Digital eXtreme Definition (DXD) is a digital audio format that originally was developed by

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

and Merging Technologies for editing high-resolution recordings recorded in

Direct Stream Digital Direct Stream Digital (DSD) is a trademark used by Sony and Philips for their system for digitally encoding audio signals for the Super Audio CD (SACD). DSD uses pulse-density modulation encoding - a technology to store audio signals on digital ...

(DSD), the audio standard used on

Super Audio CD Super Audio CD (SACD) is an optical disc format for audio storage introduced in 1999. It was developed jointly by Sony and Philips Electronics and intended to be the successor to the Compact Disc (CD) format. The SACD format allows multiple a ...

(SACD). As the 1-bit DSD format used on SACD is not suitable for

editing Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, o ...

, alternative formats such as DXD or DSD-Wide must be used during the mastering stage. In contrast with DSD-Wide or DSD Pure which offers level, EQ, and crossfade edits at the DSD sample rate (64fs, 2.822 MHz), DXD is a PCM signal with 24-bit resolution (8 bits more than the 16 bits used for Red Book CD) sampled at 352.8 kHz – eight times 44.1 kHz, the sampling frequency of Red Book CD. The data rate is 8.4672 Mbit/s per channel – three times that of DSD64. DXD also utilizes the vast array of plugins also available to PCM-based digital audio workstations, such as

Cubase Cubase is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Steinberg for music and MIDI recording, arranging and editing. The first version, which was originally only a MIDI sequencer and ran on the Atari ST computer, was released in 1989. Cut-dow ...

Logic Studio Logic Studio is a discontinued professional music production suite by Apple Inc. The first version of Logic Studio was unveiled on September 12, 2007. It claims to be the largest collection of modeled instruments, sampler instruments, effect plu ...

Digital Performer Digital Performer is a digital audio workstation and music sequencer software package published by Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) of Cambridge, Massachusetts for the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. Ancestry In 1984, Mark of the ...

, etc. DXD was initially developed for the Merging Pyramix workstation and introduced together with their Sphynx 2, AD/DA converter in 2004. This combination meant that it was possible to record and edit directly in DXD, and that the sample only converts to DSD once before publishing to SACD. This offers a great advantage to the user as the noise created by converting DSD rises dramatically above 20 kHz, and more noise is added each time a signal is converted back to DSD during editing. Today, DXD is also used as a music distribution format in some HD web stores.

References

External links

White paper: The advantages of DXD for SACDDSD, DXD & SACD - high resolution audio
* * Audio codecs Audio storage {{Sound-tech-stub