As would be expected, Sony and Philips, as designers of the CD and SACD formats, have the most players on the market in many guises such as standalone players, combined DVD/SACD players, in-car players, and Sony's PlayStation 3 game console.

The Sony SCD-1 is a well-known player which was introduced concurrently with the SACD format. The SCD-1 was introduced before multi-channel SACDs existed and only plays two channel SACDs or red-book CDs. It is no longer sold. When introduced in 1999, it sold for US$5,000.

Many other vendors offer SACD playback capabilities in their product lines, although none has offered a portable Walkman-style SACD player capable of playing the high definition layer of an SACD. Most portable CD players will play the conventional CD layer of a Hybrid SACD

DSD

SACD audio is stored in a format called Direct Stream Digital (DSD), which differs from the conventional PCM used by the compact disc or conventional computer audio systems.

DSD is 1-bit, has a sampling rate of 2.8224 MHz, and makes use of noise shaping quantization techniques in order to push 1-bit quantization noise up to inaudible ultrasonic frequencies. This gives the format a greater dynamic range and wider frequency response than the CD. Promotional materials about SACD supplied by Philips and Sony suggest that the system is capable of delivering a dynamic range of 120 dB from 20 Hz to 20 kHz and an extended frequency response up to 100 kHz, although most currently available players list an upper limit of 80–90 kHz.

The process of creating a DSD signal is conceptually similar to taking a 1-bit delta-sigma analog-to-digital (A/D) converter and removing the decimator which converts the 1-bit bitstream into multibit PCM. Instead, the 1-bit signal is recorded directly and in theory only requires a lowpass filter to reconstruct the original analog waveform. In reality it is a little more complex, and the analogy is incomplete in that 1-bit sigma-delta converters are these days rather unusual, one reason being that a 1-bit signal cannot be dithered properly: most modern sigma-delta converters are multibit.

Because of the nature of sigma-delta converters, one cannot make a direct comparison between DSD and PCM. An approximation is possible, though, and would place DSD in some aspects comparable to a PCM format that has a bit depth of 20 bits and a sampling frequency of 192 kHz. PCM sampled at 24 bits provides a (theoretical) additional 24 dB of dynamic range. Due to the effects of quantization noise, the usable bandwidth of the SACD format is approximately 100 kHz, which is similar to 192 kHz PCM.

Because it has been extremely difficult to carry out DSP operations (for example performing EQ, balance, panning and other changes in the digital domain) in a 1-bit environment, and because of the prevalence of studio equipment such as Pro Tools, which is solely PCM-based, the vast majority of SACDs — especially rock and contemporary music which relies on multitrack techniques — are in fact mixed in PCM (or mixed analog and recorded on PCM recorders) and then converted to DSD for SACD mastering.

To address some of these issues, a new studio format has been developed, usually referred to as "DSD-wide", which retains standard DSD's high sample rate but uses an 8-bit, rather than single-bit digital word length, but still relies heavily on the noise shaping principle. It becomes almost the same as PCM (it's sometimes disparagingly referred to as "PCM-narrow") but has the added benefit of making DSP operations in the studio a great deal more practical. The main difference is that "DSD-wide" still retains 2.8224 MHz (64Fs) sampling frequency while the highest frequency in which PCM is being edited is 352.8 kHz (8Fs). The "DSD-wide" signal is down-converted to regular DSD for SACD mastering. As a result of this technique and other developments there are now a few digital audio workstations (DAWs) which operate, or can operate, in the DSD domain, notably Pyramix and some SADiE systems.

Note that high-resolution PCM (DVD-Audio, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc) and DSD (SACD) may still differ in terms of fidelity at high-frequencies since DSD, owing to its high sampling frequency, does not show the typical ringing effects of reconstruction filters used with PCM. On the other hand, DSD's dynamic range decreases quickly at frequencies over 20 kHz due to the use of strong noise shaping techniques which push the noise out of the audio band resulting in a rising noise floor just above 20 kHz. PCM's dynamic range, on the other hand, is the same at all frequencies. (Some high-end SACD players employ an optional low-pass filter set at 30 kHz for compatibility and safety reasons, suitable for situations where amplifiers or loudspeakers can't deliver an undistorted output if noise above 30 kHz is present in the signal.)

