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RE: Digital Filtering

John Swenson shares similar thoughts about most digital filtering. Search for his posts under his name / ID using the keyword 'filter' on:

http://forums.slimdevices.com

http://www.computeraudiophile.com

http://bottlehead.com

Short version... NOS DACs produce a more alive sounding presentation, but will generally be 'dirty' in the higher-frequencies, something who's audibility will be system and person-dependent. DACs with industry-standard filters will be cleaner in the high-freqs, but not have that alive-ness.

His assessment is that this is due to the way digital filters have generally been implemented, particularly by DAC chip designers. Using a DAC chip where one can turn off or just not use the chip designer's digital filtering and instead use a simpler filter tailored to the DAC as can be implemented in computer playback software using digital upsampling /filtering utilities like Sox can provide the best of both worlds.

A useful 'unexpected' find he's recently related is that how DAC chips implement their filtering varies by sample rate, where they use less filtering at higher sampling rates... and that upsampling can improve the sound you get by minimizing the effect of the built-in filters.

Well worth your time to search out and read his thoughts.

Greg in Mississippi
Everything matters!


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