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So (Fred is it?),I also have been upsampling my CDs for awhile now.The majority of my listening is to Orchestral & other (mostly Classical)"Acoustic" Music. It's been my feeling that the sound quality of
acoustical instruments really is'nt served well enough by the standard 16bit
44.1 khz sampling rate. It was pretty "ear openning" when I first heard how
much improved "every" Orchestral CD that I've "upsampled" sounded.(Granted
most of these CDs were derived from "Pedigreed Recordings";as you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear).Years ago I had (unsuccessfully)tried using a DAC that employed "Oversampling". I could'nt get beyond the "artificial hollowness" it added to the sound. I don't know what possessed me to try upsampling at the music file level. While I did notice some improvements at the 24/96khz level,it was'nt until I started using 24/192 (& eventually 24"padded"/176.4khz)that I've become impressed enough that I really don't
want to listen to CD rate anymore.I just realized why you were looking for the DVDA software. I've gone the
Digital File Player route(Auraliti PK100). I rip my CDs w/dBPa them I import them into JRMC19 where I will "Convert Format" them to 24 bit padded /88.2 for chamber,jazz or other small scale music or /176.4 for Orchestral. I put the files on USB drives(5~6GB per Orchestral CD eats up "mucho" drive space).I don't really know how good the "soundcard" the Auraliti uses is,but the fact that I don't really have to "deal" w/ computer optimizing has worked out marvelous for me.Sorry if I bored you to tears,but I was wondering if your Upsampling procedure might be a bit less time consuming or a technically better approach to what I'm doing.
Have a great day.
Edits: 09/01/14Follow Ups:
Just to get back to the original intent behind your question... I believe there are a couple of considerations to be taken into account when deciding to upsample at the raw data level (i.e create a new wav file or equivalent at the desired bit depth and sample rate).
The first of these is to consider the replay components and whether additional upsampling is going to be performed ON TOP of what you have already done in software. The second is the interface quality to an external DAC.
Many DACs that use off the shelf SRC chips are actually relying on the SRC stage to achieve their claimed jitter figures. In other words, if you asynchronously upsample in software such that the SRC in the DAC is effectively "oversampling" then you lose this benefit. You will then be more affected by interface jitter.
For me personally, jitter is the biggest contributor to a disappointing digital experience and I reclock the data prior to feeding the DAC. Software upsampling so that the transmitted data is at 96kHz or higher puts huge demands on the interface receiver design and I recommend considering something like an Apogee Big Ben or Grimm CC1 (both of which I have) to perform the reclocking task and ideally use AES/EBU connections rather than optical or RCA if at all possible. The Grimm CC1 is much more expensive but really is a reference grade product. The Big Ben represents the biggest bang for buck and is a very versatile "hub" allowing cross conversion between optical, AES and SPDIF whilst providing a much cleaner data stream.
My musical preference is classical and jazz so I share a similar preference for realism. However, having done my own recordings, I realised that basing realism on commercial recordings is like tilting at windmills - unless you were present at the recording/mastering sessions, one can only GUESS what the engineer intends you to be hearing.
From my recordings (done at 24/88.2), a properly dithered/noise shaped 16/44 version is VERY close to the original when listened to on my reference system and just as "smooth". There are subtle changes to soundstage depth and height. However, the lower bit rate and sample rate does not translate to poor timbral accuracy for me at all nor is there an obvious loss of detail.
I hope this helps a bit.
Regards Anthony
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.." Keats
First,let me thank anyone who took the time to describe their methods / preferences
of upsampling CD files. I'm not really sure what is being done when I use the "Convert
Format" function within JRMC, as I'm not really choosing any settings other than the bit/filtrate.& I've been very pleased with the results. No that's not true, in most instances
the results are exceptional in terms of "opening" the amount of dynamic contrast that really was not evident at the 16bit/44.1khz level.
it appears that many more of my CDs were better "recordings" than my impression of
them was. (& I've always been pretty "Label" conscious over who I felt displayed consistently strong recording technique). So far I've only had a few CDs from the Dutton Epoch label that have'nt responded as well as I'd have liked. These recordings while finely
detailed have a bit too much of a hard edge to their treble that remains a bit fatiguing.
At the end of the day, I think one has to accept (with commercial recordings) that what is the "technically correct" approach to the D/A process is not necessarily the same as the "subjectively preferable". For me personally as an engineer, I demand technical perfection, in so far as that is possible with what I can afford, at which point I can then point to the recording as being the reason for a sound that isn't quite "right".
I feel there is a disparity between true realism and many commercial recordings - which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the deficiency of the medium so much as the fact that you are at the mercy of the recording engineer/producer who ultimately defines how the final product is presented.
