If you had to choose...

[realhifi]

Extracted from a presentation at :

High Resolution : Capturing The Moment

London AES Meeting 10, 06, 2014

De Vere Rooms, High Holborn, London

By Bob Stewart and Peter Craven

 

Now that sounds promising.

[Paul R]

Now that sounds promising.

 

(g) Sounds like high speed Octo DSD to me. Welcome to the FM of the future. As FM sounded far better than AM radio, so does DSD to PCM. (/g)

 

Seriously though, worrying about disk space, which was expensive and is now cheap, is what got us MP3s and those who claim an MP3 is indistinguishable from a CD or HiRes version. Damn the torpedoes and bring on the 100terabyte drives.

[sandyk]

Imagine trying to defragment a 100terabyte drive, or copy to another 100terabyte drive, unless your PC used those new fangled vacuum transistors ! Even then you are probably going to run into magnetisation limitations, so it seems conventional HDDs would need to be replaced by other new technology.

[One and a half]

You have a wonderful DAC !

 

Which software are you using to rip your CD's to DSD 128 ?

 

 

If it is not HQ Player, is there any chance you could try out HQ Player, and compare the job HQP does with Redbook to DSD128 conversion on the fly to the job that the Playback Designs does ?

 

So far, Jriver (Win) rips to DSD128, but my rips are DSD64, partially due to historical reasons with old Sony software that is traditional for me, the other is the DAC has a little less work to do from 64 to 128. Maybe a consideration is to rip to DSD128. Certainly if there was a turntable in the system, 128 would be the standard.

 

Lately, Jriver converts everything to DSD128 on the fly, have lived with this setup for a few months now, and am very happy with the results. DSD is about 20% of the library, to convert PCM files physically or let software do it is an experiment that needs to happen to determine what works. There certainly is a big leap forward for the Opus 128 releases, but they are mastered to be DSD from the beginning and are spectacular. Whether humble red book can equal these is an expectation that won't quite get there, but transcoding red book to DSD does take that digititus away from PCM. The better the PCM recording, the better the DSD will be.

[Paul R]

Imagine trying to defragment a 100terabyte drive, or copy to another 100terabyte drive, unless your PC used those new fangled vacuum transistors ! Even then you are probably going to run into magnetisation limitations, so it seems conventional HDDs would need to be replaced by other new technology.

 

It's an everyday problem for some of us- replicating massive amounts of data every day. As the solutions become more everyday and less expensive, it will become commonplace in the home as well.

 

Paul

[Skeptic]

Most DACs are sigma-delta, not multi-bit as that term is usually understood, so they can be considered "inherently DSD."

And most designs used today are multi-bit. The Sabre DACs which are common in everything today are 6-bit with a much higher precision internal processing format.

 

So how does going from multi-bit PCM to 1-bit DSD, to multi-bit again make sense?

 

My T+A DAC 8, carefully desgined, with pretty good reviews does PCM upsampling to 352/384 and has some pretty good filters. It is not in the same sonic class as the Exasound playing DSD256 fed from HQ Player. The T+A playing Redbook IMO does sound better than the Exasound playing native Redbook, but that's not unexpected given the Exasound does no upsampling as a matter of philosophy.

 

XXHighend does everything in PCM at 764, and I am told it is in a similar sonic league to HQ Player. The about to be released microDSD is supposed to be able to process 24/384, so you may be right in a few weeks time ;-)

 

I love the sonics of DSD256 as played by the Exasound, but I have to agree and say, it's an inherently stupid format, with poor data efficiency and masses of out of band noise. With what we know today, and the signal processing capability that we have, the recording engineers and the ADC / DAC designers should get to gether to draw up a new format that allows high sampling rates, easy to edit, mix, and merge, with data compactness as the lowest priority

Again; there is nothing wrong with playback at DSD rates. It seems that a lot of DACs today perform better when you send them a DSD input rather than a PCM one.

 

But this does not mean that you should rip to DSD.

 

Ripping to DSD is not a reversible process, whereas ripping to 16/44 PCM is a 1:1 copy of what is on the original CD.

 

4xDSD might be your format of choice today, but maybe in a year or two it will be 8x or 16x DSD, or perhaps it will be 2.8MHz 32-bit PCM.

 

My point is that this is something which should be happening on playback, not the format that you are ripping to.

 

 

Converting to DSD is inherently lossy, and while that might sound better on your current DAC today, in a year or two that may no longer be the case.

 

If you rip to a lossless 16/44 PCM format, you never have to worry about format changes, because you can simply change the software playing the file.

