Upsampling by dac, can't hear an improvement.

[Lebouwsky]

My dac is an AMR dp-777 (fed by a sms200), the dac is able to upsample pcm to 192khz. I can't notice an improvement, at most a shift sidewards. When I started streaming I used a hummingboard / gungnir running Moode and could't notice an improvement either.

 

Does upsampling in PCM make sence anyway?

[Lebouwsky]

30 minutes ago, Panelhead said:

  The answer depends on how it is done. Upsampling via hardware is usually not very transparent. 

  There are software based upsampling options that can be very transparent. Try this and see if you can hear an improvement. 

Sotm gave me a trial of Roon, which I installed on my w10 server. Upsampling did not improve things. Will try hqplayer now that I think of it.

 

 @esldude some 16/44 of my collection sound better than 24/192 which are supposed to be highly respecten recordings. In fact I've got some 24/192 that sound dreadfull. Somehow I think 96khz sounds best, wether it's my previous gungnir or my current amr dac.

[Lebouwsky]

Thank you for your comment @Superdad. 

 

It would be really nice if everybody would comment like a gentleman and respect each other in this post.

 

I will give the upsampling one more (critical) try when I'm back from beatiful Mallorca.

 

cheers fellow enthousiasts.

[Lebouwsky]

7 minutes ago, plissken said:

 

It'd be dandy if the forum was less some incredible hypocrites. 

Would buy you a double whiskey like mine if you were here, maybe you'd lighten up a bit my friend.

[Lebouwsky]

22 minutes ago, plissken said:

 

Bottom line is that Alex said he would sit for blind test of his own product any day of the week on his system with his music. Someone asked what was the nearest airport and Alex promptly folded up tent. 

 

But yet here is the same person that ran away having the chutzpah to call out other's hearing acuity. 

All good @plissken, it's just that sometimes saying nothing or odd politely is better than replying from your belly. I'm married you know.

[Lebouwsky]

21 minutes ago, unbalanced output said:

 

Came here for that. When the DAC has its own internal filter, the upsampled data is "shaped" by the filter and should look very similar to the original filtered data. 

 

With the R2R on the Lampizator, upsampling does have a perceptible difference. Perhaps not to the point that one could easily spot but is noticeable. But I can certainly spot the difference between playing nos and upsampled to DSD (using the 2nd engine). Just the other day I thought the sound was somewhat changed from one day to the other (!) and indeed I had disabled upsampling - I don't think I would be able to tell the difference if I was comparing PCM streams. 

I think we're on the same boat when it comes to upsampling PCM. But when it comes to upsampling PCM to DSD I have no experience.  I recently invested in good PCM dac. When you discribe the PCM tot DSD upsampling as "somewhat changed" I don't feel the need to go DSD real soon. What's your opinion about PCM to DSD?

[Lebouwsky]

If you'd imagine a track like a digital picture with a certain resulution, lets say 800x600 dots of red blue yellow and the dot in the upper right is red. If the picture would be upsampled to a higher resulution by a factor 4 (1600x1200), all the 4 upper right square dots should be red. The picture remains the same, there's no more info, just more dots or bits. To me, with limited knowledge of digital music files, that's what upsampling in pcm does.

 

On the other hand, imagine this same picture, but contrast is made higher, or tones are softened or whatever filter is being used. The picture can be changed to a result, more apealing to the viewers preferences. I can imagine that these filters have more freedom of movement when the picture is brought to a higher resulution. I can also imagine these filters have more freedom if a 4th colour is added to the pallet (cyan, magenta, yellow key). 

 

Feel free to shoot.

 

[Lebouwsky]

This night for the first time I used HQplayer, installed on a W10 laptop, sms200 in HQplayer NAA mode. The sms200 usb output is connected to an Uptone Regen, which gets straight in a Schiit Eitr usb to spdif converter by a hard usb adapter. From there my AMR dp777 is fed by a 75 ohm coax. The Eitr is quite special by the way.

 

Anyway, HQplayer upsamples everything to 192kHz, with the poly-sync shrt filter and the NS4 dither. I don't have a clue what they mean or what they do, but the sound is superb. I just can't stop listening, it's so emotional engaging. OMG!!! My system has never sounded so good.

[Lebouwsky]

1 hour ago, wushuliu said:

Wait blind testing that can withstand serious scrutiny and meet criteria for peer-review can be had just by flying someone out to your house? OMG I had no idea. Are ABX kits available on Amazon?

 

I didn't realize scientifically accurate blind testing could just be done by posting on the internet! Awesome! Here I was thinking you'd have to do all this work of establishing criteria, equipment, personnel... pfft. 

