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

[Charles Hansen]

Charles

I am fully aware of their specifications. I also suspect that Douglas Self and Erno Borbely know a little more than you do in this area.

 

AAAAAHHHH! That is the funniest thing I have heard in a month!

 

Cheers,

[Hiro]

The only reason the DSD exists at all is because the patents for CD were expiring. This had been a HUGE bonanza for Sony and Phiips as the royalty per CD was onl $0.07, yet it added up to $1 BILLION per year. The costs of inventing the scheme had been written off decades earlier so this represented a massive profit center for Sony. They did NOT want to lose this profit.

 

That's a myth. Direct Sigma Delta recording wasn't invented by Sony, the technology was developed by Prof. Yoshio Yamasaki at Waseda University's Acoustics Laboratory and the development of the technology had nothing to do with CD patents.

[Charles Hansen]

You really don't know?

 

Same reason we have 3D TV. Industry giants create new buzz word, people think they need it, customers won't buy without it, manufacturers then have to include it, a little time passes it becomes irrelevant, move on to the next buzz… 4K!

 

And my guess is the price premium is for reasons other than DSD capability.

 

Hello,

 

Thanks for reminding me about that part of Ted's question. My answer was so long that I had completely forgotten to answer it. You are absolutely correct. We could have updated the firmware by replacing a socketed $0.50 memory chip. It would have cost more than the chip was worth just to spend the time invoicing it. So we could have added DoP for free!

 

But when we make a model change, we take all of the stuff that we have learned over the past "X" years (I think six of seven in the case of the QB-9, but I could be off by a year or two or three). In this case we had learned a HELL of a lot from building the QA-9 A/D converter and some tricks from the AX-5 integrated amp. Plus Gordon had been after me to try out the ESS DAC an after watching Martin Malinson's presentatioin on YouTube from the 2011 RMAF, I was pretty intrigued. So we got about 1/3 of he gain from the new DAC, 1/3 from the things learned from the QA-9, and 1/3 from things we had learned from the AX-5.

 

And each time we made a change, we were all (me, Ariel Brown the chief programming engineer and PCB layout expert, and Ryan Berry who has a GREAT set of ears and not much engineering background but can whip out a circuit change on a dime), we were all taken aback. We all were pretty proud of the way that the original product sounded -- and rightly so. But it is in a whole new category now. I think you will have a hard time finding a $10,000 DAC that outperforms it. But don't listen to me -- go listen to the DAC for yourself They should be arriving in the dealers showrooms over the next two to three weeks.

 

Cheers,

[Charles Hansen]

The Ayre is limited to 64x.

 

Yes, currently.

 

If it ever gets to the point that there are 100 titles available in DSD-128, we will make an upgrade kit available. Don't hold your breath, though. I'd had to see you die, even if you are kind of hard headed.

 

Cheers,

[Hiro]

2) At the same time, every other manufacturer was SICK of Sony/Philip making so much money while they received nothing.

 

CD was Sony's invention and they rightly held patents for their invention. Not sure why manufacturers would be SICK of Sony/Philips for that??

 

Were they mad at the law?

 

or the fact that it wasn't them who who invented the format?

[Charles Hansen]

That's a myth. Direct Sigma Delta recording wasn't invented by Sony, the technology was developed by Prof. Yoshio Yamasaki at Waseda University's Acoustics Laboratory and the development of the technology had nothing to do with CD patents.

 

AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

 

 

I can't decide who is funnier -- you or Sandy K. Thanks for the laughs you guys!

[Hiro]

Yes, currently.

 

If it ever gets to the point that there are 100 titles available in DSD-128, we will make an upgrade kit available. Don't hold your breath, though. I'd had to see you die, even if you are kind of hard headed.

 

Cheers,

 

I was responding to Miska's post in which he recommended DSD upsampling in the context of digital volume control for DSD.

 

 

Originally Posted by Miska

And yes, HQPlayer supports all digital processing for both PCM and DSD, including volume control, convolution engine (for DRC) and speaker distance & level adjustments. There's also DSD rate conversion and I recommend upsampling DSD to higher rate if possible when using digital volume control to gain extra dynamic range for output. And of course more to come.

[Hiro]

AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

 

 

I can't decide who is funnier -- you or Sandy K. Thanks for the laughs you guys!

 

Long-held beliefs, no matter how misinformed, die slow, I guess...

[Hiro]

So when people started comparing the SACDs against either CD's or DVD-Audio discs. the combination of FAR BETTER hardware, along with FAR BETTER MASTERING, along with the (virtual) elimination of brickwall filters, most people said, "Aha! Sony is right! DSD is a better format than PCM!"