I find orchestral recordings are quite different in soundstaging and tonal balance compared to sitting in the audience - maybe the audiophile labels could master the sound according to "the best seat in the house" equivalent :) The sound in commercial recordings often has very exaggerated detail which you wouldn't otherwise hear in the audience given the mic placements (for example clicking finger nails on piano keys!). So the question now becomes, "what is realism?".
I know that my DAC is acceptably transparent as my recordings via the ADC/DAC chain is as close to the source such that I can't tell they are in the chain. Therefore, I now know when I have a technically "perfect" reproduction of a "bad" recording in which the balance between the performers is completely wrong (for example a soloist who is dwarfed by an over bloated piano accompaniment which occupies an unrealistic width in the soundstage - I have a few recordings like that!) I dislike the "bright" tonal balance on Virgin Classic recordings. I find the EMC recordings clinically cold....
Having not used JRMC, I can't comment on the technical merits of the SRC, but at the end of the day, if the results are better to you, then that is what matters.
With respect to the benefits of upsampling in my reference system, I have to say that the benefits of a properly implemented approach (to me) are very subtle. With the cheap "toy" reclockers like the original Monarchy or Perpetual Technologies P-1 upsamplers and the like that do upsampling via an SRC like the CS8420, I found that the SRC IC plus the effects of induced jitter on the output data stream DID have a profound effect by adding a rich bloom to the sound that was very enticing at the time, but I soon realised was the effect of jitter when I bought the Apogee Big Ben.
I guess what I'm saying in a round about way is that, in my experience, there isn't a "night and day" type of difference when all of the technical aspects of the process are close to optimum - nor should one really expect one to exist given that you can't create information from nothing! If there is, then something else (such as jitter or the digital filter/SRC algorithm) is probably affecting the result.
Regards Anthony
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.." Keats
The iZotope SRC (available in RX3 and soon to be released RX4) is one of the most transparent on the market giving you full control over the filter steepness, phase linearity and roll off point.
Regards Anthony
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.." Keats
FWIW,Izotope SRC is included in Audirvana Plus which I use on my music server. It is highly customizable and sounds excellent.
Some inmates who appear to have poor eyesight and/or are computer challenged find the excellent iZotope SRC software hard to use. I am not one of these; I use reading glasses with my computer and I RTFM when I don't understand how a product works.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
agrees with my criticism. The RX3 versions fixes the display issue, and is much more usable.
The upsampler still does not have the options availble in other packages. For such a costly package, it ought to have better provisions..
Find out for yourself; it's easy enough to compare against others and if you won't , this again demonstrates the narrow perspective that you have been posting about.
Audition and Wavelab have far superior options and choices and much better graphics than RX2.
I asked you for specifics. This would mean giving one or two functions that are missing from RX that you believe are valuable, or one or two functions that are in multiple products that your favorite products handle better than RX. In the latter case, it would include an explanation of why you believe these function(s) were handled better. Please note: these products are sold to recording engineers and are a tool for post production of recordings. They are not graphic software or video games, so your comments regarding the GUI are not relevant, particularly since you seem to be the only person who has difficulty with this interface.
If you do not provide a satisfactory answer, I will conclude that you are unable to do so and you are not the man to admit that there is something you do not know.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I am not here to satisfy your insatiable demands for answers.
My conclusion is simply that you are unable to decide for yourself what the various packages provide.
Just for the hell of it, Wavelab produces highres 3D Frequency Analysis graphics , compared to the lowres 2D graphics in iZotope2.
"The upsampler still does not have the options availble in other packages."
What would those options be, pray tell?
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
My eyesight is 20/20. The point about the iZotope interface is simply that I have a 28 in hires screen carefully adjusted for video and graphics for 98% of programs and that most users in their right minds would not want to change colours, resolution or brightness and contrast on their screens to use one program. CS6, seemingly based on iZotope now is also one of them.
You do what you must but don't expect others to agree with your narrow perspective and exposure to audio.
This is what the headline says, based on a few graphs.
In use, I do not find iZotope having a sonic advantage and the control interface is poor. In fact, Audition CS6, which now has the iZotope dlls has inherited the same low resolution dim interface that iZotope has, and is a pain to read. It has also lost the flexibility in output formats that Audition 3 has, from its Cool Edit Pro origin.
I have listened to upsampled files from iZotope RX2, Audition 3.01, CS6,
Wavelab6 and many hardware upsamplers.
Here is the interface in RX3 which, to my eyes, is clear and easy to use.
I made a simple statement that iZotope is ONE of the most sonically transparent. Seriously, I'm not quite sure why you feel the need for such an aggressive response to what I believe is a balanced, factually correct statement.
For your "analysis" to be valid you should clarify what settings you used in the comparison between the different SRC packages and whether all had the same attenuation in the stopband, where you set the transition band to begin and whether you set a minimum or linear phase characteristic. These factors plus the filter steepness will all affect the sound. Even the best algorithm can be made to sound bad if you don't know what you are doing...