If you rip to DSD you are stuck with that format unless you re-rip your library again.

 

Even with the majority of SACD of their origins with PCM, Analog tape, DSD still wins. I'm converted.

As I said before, conversion between DSD and PCM is not a reversible process, and it is best to rip to their native formats.

While I choose to play back SACD/DSD as high sample-rate PCM (because you can't process DSD) I store it in the original DSD format.

 

 

(g) Sounds like high speed Octo DSD to me. Welcome to the FM of the future. As FM sounded far better than AM radio, so does DSD to PCM. (/g)

Again; 1-bit formats are inherently flawed. Simply bumping up the sample rate with DSD does not fix that.

It pushes the noise to higher and higher frequencies, but using a multi-bit format is a much smarter solution.

 

Very high sample-rate PCM or DSD-wide is the most likely choice going forward.

 

It's an everyday problem for some of us- replicating massive amounts of data every day. As the solutions become more everyday and less expensive, it will become commonplace in the home as well.

I'm not so sure. Everyone seems to be moving their data to "the cloud" and streaming it rather than storing their data locally.

 

With the advent of SSDs, we're seeing a move from devices with 2TB of storage to ones with 128GB of flash.

 

Audiophiles and videophiles are the exception, not the norm.

[Paul R]

And most designs used today are multi-bit. The Sabre DACs which are common in everything today are 6-bit with a much higher precision internal processing format.

 

So how does going from multi-bit PCM to 1-bit DSD, to multi-bit again make sense?

 

Again; there is nothing wrong with playback at DSD rates. It seems that a lot of DACs today perform better when you send them a DSD input rather than a PCM one.

 

But this does not mean that you should rip to DSD.

 

Ripping to DSD is not a reversible process, whereas ripping to 16/44 PCM is a 1:1 copy of what is on the original CD.

 

4xDSD might be your format of choice today, but maybe in a year or two it will be 8x or 16x DSD, or perhaps it will be 2.8MHz 32-bit PCM.

 

My point is that this is something which should be happening on playback, not the format that you are ripping to.

 

 

Converting to DSD is inherently lossy, and while that might sound better on your current DAC today, in a year or two that may no longer be the case.

 

If you rip to a lossless 16/44 PCM format, you never have to worry about format changes, because you can simply change the software playing the file.

If you rip to DSD you are stuck with that format unless you re-rip your library again.

 

As I said before, conversion between DSD and PCM is not a reversible process, and it is best to rip to their native formats.

While I choose to play back SACD/DSD as high sample-rate PCM (because you can't process DSD) I store it in the original DSD format.

 

 

Again; 1-bit formats are inherently flawed. Simply bumping up the sample rate with DSD does not fix that.

It pushes the noise to higher and higher frequencies, but using a multi-bit format is a much smarter solution.

 

Very high sample-rate PCM or DSD-wide is the most likely choice going forward.

 

I'm not so sure. Everyone seems to be moving their data to "the cloud" and streaming it rather than storing their data locally.

 

With the advent of SSDs, we're seeing a move from devices with 2TB of storage to ones with 128GB of flash.

 

Audiophiles and videophiles are the exception, not the norm.

 

 

We are all aware of your opinions now, just as you are aware not everyone agrees that your facts are facts. Time to perhaps, stop trying to convince everyone else? You have a valid point, just not necessarily a convincing one. Rather, not convincing to everyone.

 

For example, the only really convincing argument to me is when Eloise brought up the possibility of a better conversion in the future.

 

Paul

[miguelito]

But this does not mean that you should rip to DSD. Ripping to DSD is not a reversible process, whereas ripping to 16/44 PCM is a 1:1 copy of what is on the original CD. If you rip to a lossless 16/44 PCM format, you never have to worry about format changes, because you can simply change the software playing the file. If you rip to DSD you are stuck with that format unless you re-rip your library again.

I agree with this in principle. In all cases the CD is your starting point so at least for archival purposes you should rip that.

 

It is possible that in practice doing on-the-fly DSD conversion sounds worse than playing a file previously transcoded to DSD. A lot of reviewers have said that playing AIFF/WAV sounds better than the same exact file in ALAC/FLAC. That's bit for bit identical stufff, so who knows? I have not verified this claim myself. Jitter jitter jitter I suppose.

 

I personally rip my CDs to AIFF and my SACDs to ISO (which I keep but I create dsf files from the ISOs for playing). My DAC transcodes everything fed to it to DSD128 regardless.

 

Mig