anyone prefer DSD (not DSD128) over 24/192?

[twhires]

It's popular (though far from a complete consensus) for may audiophiles and recording engineers to prefer DSD over 24/96 PCM, in part because they like the smoother, more analog-like sound of DSD and/or the "spaciousness" of it.

 

But I wonder is anyone prefers DSD (single density DSD64 ala SACD not DSD128) over 24/192 PCM? Sound smoother or more spacious to anyone?

 

Of course, its hard (actually, impossible) to get a perfect test, but people still develop format preferences over time. And with a choice between DSD or 24/192 downloads for the same music now commonly available, and a lot of people with DACs that play DSD and 24/192, a choice of format will necessarily have to be made when purchasing the music.

[Melvin]

Here is a poll which may be of interest:

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f13-audiophile-downloads/if-album-available-both-dsd64-and-pcm-24-192-which-will-you-purchase-17443/

 

You can still vote if you care too :-)

[Robert Hutton]

It's popular (though far from a complete consensus) for may audiophiles and recording engineers to prefer DSD over 24/96 PCM, in part because they like the smoother, more analog-like sound of DSD and/or the "spaciousness" of it.

 

But I wonder is anyone prefers DSD (single density DSD64 ala SACD not DSD128) over 24/192 PCM? Sound smoother or more spacious to anyone?

 

Of course, its hard (actually, impossible) to get a perfect test, but people still develop format preferences over time. And with a choice between DSD or 24/192 downloads for the same music now commonly available, and a lot of people with DACs that play DSD and 24/192, a choice of format will necessarily have to be made when purchasing the music.

 

LOL. If there is any 'consensus' among recording engineers it is for 24/192 by some margin, and among a whole lot of music lovers also - myself included. Good 24/192 is much more open and 'spacious' to me than DSD so far.

[Allan F]

LOL. If there is any 'consensus' among recording engineers it is for 24/192 by some margin, and among a whole lot of music lovers also - myself included. Good 24/192 is much more open and 'spacious' to me than DSD so far.

 

Interesting. I wish I could remember the name of the audio consultant who opined that 24/192 sounded closest to the microphone feed and DSD sounded closest to the live performance.

[Jud]

I do prefer DSD at home when I've had a chance for a more or less direct comparison. This could well have to do with my DAC, where any PCM, including 24/192, is run through two stages that DSD is not. First, the 192kHz resolution is interpolated to 384kHz, either in the DAC chip itself or by software oversampling. Then it goes through a sigma-delta modulator. These two steps don't occur with DSD input (doesn't need oversampling, already in sigma-delta format), and the presence or absence of these steps could easily be as or more responsible for the differences I hear than any innate qualities of either format.

[Leica]

192/24 sounds more detailed to me than DSD. Clearly PCM 192/24 is technically better and has more information in the music.

 

However I prefer the sound of DSD still. Why? Because it is more relaxing. It is silky smooth with no harshness. I would rather lose a bit of resolution and "perfection" and enjoy the music with DSD.

 

It is sort of like solid-state vs values/tubes...

[dan92075]

192/24 sounds more detailed to me than DSD. Clearly PCM 192/24 is technically better and has more information in the music.

 

However I prefer the sound of DSD still. Why? Because it is more relaxing. It is silky smooth with no harshness. I would rather lose a bit of resolution and "perfection" and enjoy the music with DSD.

 

It is sort of like solid-state vs values/tubes...

 

My preference right now is 24/192 material but played using Jriver pcm2dsd in DSD mode at DSD128

[Leica]

My preference right now is 24/192 material but played using Jriver pcm2dsd in DSD mode at DSD128

 

This is very interesting. Which DAC do you have?

 

Do you know what kind of algorithm JRiver is using to convert to DSD? Are there any options to tweak it or is just convert or do not convert?

 

I would like to know how it compares with say Korg Audiogate. Because JRiver is doing it in real time I am guessing it can't be as good as Audiogate or something else which is done slowly. Have you tried this comparison?

 

Finally how would you decribed the sonic signature of 192/24 PCM vs DSD128?

 

Sorry for so many questions but this is something I am looking at, though my DAC can only do DSD64.

