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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: Why does my 20 year old NON-NOS ladder DAC sound so good? posted by knewton on June 2, 2014 at 18:23:05:
The ESS SABRE DACs running in stereo mode convert digital data to 8 bits at a very high sampling rate, typically 44 MHz or higher. (When run in mono mode they operate at 9 bits.) Allowing for the 1024x sample rate increase and without even considering noise shaping, this gives an effective resolution of these DACs of 18 bits. With noise shaping, the effective resolution is considerably greater measured in the band below 20 kHz, around 23 bits if the chip is used in the best possible circuitry.
The SABRE chips use MOS current switches, all identical, not resistor ladders. There are 256 one bit switches used per channel to achieve the 8 bit resolution in stereo mode, a technique called "thermometer code". Because these are not all exactly identical there is a technique used to randomly rotate these bits and this evens out small variations in individual components, so that one hears random noise (e.g. at -138 dB) rather than music related distortion when the individual switches differ due to manufacturing tolerances. The details of the SABRE chips are described in the ESS technical white paper and the ESS patents.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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- RE: Why does my 20 year old NON-NOS ladder DAC sound so good? - Tony Lauck 20:24:54 06/02/14 (0)
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