You should also clarify what your replay equipment was. PC speakers don't count....
This link enables a comparison to be made.
Regards Anthony
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.." Keats
When someone says that iZotope is the most transparent in response to what I said I found amongst Audition, Wavelab and RX2, I would have expected subjective/objective comments based on actual experience, rather than relying on the web link which had found that there was little to choose between the Audition and iZotope srcs.
Your comments on settings reflect precisely what I have said. In the case of iZotope, please explain precisely what 200 filter slope and 0.99 cutoff shift mean in relation to transparency? The iZotope 2 manual is briefest on settings and explains little.
My comments on redability refers to iZotope 2 RX Adv. On my 28 in 1920x1200 display, I get a dim box of perhaps 15cm by 10 cm which is not particularly readable even when the interface brightness is set to 100%.
The box is NOT scaleable.
Your picture looks to me like relatively low resolution screen capture, perhaps magnified on your display. Please confirm or deny. As I said, I am not about to reset all my screen parameters, carefully calibrated for video, to suit the quirks of one program out of many others that display normally.
To me iZotope 2 has the worst display clarity of all other professional programs I have seen and the briefest of description on what it does. When I find that it doesn't sound any better than others, I am not prepared to use or spend money to upgrade it.
From your previous posts, I have concluded that you never figured out how to use the iZotope SRC. Without exploring the full range of its conversion settings, it is not possible to reach a valid conclusion as to transparency. Indeed, the nature of the 44.1 kHz PCM format is that conversions to/from this format will not and can not be transparent regardless of software. The controls are there to allow the user to make appropriate tradeoffs according to artistic criteria. If one is upsampling previously downsampled recordings the best settings will depend on the settings used (or converter used) to make the 44 kHz recording as well as the particular type of music and style of recording. If one wants to know the exact technical characteristics of specific settings, there are easily obtained by running the same type of tests that one sees on the infinitewave site. One can run any other kind of test as well, if one is so inclined. I believe all of the plots provided on the web site use software that comes with iZotope RX.
The image at the top of this post is a screen shot of iZotope RX. As you can see from the magnifying glass, the screen image has been blown up by a factor of 2 for the benefit of the visually impaired. (I would assume that any visually challengeduser of Windows would be aware of this built in operating system feature.)
Note that the dB scale on the right hand side is a slider and allows examination of attenuation at lower dB levels. With the offset and steepness settings shown, if one slides the scale down on will see that aliasing begins at 22.05 kHz at a maximum level of -60 dB.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
This is precisely what I said. At least I have used (and done all that you said re sliders etc) on 3 software suites and compared results with a dCS high end upsampler in coming to my conclusions. You have done none, except for using Sound Forge in some capacity, and your hardware is bog standard.As for using the magnifier, why should I pay over the odds for a piece of software which requires me to muck about on my desktop when I expect a high quality display for a high price?
It seems to me that you are just inventing scenarios to criticise posts that you have not read, understood, or comprehended properly. .
Edits: 09/04/14
Can we at least agree that the method that "You've" had the most sucess with is the one that "You" should use.
If better decisions had been made at the actual "production level" we would'nt be having a subjective "discussion" over which SRC gives you the higher degree of transparency & flexability to adjust parameters.
The bottom line is anything we use to make changes is only as good of a "tool" as our results are(& those "results" are also subjective). Not every
"technician" will like the way every "tool" works, so they'll use "another tool" that fits their needs.
I try to respect my boundries as far as my technical knowledge goes,but I've learned to appreciate "tools" that work for "me" by whether they make a positive or negative incremental change.
It's taken me a long time to learn the wisdom of making small,reversible,
incremental changes
I wouldn't worry about the two here who habitually try to change or divert a discussion topic, simply because they own or use something. They are serial posters in this regard.
I don't do this and I post what I have experienced.
Not being a "Professional Engineer" I don't really worry about whether the way I accomplish something is "technically correct". (No intended disrespect to anyone)I take all suggestions & advice with a "grain of salt" regardless of the advisor's credentials. I
"also" have found there really is no substitute for your own personal experiences.(He,he,he "serial posters",I like that "tag",seems appropriate; You could also call some of them "serial apologists" for the explanations of how things are perceived in the realm of the working professionals)
Edits: 09/03/14
are professional in engineering or IT, it is impossible, in consumer computing to know if anything is correct, since coding is 'secret' and one has to go into a lot of trouble to decode the programming steps.
When we used to do scientific computing, we had two basic rules
1. Know what the software is doing and test each element of it first
2. Write clear comments on what a sub-program does.
Believe it or not, some well tested IBM library programs produced wrong results. I used to check some really complex ones by hand!