 

Fast forward to 2013, and this is how Michael Fremer describes the difference between DSD and today's PCM recordings:

 

"Well-recorded files included 192/24 and 96/24 bit resolution ones that sounded quite good but all agreed the best digital sound came from an analog tape-to-DSD transfer. It wasn’t even close. It was the only one that produced a credible, involving, three-dimensional soundstage and a sense of space that made you want to look as well as listen."

Marantz Launches NA-11S1 Reference Class Network Audio Player and USB DAC | Analog Planet

[Hiro]

Go read John Atkinson's review of the QA-9 on the Stereophile website:

 

Ayre Acoustics QA-9 USB A/D converter | Stereophile.com

 

In it, he says that he ripped his best sounding LPs with the QA-9, and when he compared the copy with the original, he tried "until his ears bled" but could hear NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE ANALOG ORIGINAL AND THE DIGITAL COPY.

 

If it were Michael Fremer who would be saying that he no longer needs analog records because PCM sounds exactly the same, you would have somewhat of a point.

[junker]

The only person I can think of that could pull off telling his customers what they really want was Steve Jobs.

[Miska]

7) Sony played one of their typical dirty tricks when they announced that DSD would play UP TO 100 kHz with a dynamic range of UP TO 120 dB. This is complete and utter bullshit, as the S/N ratio of DSD at 100 kHz is negative. If you look at a reasonable bandwidth of say 20 kHz to 100 kHz, there is MORE NOISE in the DSD system than there is total signal.

 

Oh really? Here's 100k tone encoded into DSD64:

 

11) So when people started comparing the SACDs against either CD's or DVD-Audio discs. the combination of FAR BETTER hardware, along with FAR BETTER MASTERING, along with the (virtual) elimination of brickwall filters, most people said, "Aha! Sony is right! DSD is a better format than PCM!"

 

Seems like you love the sound of aliasing in PCM. You would need input frequencies exceeding 1.4 MHz to make DSD alias... Not so hard to get non-brickwalled quad rate PCM to alias with microphones like this:

SANKEN MICROPHONE CO .,LTD. | Product [ CO-100K ]

 

and since the DVD-Audio committee was SO STUPID as to require a completely different player than a regular DVD player, it was also doomed to failure.

 

DVD-Audio died, because the DVD committee didn't understand how to make a proper content protection, so breaking CSS was extremely easy. Unlike the SACD protection.

 

In today's online business, way of content protection is to watermark the content data with buyer's information. So whenever pirated content circulates, it is easy to know where it began.

 

14) The story would have ended there except for Gordon Rankin. He had been on parts of the USB committees over the years, and he made sure that USB had the ability to make a good audio data transfer link. So when he released his "Streamlength" asynchronous isochronous USB firmware, all of a sudden any computer made in the last ten years could serve as a transport of higher performance than ANY conventional S/PDIF transport EVER MADE!

 

Lovely marketing speech, but now you are forgetting all the pro-audio gear that had asynchronous USB audio years before hifi gear. Let's not have a tunnel vision here.

 

15) Now we have to split the story somewhat. First we will look at multi-channel PCM. Whilt it is TRIVIAL to record and make multi-channel PCM files for USB DACs, there is virtually no software available, very few software players that will handle it, and very few USB DACs are made with more than two channels. Essentially it is a solution waiting for a problem to solve.

 

Again you seem to have never looked at pro-audio side. Already 10+ years ago there was no problem having 64 channel recording and playback with a computer.

 

I purchased my M-Audio Delta1010 in year 2000. It was limited to simultaneous 10 channels in (8-analog + S/PDIF) and 10 channels out (8-analog + S/PDIF) at 96/24, but that was pretty good at that time for inexpensive hardware. By the way, that hardware is still being made and available. I used it a lot for recording and playback and wrote quite a lot of software for using it for all kinds of thing on Linux.

 

So we will leave that alone, except to say that if one thought it were a viable market, it would be trivially easy to make a 16-channel 192/24 USB playback system. But nobody really cares except a handfull of people that generally just purchase Blu-ray discs of live audio concerts.

 

Quite a lot of pro's buy those things, of course luckily there's good hardware available if you are into PCM:

RME: Fireface UFX

 

But most still use Firewire because it can perform better and is more reliable.

 

I first heard about it in 2008 (I think, I can't remember any more). I was seated next to Gus Skinas, who had been part of the Sony SACD team. His role was to be the liaison between the recording studios and the technical people at Sony who would loan out the hardware required to make an SACD. When he told me about it, I talked to Gordon Ranking about it and we said that it would be trivial to packetize the DSD stream so that it looked like PCM.

