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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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In Reply to: RE: IF you want a DAC to play normal "redbook" cds then you shouldn't buy the latest and greatest... posted by Sprezza Tura on April 15, 2014 at 08:25:32:
Actually I think you are dead wrong. ALL of my friends, except for me, have gone over to computer and high rez downloads. Of course the spent a ton of time ripping their cds as well.
I haven't found a single example where upsampling actually improved the sound. Made it different and many times weird...sure but better...no.
A good example was a friend of mine with the DCS Delius DAC (later Elgar DAC) and Purcell upsampler. We played a lot with the digital filters and the upsampling and I found, without exception that the non-integer upsampling (i.e. 96KHz and 192Khz) sounded worse than the integer upsampling (88.2 and 176.4Khz). Oversampling is also an integer (so maybe the integer up and over sampling were really the same thing?? In that case it was only 2x and 4x with the Purcell while my old dacs all do 8x). I preferred the sound of Delius with the 4x upsampling and so did my friend and he left it that way. One wonders if a normal 8x oversampling chip would have improved things further. Regardless, the DCS stuff sounded very mechanical and synthetic.
As I stated below, I have also owned two versions of the Anagram technologies digital filters with sigma/delta DACs. It was a no go in both cases. This is relevant because the Audio Aero had a very nice tube output stage that got it the closest to acceptability I have heard from this kind of higher math conversion.
If you reread what I wrote you will note that I also made the comment that I thought power supply and output stage originally were the most important part and I still think they are important; however, I have now discovered how fundamentally different the two types of DAC technologies along with the attendent filters sound from each other. Furthermore, comparing the DACs with analog (both LP and tape) I have found that the older ones (in high end implementations of course...we are not talking budget DACs from the 80s here) get consistently closer to what I hear from those other sources.
I would not call my view orthodox at all...I would call it forgotten knowledge. Orthodox was that only the bits mattered and you can throw in any old DAC chip if you build the rest up like Hercules... If what I am proclaiming was orthodox then MSB technologies would be one of a dozen companies making high end mulitbit DAC chipsets from scratch...to my knowledge they are the only ones, which makes them rather heretical not orthodox.
Other than a few other companies who have done it (Lavry engineering did one of their own as did a British company whose name eludes me) the rest buy off-the-shelf parts. Cost of manufacturing of ladder dacs is very high and people wanted high bit rates and low prices...thus the rise of the sigma/delta DAC. The Ultra Analog chips were SERIOUSLY expensive for a manufactuer. THe cheapest DAC I have seen that used these was around $3K in the early 90s. I see why they were used now though as they were seriously good. Probably you have never heard a DAC with this chip in it?
I guess if you want high rez files and your older dac won't play them (my Monarchy will play up to 96Khz files the Kinergetics is limited to 48Khz) then you have to get another DAC to play them. Since you can get many of the good older DACs for not so much money (Ultra Analog DACs excepted...some still bring a high price) then you can blow your wad on high rez dac for high rez files.
No one is saying that the future is fixed to what I observe now. I am just stating where I think we are in the present.
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Follow Ups
- RE: IF you want a DAC to play normal "redbook" cds then you shouldn't buy the latest and greatest... - morricab 06:13:47 04/16/14 (0)
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