 

Thank you Internet!

I see you speak fluent Sarcasm.

[Lebouwsky]

30 minutes ago, OldBigEars said:

@ lebouwsky I played around with software and hardware upsampling, including DSD, for quite some time.  My listening acuity must clearly be impaired as I struggled to hear any substantial improvements with anything beyond 24/96.  The hours I wasted twiddling with Izotope settings may be amongst the least productive of my life.  There are so many things - in my experience - that matter more.  People are obsessed by the numerical size of music files in much the same way that 15 years ago many people valued digital cameras based primarily on their maximum megapixel size. I'm convinced it's a passing fad.

 

It's true that some people are obsessed be numbers, that was the initial thought when I started this thread. But then I was adviced by a fellow member in this thread to at least try upsampling in the software by HQplayer instead of hardware.

 

The improvement really was there, even my wife, who doesn't care about hifi, noticed, and I even didn't tell her something changed. And I'm not biased (no investment was done, free trial) rather sceptical. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the sms200 now acts as a NAA and the heavy lifting is don by the laptop? I don't know, but this is a keeper.

 

 

[Lebouwsky]

Yesterday I did a listening session again. It's really easy to switch between mpd/ dlna to hqplayer NAA mode from my laptop. 

 

First of all, hqplayer gives a more solid presentation, with a wider soundstage. Also the "thin presentation" of the sms200 (Sotm is known for that, but this is relatively speaking) moves to a more thicker sound. This is in the mids to lower mids range.

 

The overall presentation becomes more enjoyable, which for me is the goal of this hobby: enjoying music.

 

But there's more. With the filters you can stear the music a bit to your preferences, which is not an improvement in sound, but a movement to the left or right so to speak.

 

Last but not least, my right ear is slightly better then my left. This, in combination with the fact that the right speaker is much closer to the side wall, puts the centre of the presentation a bit to the right.  At least in my head. With hqplayer I can adjust this presentation.

 

The GUI is crap by the way. But because of the much better presentation, I notice a more relaxed state of mind, which results in less skipping to another album. GUI becomes less importend, just sit back and relax. 

 

Really like where the system is going these days.

 

 

[Lebouwsky]

2 hours ago, EMMM said:

Lebouwsky, I'm sorry if I missed this in one of your earlier posts, but how do you connect from your W10 laptop to the SMS200?  Are you using ethernet bridging?  I just installed a trial version of HQPlayer on my Mac Mini but I'm scratching my head over how to have the music sent over to my SMS200.  Both Mac Mini and SMS200 are on the same network but they are in different rooms (BTW, I'm not subscribed to Roon and usually use Squeezelite on my SMS200.  I'm happy to try other applications like DLNA or HQPlayer if I can obtain a noticeable improvement in sound quality).

 

I'm a noob when it comes to such things and would deeply appreciate some guidance on this.  Thanks.

You can send me a pm and from there guide you step by step. That's what this forum is for isn't it, share and learn.

[Lebouwsky]

46 minutes ago, wwaldmanfan said:

 

After a lot of experimenting, I settled on the poly-sync-short-mp filter and the NS4 dither for RB to 24/192 upsampling. HQPlayer has a warm, natural sound, compared to Audirvana which is a little more bright and detailed. I find myself going back and forth between the two every few weeks. What is interesting about them is that the soundstage is quite different on the same piece of music.

Those filter/dither settings are most apealing to me too. But I'm open for more suggestions. It's nice to experiment a little bit.

 

Hqplayer is easy to set up, eventhough some people might suggest it's not. And upsampling PCM to 192kHz takes a tiny bit of processing capability (3% of my core i3) and some memory (40mb)

 

Therefore I just ordered a second hand small lightweight passive cooled small footprint pc. It's got an Intel j1900 processor with 4gb memory, which will be more than enough. It has a nice aluminium case and it will get a nice place in my rack (headless). Costs me 100 euro. Will report back ofcourse.

[Lebouwsky]

1 hour ago, copy_of_a said:

To get a similar sound character with A+ you have to switch A+ to Direct/Integer Mode 2 and set the iZotope SRC settings to steepness: 27 / cutoff 0.92 / pre-ringing: 0 (... IIRC.... have to double check the values when I‘m back home on the weekend). Lowpass filtering starts slowly  at around 18kHz...

 Valuable contribution @copy_of_a

[Lebouwsky]

Fellow audio enthousiasts, were talking about music here, let's not forget that. Music is emotion, which reaches our inner core. This forum is all about how to reproduce this music at our homes. Sure, we're talking about the techniques how to do so and we can differ from that. But still, it's music. 

 

Cheers