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An awful lot of truth in this...

I can agree with most (maybe all) of that but...
As I see it, he has missed a part of the point: i.e. future-proofing. When I bought my Chord Dac64 mk2, 24bit 96kHz was the stuff of science fiction and the occasional reviewer who also dabbled in recording. When I sold it a month ago 24/96 was beginning to look limited even if there is not that much available at higher resolutions...

Now I shall get back to ripping my SACDs :)
 
uncl_nigel said:
I can agree with most (maybe all) of that but...
As I see it, he has missed a part of the point: i.e. future-proofing. When I bought my Chord Dac64 mk2, 24bit 96kHz was the stuff of science fiction and the occasional reviewer who also dabbled in recording. When I sold it a month ago 24/96 was beginning to look limited even if there is not that much available at higher resolutions...

Now I shall get back to ripping my SACDs :)
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Even funnier when you consider that connoisseurs of digital, rate the playing of 16 bit CDs (and SACDs) as the best digital playback medium...

I remember when I brought out the first generation Tron Seven DAC using the TDA1541 chip set, many didn't buy it because it wouldn't do 24/96 which was just coming out. Ironically that DAC playing 16 bits CDs absolutely trounced other DACs playing 24/96 recordings. Even today it beats 95% of DACs proving there is more to Digital than a few numbers. Like most things today its a numbers game and for a salesman quoting figures and specification is the easy way to sell something and requires very little work. Basically the selling is done by the brand's marketing department.
 
I always believed in ‘source first’ or ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’, but upsampling really does work. The Chord MScaler works miracles!
 
- yes, but the MScaler is part of an ecosystem designed around and within the same basic conception - which is something like 'we cannot control the music data we have bought(use); but we can adhere extremely closely to how it ought to be reconstructed via Nyquist-Shannon.'

Personally - I've a very great deal of time for Rob Watts' digital thesis, and the way the results sound. Heaven knows, I've a fair amount of DPA/Deltec bits and bobs too... in daily use.

Day to day for digital though - and while there are aspects in which I think I have finessed it - I use a TDA15411-based CD player. Every day. Every. Day.
It gets out of the way, require no 'monkey-squint' pose as to whether this or that aspect is to my taste. On paper it is by no means the technically 'most accurate' bit of equipment I own or use - but it remains right up there, in terms of delivering the gestalt of the musical experience, in a way little else ever has; let alone over such a sustained period of , well, over a decade.

There's something really, simply, sufficient, in the basic conception and execution of this old current-steering DAC; esp when supported by really good layout, and implementation of the necessary supporting circuitry - from power supply, to output.


(and this is not in any contradiction to the use of high bitrates and sampling depths from recording through to mastering; that provides necessary elbow-room to work in, in a digital workflow)
 
I mostly listen to 16/44 since I listen first and foremost to the music and that is the format most of it comes in. And 16/44 can sound really good through (admittedly expensive) DACs form the likes of Chord and dCS. I chose dCS because it is better distributed here in France and it comes with the streamer in the same box.

I appreciate the extra 24 bit brings to the party with the recent dCS, I was less convinced by 24/96 with the aging Chord DAC64.

I started ripping my SACDs this evening and so am discovering DSD64 (as Roon calls it). 12 down 23 to go...
 
Cereal Killer said:
24/192 is the max requirement really.
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And even then...
My Roon lists 2500 or so albums of which only a couple of Yes tiles (time-consumingly ripped from Bluray Audio) and less than ten classical album dowloads are in that resolution.

A well recorded CD can be breathtakingly beautiful on the right DAC

I am not anti-hi-res - quite the contrary - I am just making the most of what I actually have.
 
Cereal Killer said:
24/192 is the max requirement really.
Click to expand...

At the very outermost. (quoted only as a good point of discussion)

The elephant in the room is what happens at the recording end:
  1. Try to find a studio mic& pre pair that can even approach about 18bts of SNR performance. Once you realise it'll roll off c 12-14Khz at the outermost..:
  2. Now go find one that can do anything like over 20Khz (hint: the SNR will be lower, very roughly - in proportion to bandwidth extension).

24/192 makes sense for the studio and production side; but to consumers - it only basically guarantees that the massively -increased storage overhead is min. c 75% pure noise - i.e. far more than added, useful, musical information. And that's before we get into the endless retread on whether what you get buying '24/192' is actually from a 24/192 source.


