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In Reply to: RE: Better than SACD? posted by Gerry E. on June 17, 2014 at 07:34:34
No, there is zero potential that these are better than SACD. 44.1 Khz is simply not as good.
They have tried everything to make boutique CDs with all sorts of acronyms, SHM, Blu-Spec, XRCD, HDCD, etc...so they can charge $30 for what is just another Redbook format.
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Proper mastering *does* make a noticeably better CD. I have a number of K2, XRCD, and HDCDs and in almost every case they sound decidedly better than their "regular" CD counterparts....
-CD-
Actually...we agree. Mastering absolutely DOES make a difference
My point was that no matter what, 44.1K has its limitations, no matter how you package it. As someone who has 5000 CDs, I am all for maximizing its potential.
Assuming a CD, an SACD (with true DSD capture), or a 192 Khz download are mastered with the same care, from the same source, the CD will always come in last.
1 bit/2.8 Mhz and 192 Khz PCM are superior in every way to my ears, and certainly 96/24 and beyond is on a technical leve.
I agree. An album that is tracked at low fi rates and then mixed down poorly, it is hard for great mastering to save it.
If you gave KOB to 10 mastering engineers it would sound different from all of them, probably great, but still different. I love Steve Hoffman's work, Kevin Gray, and that of Sterling Sound. Then we add disc cutting for lps and another possible issue with pressing quality.
If the original tracking of an album is not at least 2496, regardless of the release format, to me it is hard to say that it can be hirez. I am not a fan of upsampling per se.
How the recording of the music starts is so important. I had said on another forum that I often think that the wrong people are in charge of the music business. Of course audiophiles are 1%, so it is not about us.
Jim Tavegia
The problem is mastering has taken on totally different meanings than in the past.
In the golden age, no music collector could even name a mastering engineer.
There job was too look for obvious problems, over see the cutting, and make any technical changes if REALLY needed. This is because they would essentially get close to a finished product because producers and engineers actually knew what they were doing.
Enter the digital age, and they made sure tracks were correctly identified on CDs, and the Redbook spec was correctly made.
Somewhere along the line the "celebrity" mastering engineer appeared, and was given far, far too much license to change recordings.
Now, forget it. In the world of modern pop and rock music, mastering engineers get garbage and pro tools slop recorded on computers, then even screw it up more before final release. Using anything over 48 Khz is a rarity. And it is a shame as there is a lot of amazing music being made today.
Classic analog recordings remastered in high resolution is where the big pay off is...if done with care...no Redbook CD should be the equal.
Michael Fremer on AnalogPlanet has a great article on the new mono Beatles' LPs that is a great read. I so hope they come out great. I have enjoyed my 9 stereo remasterd CD from 2009, but I know they could have been better, but maybe not considered that it was a CD release. The Stereo LP set sure took a wacking in the press.
Jim Tavegia
I have 4000 cd's and most redbook cds played on my Audio Transport and dac sound better then most hi rez played on my Mytek 192 DSD dac. Of course I think that a lot of vinyl sounds better than Hi Rez downloads. I have not heard a delta sigma dac that is the equal of a good ladder dac handling redbook PCM. Just my opinion of course
Alan
I am not surprised at your findings. The MyTek could peel paint off a wall with PCM recordings (less so on DSD). It is not for consumer grade audio in my opinion. It is hot hot hot..with double the voltage output of any CD player, even from the single ended outputs.
Compare hi rez and redbook through the same high quality dac then comeback and tell me redbook is consistently superior.
My Mytek has an internal jumper setting that reduces its output level by 6 dB. This is what I use to drive my Focal near field monitors. Also, the Mytek has an analog volume control that adds euphonic second harmonic distortion. The digital volume control does a much cleaner job of reducing the output level. Therefore, I bypass the analog volume control and the extra set of I.C. op-amps.
My Focal near field monitors were "hot, hot, hot" with many classic CDs totally unlistenable when driven by the Mytek or by a juli@ sound card. This is not the fault of the speakers, the DACs or the recordings. This was the fault of my room acoustics and system setup. The cure in the treble was fairly simple: put up some acoustic treatment on the walls that were causing early reflections and adjusting the tweeter controls on the Focal monitors to properly "voice" the system. I did this by listening to several dozen recordings, but if I had just picked one or two orchestral recordings on Reference Recordings I could have saved myself a lot of time.
