Playing SACD .dff rips on MacOS

Since doing some research on audio quality this week for a RN breakfast panel responding to Neil Young's comments I've been hunting for ways to experience the best quality audio I can get out of my Mac.

I don't have a SACD player but I found some rips in the form of .dff files that contain 1 bit encoded streams at 2.8 MHz. To play these on a Mac you can AudioGate from KORG. It's free but they either want you to have some of their hardware or alternatively use your Twitter account to tweet a little marketing. This seems like a fair deal to me.

The software is written in some kind of cross platform library so it looks pretty weird on the Mac but it works and sounds good. Oddly it claims to be clipping pretty frequently but maybe the track is normalised to use the full dynamic range.

I'm outputting to an Edirol at the highest bit samples and rate I can do.

The software will convert to formats including FLAC:

but as I mentioned they force you to tweet some marketing. Haven't seen this before.

Interesting....