(I'm not remotely against the idea, BTW - just that salesmanship has long outrun rational discussion of what is truly worthwhile - by over a decade. The current suggestion now seems to be 'well storage is cheap' - so it is - but to what end, exactly? heat death of the Universe? )
 
martin clark said:
24/192 makes sense for the studio and production side; but to consumers - it only basically guarantees that the massively -increased storage overhead is min. c 75% pure noise - i.e. far more than added, useful, musical information.
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100% agreed, its a case of max headroom availability. IMHO the requirements for the likes of DSD and MQA will fade just as SACD did.

uncl_nigel said:
A well recorded CD can be breathtakingly beautiful on the right DAC
Click to expand...

I have 1800-1900 albums and less that 2% is 24/192. a long time ago (as an experiment) i bought a 24/192 studio master and down sampled it in dbpoweramp to 16/44 there was no audible difference really which i put down to the superb engineering of the studio master file.
 
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Cereal Killer said:
100% agreed, its a case of max headroom availability. IMHO the requirements for likes of DSD and MQA with fade just as SACD did.



I have 1800-1900 albums and less that 2% is 24/192. a long time ago (as an experiment) i bought a 24/192 studio master and down sampled it in dbpoweramp to 16/44 there was no audible difference really which i put down to the superb engineering of the studio master file.
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Surely if there was no audible difference it doesn’t matter if the original recording was good or not.
 
Upscaling an audio signal is like enlarging a digital photograph in the sense that the quality of the result will depend on the upscaling algorithm being used. In photography there are many different algorithms – for example bicubic, sinc, and those using fractals. To return to the original point, a system may not be able to reveal the extra detail just like a computer screen may not reveal all the detail when a photo is enlarged.

AndrewG said:
I always believed in ‘source first’ or ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’, but upsampling really does work. The Chord MScaler works miracles!
Click to expand...

The M-Scaler is an excellent product – I have one – but I think when discussing its capabilities it’s important to observe that its success is due to the filtering – particularly tweaking transients (with the WTA Watts Transient Algorithm as described by Rob Watts in his lectures) – rather than simply upscaling in a straight mathematical way. Another way of putting this, whatever upscaler is being used is the capability of the upscaling algorithm being applied. The M-Scaler needs a high output rate the upscaling so that the filtering can do its job. I don’t believe that simple upscaling with a basic algorithm will provide much benefit.
 
I am CD only here, and I have never thought I am missing out on sound quality. I have the Audionote CDT3 transport feeding the Weiss DAC1 Mk3 pro model and it is like having a new CD collection, the extra resolution of the Dac is still digging out much more information at 44.1 16bit.
 
G T Audio said:
Even funnier when you consider that connoisseurs of digital, rate the playing of 16 bit CDs (and SACDs) as the best digital playback medium...

I remember when I brought out the first generation Tron Seven DAC using the TDA1541 chip set, many didn't buy it because it wouldn't do 24/96 which was just coming out. Ironically that DAC playing 16 bits CDs absolutely trounced other DACs playing 24/96 recordings. Even today it beats 95% of DACs proving there is more to Digital than a few numbers. Like most things today its a numbers game and for a salesman quoting figures and specification is the easy way to sell something and requires very little work. Basically the selling is done by the brand's marketing department.
Click to expand...
Not all but some 24/ bit recordings were stretched out by computer to make it fit the medium so not true 24bit but you pay extra. Lot of cons was going on.
 
Octavian said:
Not true, I am afraid. Output of digital audio does not consist of discontinuous "sound pixels", even if the idea is intuitively tempting.
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Upsampling is adding/interpolating new discrete points before converting to analog, so it is discontinuous at that point.
 
406v6 said:
In photography there are many different algorithms – for example bicubic, sinc, and those using fractals. To return to the original point, a system may not be able to reveal the extra detail just like a computer screen may not reveal all the detail when a photo is enlarged.
Click to expand...

Let’s take the analogy a little further: with a picture it would be easy to see the ‘added’ volumes of blank spaces between the colour. These spaces offer nothing but a bigger canvas and frame. If you were 20m away looking at the picture you’d not notice the white pixels between the colours.... In digital audio the same spaces that would be added by upsampling, add voids in the overall volume of the file. These spaces don’t contain any information in them but the file size becomes remarkably larger. There’s is an argument that these spaces allow extra dynamic/headroom in audio but in an image it would registered as a bleed of colour.

I suppose it’s a bit like trying to revert and MP3 into a FLAC/lossless file.
 
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