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In Reply to: RE: Another take on Schiit Bifrost posted by Dynobot on March 18, 2012 at 08:19:55
"That would be the nature of the AKM chips coming through. I found this to be true with nearly every AKM Dac I have owned and listened too."
If it's just playing 44.1 kHz through the AKM DAC then it may be a filter effect. The cure would be to try upsampling with a smooth, somewhat rolled off filter, e.g. Sox, 92% offset, minimum phase.
If it happens with most higher sampling rate recordings it is likely that your system is on the bright side and might be more enjoyable if tamed somewhat. Some recordings are just too bright and if one voices the system for them then other recordings may be too dull.
I leave my equipment powered up 24/7 as that also smooths things out.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
very true about 16 bit recordings. The sampling rate is just not high enough. On 24/96 recordings the Bifrost is very neutral in my system. To get the highs right I needed 200 hours break-in and a good 75 Ohm coaxial cable.
Just think about the recording side with inferior ADCs, mixing boards, cheap cables, and dirty power it is a wonder any recording sounds worthwhile.
If clever noise shaping is used, 96/16 can sound almost as good as 96/24. I have done experiments with 96/12 which is only slightly worse and even 96/8 was acceptable, albeit like a noisy pre-recorded tape.
With a much higher sampling rate noise shaping works better. This is why DSD sounds good. DSD is nothing more than 2822/1 PCM, encoded using very clever noise shaping.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I think the Bifrost may have been voiced with the Schiit Lyr tube headphone amp. I had taken the Lyr out of the playback loop as it appeared to be slightly "rolling off" the high frequency response of my SACD playback on my Oppo 95 . The SACDs still sounded detailed but they were sounding more like the CD playback (also pretty exceptional)from the Oppo. DSD sounds a little different then PCM. PCM hi freq. is just a bit more etched. The decay of DSD notes while distinct fade more naturally into silence. Granted I've never heard state of the art PCM playback.
I placed the Lyr back in after the Bifrost & now my PCM music(being played from a hard drive into a Cambridge Audio Network Player into the Bifrost)is sounding closer to DSD. I think I like the sound of my CDs dBPa ripped to my Hard Drive better than them being played on a optical drive. They appear to be a little more immediate & smoother sounding.
The Oppo will remain on the preamp I had it on. I will continue to use two dedicated source specific playback paths as this seems to work for me at this time(or unless I find a magic wallet to fund my new system additions)
Just out of curiousity I took the Lyr back out of the loop. As it turns out the Bifrost must still have some burning in to do, as the HF response is'nt as aggressive it was even without the Lyr following it. For some reason I'm not actually that big a fan of the Lyr, I always seem to loose a slight bit of transparency when it's inserted.
On another note, what do you guys think of Neko D100 DAC ? It looks pretty interesting (& it's about at the upper limit of what I'd like spend at this time) Thanks
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