[tboooe]

My preference right now is 24/192 material but played using Jriver pcm2dsd in DSD mode at DSD128

 

What are your PC specs. I understand pcm2dsd takes a fair amount of processing power.

[elcorso]

As I replied several times to the same question this is very DAC dependent, and of course how the music was recorded, if DSD recorded I'll go to DSD with no doubts.

 

And even with my DACs, good 24/192 recordings Audiogate converted to DSD I found (like more) when playing as DSD.

 

Roch

[christopher3393]

My preference right now is 24/192 material but played using Jriver pcm2dsd in DSD mode at DSD128

 

But I'm sure you understand how important and helpful it would be to know the details of your system ,especially your dac. This info is really what will help people IMO.

[astrotoy]

Thanks to ted_b and a good friend who built me out a Play Station 3, I've been converting all my SACD's to dsf, both stereo and multichannel where possible. I am waiting to see how the DSD multichannel world is developing, particularly with Macs, until I take the plunge with a DAC. In the meantime I can't play any of the multichannel dsf files, only mch SACD's with my Oppo 95. I do have a multichannel preamp, a C-J MET-1 which has two 5.1 inputs.

 

Right now, if I want to play a stereo dsf file, then I have to use my Berkeley DAC2 with A+, which converts it to 24/176. But since I have plenty of 192/24 from my vinyl rips (now up to about 12TB worth) I am not lacking in material to play.

 

I have not been following all the details, but I want to make sure I understand the difference between PCM 192/24 and DSD 64 in terms of creating the files. If I am Channel Classics or Cookie M or some of the other pros and recording in DSD, can I edit in DSD so that I can replace an errant piano note or other such issue. I think I read somewhere that one has to convert to PCM to edit. True or not true. Also could I do the same at home with a DSD ripping set up like I am doing now with PCM 192/24. As some of you know I have a PM Model Two using Pyramix and Merging's Mykerinos card to rip at 192/24 and Izotope RX2 to declick my vinyl files. Sounds quite good. However, could I use an ADAC that does DSD and then use something like Izotope RX2 (not cheap, but not too expensive) to declick or denoise.

 

Finally, has anyone with the top of the line DAC's like Playback Designs which do both PCM and DSD, played the same titles that have been released in both formats? Any comparisons? Please correct me here if this doesn't make sense.

 

Thanks, Larry

[dan92075]

This is very interesting. Which DAC do you have?

 

Do you know what kind of algorithm JRiver is using to convert to DSD? Are there any options to tweak it or is just convert or do not convert?

 

I would like to know how it compares with say Korg Audiogate. Because JRiver is doing it in real time I am guessing it can't be as good as Audiogate or something else which is done slowly. Have you tried this comparison?

 

Finally how would you decribed the sonic signature of 192/24 PCM vs DSD128?

 

Sorry for so many questions but this is something I am looking at, though my DAC can only do DSD64.

 

I have a Wyred Dac2SE

 

I have tried this experiment on both a 2year old PC laptop and a half year old Macbook Pro running Jriver19

 

I did comparisons using the free 2L samples:

They have DSD64, DSD128, PCM192, etc all converted from the same original DXD file.

I felt the DSD64 using pcm2dsd on the fly using the PCM192 sounded pretty much the same as the DSD64 I downloaded from 2L

[pacwin]

It's popular (though far from a complete consensus) for may audiophiles and recording engineers to prefer DSD over 24/96 PCM, in part because they like the smoother, more analog-like sound of DSD and/or the "spaciousness" of it.

 

But I wonder is anyone prefers DSD (single density DSD64 ala SACD not DSD128) over 24/192 PCM? Sound smoother or more spacious to anyone?

 

The recording format has in the final analysis only a small part to play in the overall production of sound, musician competence, the music itself, the recording environment, microphone and preamp quality, and other intangibles like whether the recording is live, multi tracked, multi miked and whether the final commercial release is in stereo or some form of surround (nowadays up to 9.1 on blu ray). If there is to be a lot of signal processing of the digital recording this will influence choice of format.

