ANOTHER Example of Why I HATE DSD and Why Customers Who Bought Sony's Boloney Are So Annoying

[beerandmusic]

1 hour ago, sandyk said:

 So did DVD-A , yet it wasn't enough to make the General Public want it . DSD is likely to remain a niche product and possibly eventually die out as the younger generation in general, doesn't appear to be greatly interested in any more than Audio from a Mobile phone.

 The only thing that appears likely to survive is the Loudness Wars.

Are there any statistics published anywhere that suggest there are less "audiophiles' in the "younger generation" today than there were in the 70s-80s? I would guess that there will always be a good amount of audiophiles to keep dsd alive for many years to come.

[sandyk]

5 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

Are there any statistics published anywhere that suggest there are less "audiophiles' in the "younger generation" today than there were in the 70s-80s? I would guess that there will always be a good amount of audiophiles to keep dsd alive for many years to come.

 

Outside of forums like this, and readers of the Hi Fi printed media, most members of the General Public wouldn't even know what DSD was . Even BluRay appears to be struggling these days.

[Miska]

27 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Outside of forums like this, and readers of the Hi Fi printed media, most members of the General Public wouldn't even know what DSD was . Even BluRay appears to be struggling these days.

 

Let's keep two things separate. Format on distribution media and what you send to the DAC. There's no reason to assume these two have anything to do with each other.

 

Most distribution media is 44.1/16 PCM and it's portion is not going to change soon in a big way.

 

[jabbr]

56 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

Outside of forums like this, and readers of the Hi Fi printed media, most members of the General Public wouldn't even know what DSD was . Even BluRay appears to be struggling these days.

The same could be said for linear power supplies, more so when applied to computers  

[jabbr]

31 minutes ago, Miska said:

Let's keep two things separate. Format on distribution media and what you send to the DAC. There's no reason to assume these two have anything to do with each other.

As you know better than any of us, if usable production, mixing and mastering software were available and easily usable in the SDM domain, given that ADC also generally start out so modulated, there would be no reason for PCM. Nonetheless “pro-tools” “Reason” and sampling is likely the source of far more % of popular music than recording. As computers become generally more popular perhaps the need for PCM encoding will be less. Or the information will be modulated into the most convenient format ... 

[sandyk]

23 minutes ago, jabbr said:

The same could be said for linear power supplies, more so when applied to computers  

 And your OFF TOPIC point is ?

Incidentally, I don't use a Linear PSU in my W10/64 PC.

[jabbr]

28 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 And your OFF TOPIC point is ?

Incidentally, I don't use a Linear PSU in my W10/64 PC.

If I must be literal: SDM is used in 99.9% of current DACS.  I do not know how many SACDs have been sold but they far outnumber all of the esoteric tweaks, linear power supplies and other audiophile things that we do here. SDM is the rule rather than the exception regardless of how music is distributed. 
 

The average cares nothing about an R2R DAC nor an SACD.

 

So although no one knows what DSD is, they all use it. For me HATING DSD is like hating logarithms, or the Hilbert space, for example

[sandyk]

1 hour ago, jabbr said:

For me HATING DSD is like hating logarithms, or the Hilbert space, for example

 I haven't said that I hate it. I have merely said that I don't feel the need for conversion to it from the original format ,

 to play in a special (later model) DAC , just as probably 99.99% (or more) of the population don't feel the need for it, or for that matter have any knowledge about it whatsoever. The same applies to USB Audio as well .

 In any case many DSD releases were edited or mixed using PCM anyway.

Quote

The average cares nothing about an R2R DAC nor an SACD

That we can agree on. R2R reminds me of Michael J Fox

[opus101]

55 minutes ago, jabbr said:

For me HATING DSD is like hating logarithms, or the Hilbert space, for example

 

Does anyone actively market logarithms?

[sandyk]

7 minutes ago, opus101 said:

 

Does anyone actively market logarithms?

 

Are you looking for a business opportunity ?

 Perhaps you can get a few tips from the MQA mob ?

[opus101]

Good one. My point was maybe the 'hatred' towards DSD is due in large part to the way its propagandized by Sony and others. Logarithms, not so much.