 

At that time, I already had such scheme for transferring DSD over PCM (with FourCC marker 'DSD ') because I needed it for my prototyping, I also got emails from companies asking for such feature. But I usually recommended them to just provide ASIO drivers with DSD support, because it is not such a hack and supported both record and playback. ASIO had native DSD support already early, I think at least 2006 or earlier. I cannot really remember and I don't have a good version history.

 

At that time I also designed my A/D/A converter that has analog input with two ADC chips in parallel, one running at DSD128 and another one running at 192/24. It also has a DAC chip for playing back either of those two contents.

 

But then we realized it was a fool's errand because the only source of software was to (illegally in this country) rip an SACD with one of the rare specific models of PlayStation 3s. So we said, "Screw it."

 

I didn't worry about the content, because people could record DSD and for me DSD was a way to turn a modern DAC chip into "NOS" mode and run all the digital processing in a computer. Around those times there were also Korg MR-1000/MR-2000 recorders that were very good for archiving vinyls at DSD128 and lot of people were using those recorders for that purpose. But those recorders were inconvenient for normal playback, mostly because of limited storage space.

 

Here is one report from 2007, from Stereophile site regarding vinyl archiving with a Korg recorder:

http://www.stereophile.com/content/korg-mr1000-used-archive-vinyl-1

 

The problem is that now Sony has to talk out of both sides of their mouth at once. They painted themselves into a LITTLE TEENSY CORNER because they said that one of the prime advantages of a one-bit system was that was always inherently linear. But when people found out the trught that probably less that 0.001% of all DSD recordings actually were transferred into PCM and then back to DSD, they look pretty damn stupid.

 

Now you don't seem to understand this part. PCM is also inherently linear as long as you stay in digital domain. Problem is that at the actual conversion stage, only 1-bit is inherently linear while it is impossible to make a perfect multi-bit converter because proportional ratios between ladder steps are never exactly what they are ought to be, due to component tolerances.

 

18) But the truth is that there are still some HUGE problems with DSD, especially with regards to out of ban noise

 

It is not a problem, it is only a problem because you are trying to compare Nyquist-sampling system to a non-Nyquist sampling system. If you disregard Nyquist frequency and look at PCM at equivalent bandwidth, for example from 0 - 1 MHz it also has out of band noise issues, especially if you don't use brickwall filters. PCM especially has a HUGE problem of this out-of-band noise (images) being directly correlated with the input signal!

 

When I measure a DAC I use at least 5 MHz bandwidth to see what it actually pushes out.

 

19) We have recently introduced a two channel A/D converter that will output both PCM and DSD. But this converter has a few tricks up its sleeves. Specifically we have taken a page from the "What is so great about DSD" manual and applied it to PCM. And it turns out that with quad rate PCM you can get ALL OF THE SONIC ADVANTAGES OF DSD WITH NONE OF THE PRACTICAL DISADVANTAGES.

 

UMM, lemme guess... It will have heavy aliasing if I input 2V 100 kHz tone to it while recording quad rate PCM.

 

20) So the bottom line is NOT that you are an idiot if you like DSD. DSD can sound wonderful. But what I am saying is THERE IS NOTHING MAGIC ABOUT DSD. WE CAN GET ALL OF THE GOOD THINGS ABOUT DSD IN A HIGH SAMPLE RATE PCM RECORDING ALSO!

 

How high are you ready to go? At least 352.8 kHz minimum and preferably 1.536 MHz, at 24-bit. Oh, wait, now the file downloads become impractically large, even for modern network connections.

 

DSD has very good bitrate efficiency vs sound quality.

[Audio_ELF]

In reply to Miska and Charles: As always there are two sides of the story...

[rennq]

Fast forward to 2013, and this is how Michael Fremer describes the difference between DSD and today's PCM recordings:

 

"Well-recorded files included 192/24 and 96/24 bit resolution ones that sounded quite good but all agreed the best digital sound came from an analog tape-to-DSD transfer. It wasn’t even close. It was the only one that produced a credible, involving, three-dimensional soundstage and a sense of space that made you want to look as well as listen."

Marantz Launches NA-11S1 Reference Class Network Audio Player and USB DAC | Analog Planet

 

Is that a joke?

 

How many variables are left out?

 

"best digital sound came from an analog tape-to-DSD transfer". Compared to what? "Well-recorded files"?

 

Is he really describing "the difference between DSD and today's PCM recordings"? Or do you just make it a habit of adding your own misleading commentary?

