Digital Drive

Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

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RE: What does really good digital sound like?

Posted by Todd Krieger on October 24, 2021 at 21:29:25:
"I actually no longer believe in an 'absolute sound' - It doesn't exist. But Everything is relative to something else."
An "absolute sound" is a hypothetical phenomenon..... Even if it does exist, nobody would know what it actually is..... Or how close we are to it......
It's like nothing being "perfect"..... Or not knowing how close to "perfection" we actually are..... But we still strive to get as close to it as possible.....
I do think that if there is an "absolute sound," a requisite to approaching such ideal is to play recordings that enable realization of such standard...... But I do think most recordings would "fail" in this regard...... Even unadulterated recordings in which, for example, may have been recorded in a venue with poor acoustics..... Or a recording in which the A/D conversion had excessive jitter..... (Such recordings would not be helped with the use of "reclocking" at the playback end.) Or a recording in which asynchronous sample-rate conversions had taken place (Beatles "Box Sets" have this issue)..... Or a recording in which "clipping" had taken place or excessive dynamic limiting/compression had been utilized..... Or a recording in which resolution was lost due to improper dither application (excessive noise, dither applied in which downconversion had *not* taken place, etc.)..... (A lot of recordings are degraded in which the chain of custody from recording session to final production disc was "broken" at some point during the process.) A lot of ways a recording can become degraded to where an "absolute sound," if it were to exist, becomes unattainable.
"The major problems I see (have seen) for CD playback are vibration, both internal and external, and scattered background laser light, flowed closely by the fluttering of the disc while playing. All of those things are never addressed by manufacturers."
I would tend to agree if there was a lot of "CD quality" playback of music files that improved upon playback of physical CDs...... But I think good CD playback sounds better than good playback of a numerically identical CD-quality file off a server. (The latter is devoid of the issues you alluded to.)
"Many people believe the limit is only 5% away or perhaps 10%, whatever."
It could be 50 percent away..... Nobody really knows......
"It's the old cost effectiveness argument, why spend another x dollars just to achieve the last 5% in SQ?"
This is why people should listen before they buy...... And determine if the changes in sound they hear is worth spending the money.