 

There is to my knowledge only one commercially published recording which was simultaneously recorded in PCM and DSD (Velut Luna CVLD092 SA-CD.net - Liszt: Grandes Etudes pour le Piano - Massimo Gon). This could be a useful test disc but it won't be everyone's cup of tea (classical solo piano)

 

If you have a stereo system all things being equal, and within the limits/variability of each recording, DSD 128 recordings are currently king of the pile. These recordings are typically live and acoustic played by highly trained/gifted musicians and recorded basically live to recorder from some kind of analogue chain (a good recent example is WAONXA-3018/3019 WAONXA-3018/3019 RECORDING DATA. The other useful application of DSD is to capture the analogue signal from analog tape. This is the world of Mobile Fidelity and some of Analogue Productions reissues as well as some of the Japanese audiophile reissues of classical analog recordings. DSD is unbeatable at this task especially with a discrete ADC like the Grimm AD1

 

Those recording in DXD (DaCapo, OUR Recordings, SibaRecords, 2L, ERPMusic) are typically releasing in surround sound and have more complex signal processing tasks to perform than the live to disc genre. In these cases DXD is more or less indistinguishable from DSD and most DSD aficionados will happily listen to it. As it happens there are no commercial disk formats for DXD so these are either released as SACD or down sampled to 192/24 for blu ray release. In the case of 2L they will often release in dual formats (blu ray and SACD). In those cases careful listening shows that the 192/24 down sample from DXD is slightly superior to the transcode from DXD to DSD. If you want to listen to some state of the art DXD recordings released as SACD perhaps try the new Palle Mikkelborg recording http://michalapetri.web18.dandomain.dk/uploaded/variousfiles/2013-MikkelborgGoing2Pieces-Booklet-EN.pdf Going to pieces without falling apart.

 

The number of native DSD recording releases (Channel Classics, Challenge Records, Pentatone, Mariinsky etc) still outweighs the number of native PCM blu ray recordings but PCM nevertheless dominates as the main recording source underlying the majority of SACD releases especially in multichannel (Good examples of those are BIS, Chandos, Linn Records). However within the DSD realm there is a difference between the various DSD workstations. In general Sadie and Sonoma workstations are more true to the DSD source whereas the Pyramix will basically convert to DXD.

 

In none of the above have I implied any relation to pop music. Pop music in general neither requires nor benefits from very high resolution recording, largely because it is so heavily processed, shaped, compressed, limited, and in many cases the underlying electronic keyboards, drum machines and what not are using limited quality quite possibly not even 24 bit samples anyways.

 

Returning to DSD's principle benefit: impulse response. This is due to the fact that DSD is capturing the rate of change of a signal over time whereas PCM is trying to nail an actual measurement. So when we are capturing the first attack of a bow on a string, the smash on a cymbal and its feathery decay, the rat a tat tat of a snare drum, the pluck of a harp string, finger sliding of the string of an upright bass and so forth in a real live acoustic environment DSD just does it better moreso as you increase the sample rate. However if you need some of the flexibility of PCM in terms of pre or post processing of the signal before the public hear it then you obviously choose that path and most do. It is only the really elite recording teams who choose DSD in the first place.

 

I know this is long winded but the recording format is only one small part of the evaluation needed to acquire a piece of music software. Above all is the music and the musicians, the recording infrastructure, skill and experience of the recording team, microphone selection and quality. microphone placement, level setting and so forth. If none of these other factors are optimal it doesn't matter a damn what the recording format is.

[DigiPete]

I'll take some SACD's only to have them converted.

There is a great backlog of surround material that was released on SACD only, but should have been put on DVD-Audio, Bluray Audio or pure download.

 

Any modern high-end system has careful DSP, so you need to have PCM no matter what.

Sorry guys, DSD's only fit for dinosaurs.

 

 

Surround is The New Black

[sandyk]

The vast majority of members are unlikely to get approval for at least 5 surround speakers and a subwoofer (or 2 for LF directionality) from SWMBO. Many surround recordings are too "gimmicky" anyway.

A better than average stereo system that hasn't undergone DSP processing (tongue stuck out) can often do a pretty good surround sensation without all those additional speakers that are hard to set up for proper seamless matching.

