discs and playing those DVD audio discs through the PS Audio PWT and DSD components results in the most phenomenal sounding music experience. Got to love and truly enjoy what PS Audio has accomplished.
For now, I will leave it up to others to evaluate and report back their findings using an SSD to produce DVD Audio discs. Would be interesting to learn if the same result may be achieved using a USB thumb, flash drive or even an SD card.
Interesting. Does the software you’re using to write the DVD create an image file first and work from that or does it burn on the fly and simply hope that the needed file is available when it gets to that portion of the DVD?
I am using Ashampoo Burning Studio to create DVD Audio discs, often abbreviated as DVD-A. It is actually a data disk that can be read by the Perfectwave Transport and a few other transports. For more specific information about DVD-A discs, an internet search should provide valuable and more specific information.
Thank you for the information. What I was getting at and is still unclear from reading the documentation for your software was if it creates an ISO first and then writes that ISO to the disc or if creates the disc structure on the fly. Since there is an option to copy the source files to the local HDD, I suspect it is the latter as there is little point in doing that if you’re making an ISO first. The first approach requires more time and additional space on a drive to store the ISO but produces more reliable results. The second is faster but its results are heavily dependent upon your system’s ability to provide a steady flow of data to the burner. If you are seeing (or hearing) different results between HDD and SSD sources, perhaps this is due to I/O bottlenecks in your system. Preparing an ISO and using that to write the disc may eliminate the differences you’re hearing or produce even better results. It will also provide a consistent source to use if you choose to compare different media, burners, write speeds, and so on. Good luck with your experiments.
Thank you for your information and thoughts Peanut_Butter. Many high quality music servers use SSDs rather than HDDs. I suspect the difference is the SSD vs the HDD, since an SSD is completely silent while an HDD has moving parts that may add some noise in the files. And my PC is about 6 years old and probably has a noisier HDD than many of the newer and better HDDs made today. Been trying to convince my wife we need a new computer. Anyway, I wrote the posting as a pathway for others, like me, to help them possibly realize a better sound quality from their PWTs.
Been a few years, but I burned my DVD-Audio and DVD-Video music discs to flac using a program called DVD Audio Extractor. Worked for stereo and multi channel rips.