[pkane2001]

2 minutes ago, opus101 said:

Good one. My point was maybe the 'hatred' towards DSD is due in large part to the way its propagandized by Sony and others. Logarithms, not so much.

 

I hate logarithms. They are so non-linear!

 

[jabbr]

7 minutes ago, opus101 said:

 

Does anyone actively market logarithms?

Yes of course — I suspect the current global market for data science products dwarfs recorded music by a long shot. Nonetheless I am merely a consumer — hopefully along the spectrum of an educated one — and I welcome choice in media — I particularly welcome efforts toward media which place importance on great sound. Really the most likely probability is that we will be left with low bitrate MP3 because no one really gives a f*ck.

[opus101]

2 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

I hate logarithms. They are so non-linear!

 

 

Like transistors. And brains.

[pkane2001]

Just now, opus101 said:

 

Like transistors. And brains.

Yes!!! Them too! 

[jabbr]

24 minutes ago, jabbr said:

I particularly welcome efforts toward media which place importance on great sound.

I like to add that I am happy to take whatever format I’m given whether that be feralA encoded PCM or DSD and convert it into the best input format for my DAC using software. That’s the beauty of software. 

[Ryan Berry]

9 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Because SDM (DSD is a marketing name for one flavor) is so much more modern than PCM and can be native to many actual D/A conversion sections unlike PCM. Making a good native PCM DAC - R2R ladder is very hard and expensive. And to make such perform well it still needs some similar technologies as already utilized for SDM.

 

16x oversampling filters don't get yet anywhere close to rates needed by modern delta-sigma modulators (> 10 MHz), so rest of the oversampling and delta-sigma modulation is up to tiny DSP on the DAC chip. I'm not so big fan of such all-in-1 solutions...

 

Instead I prefer DAC to be just that - digital to analog converter. Converting input bits to analog bit-perfect, as good as possible, without touching the input data. DSP is better performed elsewhere, outside of the box where sensitive analog signals are.

 

P.S. Quick calculation is that for example my EC modulators perform about 6.5 billion calculations per second per channel for "DSD256" output. This is modulator alone, without 256x oversampling filters... So quite a bit of calculations.

 

 

And impedes manufacturers from doing what we know makes a large positive change in the units.  I fail to see the advantages of attempting to drive the DSD standard on listeners.  All it's really doing in the end is bypassing filters, which means people are often comparing apples to oranges and not realizing it. Add in times when things are getting "dressed up" in DSP on the software end, that even tricks people into thinking the DSD is somehow better.

[asdf1000]

4 hours ago, jabbr said:

So although no one knows what DSD is, they all use it.

 

They all use 1bit SDM (DSD) ?

 

1bit SDM (DSD) is quite different to 5 or 6 bit SDM...

[Miska]

3 hours ago, Ryan Berry said:

And impedes manufacturers from doing what we know makes a large positive change in the units.  I fail to see the advantages of attempting to drive the DSD standard on listeners.

 

It doesn't, instead it leaves you more money to focus on the actual conversion and analog sections and doing things you know. And better allows you to omit cheap COTS DAC chips and go for discrete designs of your own. I much more see that use of COTS DAC chips impedes you from doing many things.

 

3 hours ago, Ryan Berry said:

All it's really doing in the end is bypassing filters

 

Of course, that is half of the point. Other half of the point is that with a suitable DAC it bypasses both digital filters and modulator. Data feed going straight to the D/A conversion section. Which is the point.

 

As I said, with PCM, even at 16x rate inputs that many DACs already support, it is not yet enough to perform all the necessary oversampling needed for the modulator. And DAC chips resort to cheap-ass methods going up from there such as sample-and-hold (copying same sample multiple times) or linear interpolation which are both a big no-no for audio. This is before going to things like modulator implementation details.

 

I have one discrete R2R DAC that can accept 32x rate inputs (there are DACs from at least two vendors on the market) and at those rates on such DACs, when suitable noise-shaped dithers at correct word lengths are performed, you can get pretty decent results with PCM too. Then when combined with digital filters that have enough stop-band attenuation the analog filters actually manage to remove most of the digital images and the reconstruction becomes fairly complete.