Sometimes it may be better to have very good stereo speakers also do the job of the centre speaker in a surround system.

 

Alex

[wisnon]

DidiPete,

Pure DSD does exist without DSP, one example here, (PBD and EMM are others):

 

Thermionic DSD, LampizatOr Style | Confessions of a Part-Time Audiophile

 

In any case, multibit DSM is not PCM....

[clpetersen]

I do prefer DSD at home when I've had a chance for a more or less direct comparison. This could well have to do with my DAC, where any PCM, including 24/192, is run through two stages that DSD is not. First, the 192kHz resolution is interpolated to 384kHz, either in the DAC chip itself or by software oversampling. Then it goes through a sigma-delta modulator. These two steps don't occur with DSD input (doesn't need oversampling, already in sigma-delta format), and the presence or absence of these steps could easily be as or more responsible for the differences I hear than any innate qualities of either format.

I am looking to upgrade and distribute our system across several locations in the home. In the main listening rom I am looking seriously at Hegel because (1) it is very good equipment (2) I am also Norwegian, and because of (2) I greatly prefer minimalist designs. Hegel, like many others is recognizing that for many people, there will be a single source of input and it will be digital, not line-level. So they are integrating DACs into their amplifier designs, which is highly appealing (see (2) above). I asked about DSD support and here is what they responded:

---

"Our DAC's do not support DSD. The reason behind that is quite simply

that there are no chips available that we feel does DSD while keeping the

quality on regular PCM (which most of your music probably is). That may also

be the reason to why some DSD demo's seems very convincing. So by

implementing DSD we would reduce the sound quality on PCM. We hope that some

day, a chip that does both well becomes available. "

 

---

Something to consider. There is tremendous movement in the field right now, makes it fun and hard to decide as well. Two constants: a good amplifier and a good set of speakers.

[NOMBEDES]

(QUOTE PACWIN)

 

In none of the above have I implied any relation to pop music. Pop music in general neither requires nor benefits from very high resolution recording, largely because it is so heavily processed, shaped, compressed, limited, and in many cases the underlying electronic keyboards, drum machines and what not are using limited quality quite possibly not even 24 bit samples anyways.

 

 

 

Wow. I guess I will not be getting that Hirez Lorde download!!!

[gmgraves]

It's popular (though far from a complete consensus) for may audiophiles and recording engineers to prefer DSD over 24/96 PCM, in part because they like the smoother, more analog-like sound of DSD and/or the "spaciousness" of it.

 

But I wonder is anyone prefers DSD (single density DSD64 ala SACD not DSD128) over 24/192 PCM? Sound smoother or more spacious to anyone?

 

Of course, its hard (actually, impossible) to get a perfect test, but people still develop format preferences over time. And with a choice between DSD or 24/192 downloads for the same music now commonly available, and a lot of people with DACs that play DSD and 24/192, a choice of format will necessarily have to be made when purchasing the music.

 

I do all of my recording using DSD64. Often I have to convert the DSD to 24/192 or 24/96 (not to mention Red Book) in order to edit with Audacity, as well as disseminate these recordings to clients. Frankly, I hear no difference in a side-by-side comparison with the original recording. However, I do often use a Zoom H2 (at 24/96) as a piggy-back backup off of the same microphone mixer when using my Korg MR1 as the main recorder, and it sounds a bit better than the recordings made with the Zoom from the same source. When I use my MR-2000S as my main recorder, I use the MR1 as the backup. Where I have the room to set-up everything, I definitely use my big Berhinger X1222 mixer and my MR-2000S, but where space/weight is a problem, I take my smaller X1202 (for which I have even built a bespoke battery power supply) and my MR1 recorder.

[bmoura]

If you have a stereo system all things being equal, and within the limits/variability of each recording, DSD 128 recordings are currently king of the pile. These recordings are typically live and acoustic played by highly trained/gifted musicians and recorded basically live to recorder from some kind of analogue chain (a good recent example is WAONXA-3018/3019 WAONXA-3018/3019 RECORDING DATA.

 

That one looks interesting. Is it available in DSD 128 from one of the music download sites?

WAONXA-3018/3019 RECORDING DATA