DST

To reduce the space and bandwidth requirements of DSD (2.8 Mbit/s per channel), a lossless compression scheme called Direct Stream Transfer (DST) is used — DST compression is compulsory for multi-channel regions and optional for stereo regions. This typically compresses by a factor of between two and three, allowing a disc to contain 80 minutes of both 2-channel and 5.1-channel sound.

PSP

SACD includes various copy protection measures of which the most prominent is Pit Signal Processing (PSP), a physical watermarking feature that contains a digital watermark modulated in the width of pits on the disc (data is stored in the pit length). The optical pickup must contain special circuitry to read the PSP watermark, which is then compared to information on the disc to make sure it's legitimate. Because the majority of DVD players and all DVD-ROM drives use an optical pickup that lacks this specialized watermark detection circuitry they cannot read the data on the SACD layer of a protected SACD disc.[3]

On hybrid SACD discs, PSP is only applied to the SACD layer — not to the CD layer.

Comparing SACD and CD

Many people feel that even a moderately good system should reveal a significant difference between SACD and either CD or DVD-Audio.[citation needed] The late film composer Jerry Goldsmith, for example, fiercely backed SACD and several albums of his film scores and compositions are available as Hybrid Multichannel SACDs.

Few home audio systems can accurately reproduce sounds above 20 kHz, and most recording chains are designed around this limit. Modern pop music is typically compressed to a small percentage of the maximum available dynamic range, and thus would not benefit from the extended dynamic range available in SACD. In comparison, acoustic performances of jazz, folk, classical and alternative music can definitely benefit from the lack of amplitude compression that an extended dynamic range affords.

Conversely, the properties of DSD and the authoring process tend to discourage the kind of extreme compression and unpleasant-sounding hard digital clipping often found on PCM recordings. Unlike CD, which sets the 0 dB level right at the theoretical PCM signal limit, and doesn't take into account oversampling, SACD sets the 0 dB level at 6 dB below the theoretical full-scale DSD signal, and prohibits peaks above +3 dB. DSD processing is less amenable to simple clipping to meet these limits, forcing more care to be taken during mastering. The extra headroom also eases the job of DACs in playback equipment, which often suffer overload distortion when fed the full-scale PCM common on heavily-compressed CDs.[4][5] Thus, improved quality may result from simply preventing the kinds of poor mastering often found on PCM, rather than from any fundamental audible difference between DSD and PCM; PCM mastered several dB lower would also obtain the same benefit.

Increasingly, home audio playback systems are home cinema multichannel and this single feature may prove to be the most important when considering the differences between Compact Discs and the newer distribution formats. CDs are stereo and both SACD and DVD are multichannel-capable. In addition, SACDs can be authored to be both forward and backward compatible with existing CD players.

It can be argued that SACD and DVD-Audio are merely attempts to add copy-protection features rather than actual improvements in recording and listening technology, and allowing an 80 kHz upper limit when human hearing is less than 22 kHz may be considered useless. Sony and other supporting company's response is that in the hands of a competent engineer and producer, these formats provide additional capabilities and features that can create a more engaging and compelling listening experience. Record label owner David Chesky of Chesky Records has said that "we can give you a much better ride" with Super Audio CD discs and has set August 2007 as the date when all of his company's music releases will be issued only on Hybrid Super Audio CD discs, compatible with both CD and SACD players.

An article published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society Vol. 55 Number 9, September 2007, entitled "Audibility of a CD-Standard ADA Loop Inserted Into High-Resolution Audio Playback" by E. Brad Meyer and David Moran reported the results of their study, which concluded that listeners could not hear the difference between a high-resolution two-channel recording and a CD-quality downsampling of the same recording except at extremely high sound levels. The article concluded that many high-resolution releases sounded better than their CD counterparts, but attributes this to mastering differences.