SARACON Sampling frequency converter

SARA­CON – a ver­sa­tile mul­ti­chan­nel file for­mat and sam­pling fre­quency con­ver­sion tool of ut­most sonic qual­ity and un­prece­dented con­ver­sion speed. All stan­dard sam­pling fre­quen­cies are sup­ported, in­clud­ing DXD and DSD. The Su­per Au­dio Center rec­om­mends SARA­CON for DSD con­ver­sion. POW-R dither­ing is also included.

Sara­con runs on Win­dows™ or OSX™ plat­forms and comes in two vari­ants: SARA­CON and SARA­CON-DSD. The lat­ter ob­vi­ously also sup­ports DSD con­ver­sion in both di­rec­tions, in­clud­ing DS­D64 and DS­D128 vari­ants. SARA­CON is a batch proces­sor work­ing on source and des­ti­na­tion files. It does not sup­port stream­ing modes. Many stan­dard in­put and out­put for­mats are sup­ported. POW-R dither­ing is a stan­dard fea­ture as well.

Sam­pling frequencies

The SARA­CON is an ex­tremely ver­sa­tile soft­ware tool for sam­pling fre­quency and for­mat con­ver­sion. Sup­ported sam­pling fre­quen­cies in­clude all the stan­dard dig­i­tal au­dio sam­pling fre­quen­cies like 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192, 352.8, 384 kHz, DXD, DS­D64 and fi­nally DSD128.

Out­put

The out­put word-length can be set to 16, 20, 24 or 32 Bits fixed point, or to 32 or 64 Bits IEEE float­ing point. Plus DSD. The word-length re­duc­tion uses flat TPDF dither­ing as well as any of the three POW-R dither­ing algorithms.

File formats

In terms of file for­mats as in­put or out­put SARA­CON shines with a plethora of sup­ported for­mats, in­clud­ing wav, aiff, au, bwf, sd2, caf, paf, mat, raw, ds­d­iff, FLAC, Ogg/Vor­bis. The num­ber of chan­nels is un­lim­ited in a PCM to PCM or DSD to PCM con­ver­sion, while it is lim­ited to six in a PCM to DSD conversion.

Con­ver­sion algorithms

The con­ver­sion al­go­rithms are based on our sev­eral decades long ex­pe­ri­ence with sam­pling fre­quency con­vert­ers. The user in­ter­face is tidy and a sim­ple – as one would ex­pect from a pro­fes­sional tool. A sine wave gen­er­a­tor is built in for test­ing pur­poses.

DSD version

The DSD ver­sion of the SARA­CON sports some ad­di­tional, DSD spe­cific fea­tures like an ex­ten­sive DSD con­ver­sion analy­sis with log files, se­lec­table in­ter­po­la­tion/dec­i­ma­tion fil­ter sets, flex­i­ble in­put to out­put chan­nel rout­ing, dif­fer­ent mod­u­la­tors, each with its own op­tions like gain, dither­ing etc.. Note: All DSD spe­cific fea­tures are sup­ported by the SARA­CON-DSD ver­sion only.

File formats

• Sup­port for all ma­jor au­dio for­mats in­clud­ing wav, aiff, au, caf, sd2, mat, raw

• Com­pressed for­mats: FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis

• RF64 and BWF sup­port with meta data transfer

• All ma­jor PCM num­ber for­mats sup­ported: fixed point (16, 24, 32 Bits), float and double)

Sam­pling frequencies

• Sam­pling fre­quen­cies sup­ported: 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 88.2 kHz, 96 kHz, 176.4 kHz, 192 kHz, 352.8 kHz, 384 kHz, DXD, DS­D64 (2.8224 MHz), DS­D128 (5.6448 MHz)

Con­ver­sion algorithms

• Choice of dif­fer­ent mod­u­la­tors for DSD gen­er­a­tion (low, medium and high order)

• Time ref­er­ence trans­fer be­tween BWF and DSD and vice versa

• Tag trans­fer for cer­tain for­mats

• Heav­ily op­ti­mized for sse2 en­abled proces­sors with mul­ti­ple cores

• Un­lim­ited num­ber of chan­nels, files and jobs

• Up-sam­pler char­ac­ter­is­tics se­lec­table (dif­fer­ent interpolators)

• Dif­fer­ent mod­u­la­tors se­lec­table, each with its own op­tions like gain, dither­ing etc.

• Flex­i­ble in­put to out­put chan­nel routing

• Se­lec­table in­ter­po­la­tion/dec­i­ma­tion fil­ter sets for DSD conversion

Dither­ing

• TPDF, POW-R1, POW-R2 and POW-R3 dither algorithms

Qual­ity

• PCM to PCM and DSD to PCM con­ver­sions bet­ter than −180 dB THD+N

• PCM to DSD con­ver­sions −159.4 dB (CRFB10)

Batch mode

• Smart batch modes to in­ter­leave sev­eral dif­fer­ent mono in­put file sets into mul­ti­chan­nel files

• Su­per batch con­ver­sion to keep the work­sta­tion busy overnight or over the weekend

Mon­i­tor­ing

• Non volatile sig­nal mon­i­tor­ing for PCM to DSD conversion

• Log file/win­dow for doc­u­men­ta­tion of con­ver­sion processes

• Ex­ten­sive DSD Con­ver­sion analysis

• Non-volatile level/peak me­ter and his­tory with full fea­tured viewer

Good­ie

• Dithered test sig­nal gen­er­a­tor for PCM

• Test sig­nal gen­er­a­tor for DSD

Com­mand line interface

• Com­plete com­mand line in­ter­face for au­toma­tion with bash scripts or from other tools