Getting the problems I had in the bass resolved was much harder, it involved a lot more than twisting two "treble" controls until they were half-way down the scale. (Groveling around on the floor moving the sub woofer and twisting the cross-over controls was a PITA.) After spending several weeks trying to balance the bass by ear I gave up and got a calibrated microphone and real time analyzer before I was successful. In the bass, the best sound was found with as close to flat response as I could get, down to about 27 Hz which was as far as my sub would go. In the treble, it was necessary to roll off 10 kHz by about 3.5 dB, shelving after that, but I adjusted the highs solely by ear, unlike the bass.
From my experience I am completely happy with both my Mytek and my Focals, but I can understand that non-technical audiophiles might find both of these products less than satisfactory "out of the box". Both products were developed for the pro-audio marketplace where technical ability on the part of the consumers is assumed.I wouldn't call them "DIY" products because there was no need to use a 'scope or soldering iron, but they were far from "plug and play".
I have never used the Mytek at 44.1 kHz. I always upsample CDs to 176.4 or DSD128 using HQplayer before sending the result to the Mytek. The Mytek uses the standard SABRE chip upsampling filter and this is marginal at 44.1 kHz. This is no big deal in a computer audio system where there are many possible filters that can be used to do one's own bespoke upsampling. Of course, no amount of trickery is going to make 44/16 audio sound as good as 176/24 audio or DSD. The Mytek sounds best running at DSD128.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Thanks for the post.
I will say what I have said before, the MyTek is not for the faint of heart. It is an analytical tool, and to have to jump through that many hoops as you did to make it listenable is unacceptable to me.
Comparing the same recordings on the MyTek and other DACs is futile because even the lowest output is blaring hot.
This is a product for surgically monitoring a recording for flaws, not for enjoying music. Even through my tube amps it sounds like nails on a chalkboard.
You called DSD over DoP a "kluge"...well this DAC is a kluge in my opinion.
Did you adjust the jumpers to reduce the output level by -6 dB? Did you set the volume trim to -14 dB? If you do these two things then the output level will be normal. With these settings I drive my Focal powered monitors at a typical volume control setting of -18 dB, but when I want it really loud and the recording was made at a low level then it sometimes gets turned up to -6 dB.
For comparison purposes with other DACs you can use the digital volume control to even things out. The DAC chip has lots of excess digital resolution compared to the op-amp based output circuitry, so you can easily throw away 20 dB of resolution. Actually, if you run these op-amps at a lower level they will have less distortion as well, but for this purpose it probably won't be necessary to do more than set the volume trim to -14 dB. With these settings my system is dead quiet, with no sound coming out of the speakers at all while playing digital silence, even when the volume control is turned all the way up to -0 dB and my ear is right next to a tweeter.
Also, to avoid high frequency glare it's best to select the slow filter and make sure upsampling is off to disable ASRC to 192 kHz.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I did all of the above..all of it..minus the jumper adjustment.
Feature wise, it the DAC is a great value, but imo it is a professional tool, like a lab microscope. None of the output stages..volume bypass, analog volume, or digital volume are refined.
BTW, I make no judgements about your system. Focal is used world wide in professional settings, especially active models. I am a believer in active monitoring, lots of advantages there.
I believe if you were to get a good quality ADC and feed it an analog signal and put the resulting digital through your Mytek that you would find that the output would sound remarkably like the input to the ADC. If you haven't done this and haven't actually observed a nice sounding analog signal being reduced to annoying screeches then you are probably ascribing what you don't like to the wrong part of the record-playback chain. There is a lot that can go wrong between musicians and ears.
These kinds of bypass tests are easy to do with tape recorders which nearly always include both record and playback capability. They are not that much more difficult with ADC - DAC loops, but not all audiophiles have a suitable ADC. If you haven't done such a test then you have no basis to ascribe any poor sound to the Mytek.* What you don't like to hear is more likely to be some incompatibility between the recording and other parts of your playback chain, for example your speaker/room/ear interface. Recordings that were made to sound right on a rolled-off playback chain will sound horribly bright on a flat playback chain. Unfortunately, most recordings fit this description, which makes a flat playback chain, however technically "correct", a complete disaster.
The place to fix this is not at the DAC, it's where the problem is likely to exist, namely in the speaker/room interface. Back in the days when it was "high fidelity" and before the "high-end" marketing scam was created there was a fairly simple way to deal with these problems that sufficed to eliminate at least the first order problems: tone controls. However, a bunch of clever scam artists discovered that if you took these away and convinced people that they were bad you could sell endless slightly different components and endless "remasters" of the same recordings by dead musicians, each with slightly different equalization.