 

As you know, for complete and accurate reconstruction of the analog waveform, there must be no image frequencies left anywhere above Nyquist frequency of the original content. If the first image level is let's say at -72 dB, it means that your reconstruction is accurate only to about 12-bit resolution. Now with my best filters, image levels are below -240 dB. And apodizing filters remove aliasing band problems of A/D converters.

 

Sure, if you can provide a DAC that has let's say 12 MHz 32-bit PCM input, I can happily send that kind of data there too. But then the question becomes what kind of modulator implementation follows?

 

3 hours ago, Ryan Berry said:

that even tricks people into thinking the DSD is somehow better

 

I have provided quite a bit of measurement results as well.

 

[Miska]

2 hours ago, asdf1000 said:

1bit SDM (DSD) is quite different to 5 or 6 bit SDM...

 

It is not, implementing those higher bit count modulators in a cheap way is just easier. That is really only "benefit".

 

Beauty of DSD is that you can easily make for example "5-bit" SDM conversion section convert it to analog. You can see example of such in my DSC1 design. There you have "5-bit DSD D/A converter" in action. It's a bit dummy though and I know how to massively improve it.

 

By the way ESS Sabre for example works in a pretty similar way with 6-bit (it has 64 elements) and is "multiple bits in time".

 

Nice thing with 1-bit SDM is also that you can make "power DACs" straight from it. It is also used by modern MEMS microphones natively. So for example in your mobile phone, both microphone and speaker/headphone amplifier use 1-bit SDM natively. So people listening Spotify on their mobile phones are practically listening to "DSD" without knowing about it.

 

[beerandmusic]

no dsd haters can win any argument or debate with Miska and JABBR active here (grin)

[asdf1000]

2 hours ago, Miska said:

It is not, implementing those higher bit count modulators in a cheap way is just easier. That is really only "benefit".

 

As you know, Rob Watts (designer of all current Chord Electronics UK DACs) has different thoughts. But we don't need to rehash all that again.

 

Btw, I'm both a Chord DAC owner (bit perfect playback) and HQP Embedded (RME ADI-2 DAC FS in DSD Direct Mode) user.

 

 

[Miska]

1 hour ago, asdf1000 said:

As you know, Rob Watts (designer of all current Chord Electronics UK DACs) has different thoughts. But we don't need to rehash all that again.

 

Well, not so much, since he is using specifically those very much simpler modulator types. OTOH, he has so far made so many misstatements about DSD, that I have proven wrong, that I don't put much weight on that.

 

We know for example how RME ADI-2 running in DSD Direct mode performs, compared to how similarly priced Chord Mojo for example performs...

 

He won't be able to run anything like my filters and EC modulators on the FPGA's he's currently using.

 

Nice thing with computers is that for less than 5000€ you can get about 1 TFLOPS (double precision) of computing power that allows doing all kinds of things!

[asdf1000]

53 minutes ago, Miska said:

We know for example how RME ADI-2 running in DSD Direct mode performs, compared to how similarly priced Chord Mojo for example performs...

 

Apples and Oranges though - Mojo needs to survive off battery so DSP needs to be limited.

 

A better comparison (cost and non-portable) is probably i9-9900K build + RME ADI-2 DAC against Chord Hugo TT2 ....

 

And for headphones setup you'd need to add a HPA4 to probably match TT2's headphone output performance (especially power).

[jabbr]

13 minutes ago, asdf1000 said:

 

Apples and Oranges though - Mojo needs to survive off battery so DSP needs to be limited.

 

A better comparison (cost and non-portable) is probably i9-9900K build + RME ADI-2 DAC against Chord Hugo TT2 ...

 

Let's see ... I am currently using my $1700 Dell Xeon W workstation to run @John Dyson's feralA da-avx decoding, and can do this while running HQPlayer with EC modulators at DSD128, similarly can use this machine with RTX 2080 Ti card for CUDA processing as well as games ...  and it doesn't need a new DAC nor headphones amp when I upgrade ...

 

Now if I were getting a new DAC that Holo May looks very tasty ...