I’ve got an NEC DVD+RW ND-5100A drive in my Dell laptop, and I just put the hybrid SACD of Sting’s Sacred Songs into it for the first time, hoping to rip it to the harddrive. However, not only will it not play it, it won’t even detect it. (I was expecting it to faithfully read the CD layer as my generic “discman” does, but no luck.)
Is there a solution to playing these sort of discs in such a drive? The disc is two years old, so I can’t return it.
I think you’re hooped. The drive will see the HD content using the “DVD” frequency, but it’s encrypted and unreadable. I don’t think there’s a way you can force the drive to treat it like a regular CD.
I can’t think of any suggestions as to how you could play the content from your computer (short of installing a CD-rom drive) that wouldn’t violate board rules.
Well, that’s disappointing. Do any DVD-ROM drives play hybrid SACD discs? If so, maybe a new driver may help.
This really makes me want to not bother buying any more SACD’s, too, which is unfortunate.
(The CD, of course, is called Sacred Love, not Sacred Songs…)
My Lite-On SOHW-812S DVD-RW drive reads the CD layer just fine. Don’t know the percentages involved, but some do, and some don’t.
The specs for the drive do not include SACD media compatibility
It’s possible that flashing the latest firmware for the drive might help, but I don’t know about SACD to know if SACD compatibility is an optical issue (in which case you’re screwed) or a data recognition issue where updated firmware might help.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think part of SACD compatibility is dependent on hardware.
There are several levels of content protection on an SACD.
The lead in is scrambled. This might be addressed with a firmware update.
One part that I think is hardware specific is the way the encryption key is hidden on the disk – it’s encoded in the actual shape of the some of the pits on the recording surface – so those pits carry an extra level of information beyond “1” and “0” – something like some pits are “1a”, some are “1b”, some are “0a” and some are “0b.” (The width of each pit is slightly different.) I guess this might be possible with a firmware update, but my intuition (for what it’s worth) is that that’d be tough.
One part that I’m sure is hardware specific is the second key for the cryptographic algorithm. It provides initial values and is locked into a proprietary IC required for SACD-compatible players. Releasing firmware updates that contained this information for emulation would compromise a large part of their DRM scheme, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for that.
I can sympathize with that.
SACDs sound nice, but there’s an awful lot of dirty bathwater with that baby. DVDA seems like the next logical move.