Sometimes the problem is just that you are trying to play an excellent recording on a inadequate system and ascribing shrillness to the way our ears work, e.g. the Fletcher–Munson effect. The latest eclassical.com "special of the day" of Petroushka and The Rite of Spring fell into this category. It sounded horribly shrill and thin when played at back hall volume, but when turned up to row 5 volume the recording snapped into focus and sounded realistic. Of course, I have a system that will produce undistorted sound at my listening position at 118 dB, no Quad 57's as I am a fan of Mahler symphonies and not solo harpsichord music. Others on AA have complained that the BIS recordings are shrill and unlistenable.
*If you have the pre-amp version of the Mytek then you can perform analog bypass tests from an analog source and see how the Mytek op-amps are coloring the sound. That would be another way to narrow in on the problem.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Well, let me fill you in.
I have a Tascam DA3000 and a Korg MR2000, both 192/DSD recorders.
I have been archiving master tape dubs off of several reel to reels in primo condition.
I can tell you that the the files sound far more forward, with less soundstage depth with the MyTek as compared to 2 other DACs, and as compared to live tape playback. The other two DACs are far closer to the original event.
The MyTek does has an incredible amount of detail, but the sound does not breathe, spatial cues are far less evident. I stand by what I said, in my opinion, (please note that!)it is a tool for monitoring recordings for flaws, not for enjoyment. Listener fatigue big time.
Speaking of Stravinsky, the Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky recording on Columbia of Rite, to me is stunning on SACD. I once had the LP, and the SACD destroys in regards to dynamic range, tonality, and depth.
If you've done level matched bypass tests, then you could be right and I would definitely accept this if you'd used the Grimm. EMM Labs or Horus ADCs. However, from listening to Bruce Brown's DSD shootout, I found both the Tascam DA3000 and a Korg MR2000 sufficiently lower quality than I rejected both of these converters. I believe the files are still on line at Bruce's website, which is linked from the long thread below. (Of course with a different DAC my converter preferences might reverse. Such is audio, where as my friend Clark Johnsen once put it, "There are no sound standards.")
In addition to exploring the effects of the analog driver stages by using the Mytek in preamp mode, you might also try using software conversion from PCM to DSD. I found the PCM to DSD conversion available in HQPlayer to do an excellent job and preferred the sound quality of all PCM formats converted to DSD128 over playing them directly. After doing these listening tests I have become suspicious as to the sound quality of the PCM upsampling that goes on inside the SABRE chip. (If this is a correct diagnosis, then I would expect similar results with inexpensive or mid-range DACs that use the SABRE chip without outboard bespoke filters.)
There are a few other tweaks with the Mytek that are important to get the best sound. I found it was important to dim the LED lights and to turn off the flashing level meters. Also, I have yet to get good sound of any form out of the Mytek through the SPDIF input, but I never really tried either, just briefly tested it to see if it worked while the unit was still under warranty, using an ancient RCA analog interconnect cable and not even a proper digital cable.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Tony, while what you say theoretically is correct, you are engaging in flight of fantasy here.The Grimm, EMM, or Horus units are for mastering and recording suites that make a living from digital audio. Not for the hobbyist. Let's get real.
Secondly, you may be amused to know that Mr Brown recommend both the Tascam, and Korg units highly. He even highly recommended the smaller, portable MR-2 as a superb budget ADC. He was right, in application, they have far surpassed my expectations. When I A/B the tape and the file playback, the results are very impressive.
FYI, I did the DSD Battle Royale and had a few preferences, but I was not in the least put off by the Tascam or Korg samples, actually I thought all the samples were excellent, hard to say which was "best", but they were all slightly different.
Agree about upsampling to DSD, but also to 176.4 or 192 depending on original incoming sample rate. There are very good reasons why it sounds better. As you have noted in the past, one can do this in the software domain or in the DAC..as far as DSD, PS Audio does that in the new DirectStream DAC..you only need 6 grand to get the benefit. :)
Edits: 06/23/14
Proper mastering does not justify a $40 price. If one has access to a high-res digital master one can create a 44/16 master in a few minutes on an ordinary computer using a few hundred dollars worth of hardware and software.
HDCDs use a different digital encoding format and when played back on an HDCD capable player they provide more than 16 bits of resolution. HDCD is a different digital format than Redbook. The format is better than 44/16 but not as good as 44/24.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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