[Miska]

At DSD256 (already available), we can do something like this

 

or alternatively something like this

 

At DSD512 (also already available as DAC) it can look like this for example:

 

Guess how it will look like with DSD1024?

 

And the noise floor at low frequencies in these images is limited by source and destination material used to make this plots. Not by the DSD...

[Hiro]

Is that a joke?

 

How many variables are left out?

 

"best digital sound came from an analog tape-to-DSD transfer". Compared to what? "Well-recorded files"?

 

Is he really describing "the difference between DSD and today's PCM recordings"? Or do you just make it a habit of adding your own misleading commentary?

 

Far from a joke.

 

It's obvious from what Michael Fremer wrote in his report that 192/24 and 96/24 files couldn't hold a candle against the DSD files they were listening to.

[Miska]

And here is how I understand Charles thinks 100 kHz sine recorded at quad rate PCM should look like:

 

IMO, that alias is much more nasty than non-correlated hiss at the same frequency.

 

I would at least expect to be able to record to 100 kHz with a mic that has 100 kHz response. DSD256 works pretty well for that purpose.

[rennq]

Far from a joke.

 

It's obvious from what Michael Fremer wrote in his report that 192/24 and 96/24 files couldn't hold a candle against the DSD files they were listening to.

 

Obvious, huh? Just more deception.

 

At least make some sort of effort to conceal your Sony shill activities. How much do you get per DSD mention? There is not one single post of yours where the letters DSD are not included. That includes other sites.

 

Yeah, a 24/192 and 24/96 from an upsampled, remastered, brick-walled, compressed to death, file couldn't hold a candle to an analog tape to DSD transfer, so what.

 

BTW, you stated earlier: "If it were Michael Fremer who would be saying that he no longer needs analog records because DSD sounds exactly the same, you would have somewhat of a point. "

 

I changed one word.

[Hiro]

Yeah, a 24/192 and 24/96 from an upsampled, remastered, brick-walled, compressed to death, file couldn't hold a candle to an analog tape to DSD transfer, so what.

 

Talk about being deceptive. Do you have a proof of that? Michael Fremer writes about 192/24 and 96/24 "resolution" files. There's no mention of any upsampling or compression. On the contrary, Michael Fremer writes that the 192/24 and 96/24 PCM files were "well-recorded". Do you assume that well-recorded means brick-walled and compressed to death?

[rennq]

Talk about being deceptive. Do you have a proof of that? Michael Fremer writes about 192/24 and 96/24 "resolution" files. There's no mention of any upsampling.

 

That's my point genius. If he doesn't mention it, then don't assume the files are of equal quality.

 

Do you have proof that the files are of equal quality, PCM performance of the player is equal DSD, etc., etc., etc.? The variables are endless, but you conveniently disregard any of that when it benefits your deceptive agenda.

[firedog]

Far from a joke.

 

It's obvious from what Michael Fremer wrote in his report that 192/24 and 96/24 files couldn't hold a candle against the DSD files they were listening to.

 

You are adding wide ranging meaning to a quick reference in Fremer's article regarding one quick listening session. Anecdotal evidence - and we have no idea what he was comparing - so it's a nice complement for DSD, but not really meaningful to draw any conclusions from that quote: What was he comparing? Pretty clearly not the same music recorded in both formats. And what does "well-recorded" mean?

 

The fact that the DSD sounded better to him could easily be due to the DSD files in question simply being better recordings, and have NOTHING to do with the relative sound of the 2 formats.

[Hiro]

Pretty clearly not the same music recorded in both formats. And what does "well-recorded" mean?

 

rennq assumes it means "upsampled, remastered, brick-walled, compressed to death"

 

The problem is when this is your understanding of the written word, basic communication is not possible.

[wappinghigh]

^message to Charlie H. hahahahaha Loved the OP man. I'm with ya all the way. I feel for you brother. You Rock. Good on ya for telling it how it is.. P.S. YPB (You poor bastard). P.P.S. there is ebay and then the Invicta and Oppo. Cheers Wap.

[rennq]

rennq assumes it means "upsampled, remastered, brick-walled, compressed to death"

 

The problem is when this is your understanding of the written word, basic communication is not possible.

 

Are you just acting dumb?

 

The point I was making is I can just as easily assume it means upsampled, remastered, brick-walled, etc. just as easily as you chose to assume it means all variables 100% equal.

 

The fact is no one knows, so don't be deceptive by assuming things when they benefit your agenda.

[wappinghigh]

Well done Charles my friend. Well said man...P.S you've only realised now that Sony sucks? hahahahaha. YPB.