One can go thru 500 pages of an Audition 3 manual without being much wiser on what EXACTLY some aspect is doing.
Currently I am annoyed that neither Audition or Wavelab 7 will rip audio from mpeg2 or vob, which Audition is supposed to be able to do. Read web claims and it should be possible. Read how and the instructions are wrong.
You had me worried that I had stated I "was" a Professional Engineer. I had in fact stated that I "was'nt". I was merely trying to explain why I have'nt concerned myself with technical details I don't really have any reason to find out about.
I really have no need to "reverse engineer" digital processing that is working quite well for what I use it for. I have no desire to do anything other than expand the overall dynamic contrast "ratio" of the music I convert to a "ratio"(of this element) that "I" subjectively feel was'nt sufficiently preserved in the CDs 16b/44.1 "version" of the recording.
People become defensive about the sound of CD rate music,but I'll repeat that "I" subjectively think it is only "barely" sufficient. You really don't want to know what I think about listening to any kind of compression
(FLAC or other inclusive)
No, but I am one
Oh, that was'nt clear to me.
I just thought you were an exponentially more commited Audiophile than myself. That being the case as Emily Litella would say "Never mind !!"
(or as Roberto Duran pleaded in his fight w/ Sugar Ray Leonard "No mas!")
"Currently I am annoyed that neither Audition or Wavelab 7 will rip audio from mpeg2 or vob, which Audition is supposed to be able to do. Read web claims and it should be possible. Read how and the instructions are wrong."
I suggest you convert your files before editing them. It could be worse. Your software could open the files and attempt to edit them, but then garbage up the edits. That's probably not what will happen, but it did happen to me when editing FLAC files using a version of Soundforge. It took me a while to learn not to use Sounforge to edit any file formats except WAV files.
If you want to know exactly what your software is doing, then this will be impossible unless you reverse engineer the program (e.g. using a Hex editor) and life is far too short for this level of effort. However, it is possible to see how various functions work, because all audio editors come with the ability to examine waveforms in detail down to the individual sample level, as well has having built in test generation software, spectrum analysis, etc... With some knowledge of signal processing it is possible to measure what various software (e.g. sample rate converters) do to music files in gory detail. Indeed, experience has shown that if you do not do this vetting you will probably not get good results out of most audio editor software.
The situation with IBM library routines does not surprise me, based on my experience a long time ago running benchmarks. At Digital Equipment in the 1970's there was a woman in the Research Department who was in charge of "computational quality" and it was her job to ensure that all of processors and software library routines gave correct results, down to a fraction of a bit. (Where the true answer was in between two possible floating point numbers, the "correct" version is the particular number that is closest to the actual answer.) She contacted me one time to complement me on the PDP-10 square root routine that I had written, because it made the correct rounding decision in every possible case. (Something that I was well aware of, because I had tested every possible number to verify that the square root was calculated correctly. I wasn't about to have a bridge collapse on account of one of my programming bugs.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Why should it be necessary to convert to mp4 with probable degradation when Audition CS6 is claimed to be able to rip mpeg2?
It shouldn't be necessary. But the product you have is what it is. Or perhaps you would prefer to file a lawsuit?
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
This is a mindless comment
I use dBPoweramp and EAC to rip at 44.1 wav, then Audition 3.01 to upsample to 176.4k 32 bit integer in batch mode. My Audition 3 is installed in XP and I have found it a superior program than Audition CS5 or CS6, with greater clarity in settings. I do not use post/pre filters and set quality at 999 (maximum). Audition also allows me to filter out sharp spikes at 18-20k found in some recordings (apparently TV breakthrough) but this can take a lot of time. I have tried the other pro programs including iZotopeRX2 but I like Auditon best for control and SQ.
I also own a dCS pro Processor which upsamples real time or convert and play in DSD into it's DAC. SQ is very good.
I had tried many real time upsamplers that use commercial chips, but SQ seems to me compromised in most cases.
For some reason I've never really used Adobe (well knowingly anyway) that much.I use JRMC in a "Library Mode" only. It would occasionally act a bit quirky when I started using,but I eventually "tamed" it (For some reason it seems to now uderstand I don't care about using it as a "player" & we get along just fine.) The 24bit "padded" mode I'm using works pretty well for me.
My Metrum Hex DAC seems to have a "sweet spot" for the 24bit padded/176.4khz Mecury Living Presence,Lyrita,EMI,Decca & even some newer "non-pedigree" Classical recordings from labels such as Naxos have me thinking they sound like dead silent vinyl . My PC labels these files as "32bit" files so I was surprised that I was able to play them through the Hex,but they sounded very nice so I've stayed with using this rate.
Thanks for checking back
Thanks! for sharing SteveA-
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