PCM & DSD

[Ralf11]

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/dsd-vs-pcm-myth-vs-truth.581230/

 

thoughts?

[elcorso]

30 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/dsd-vs-pcm-myth-vs-truth.581230/

 

thoughts?

 

This has been discussed ad nauseam in the last ten years in CA and elsewhere, but you have less than two to be with us!

 

Discuss it again I feel very much at the torture of tantalum...!!!

 

Roch

[Allan F]

36 minutes ago, elcorso said:

This has been discussed ad nauseam in the last ten years in CA and elsewhere...

 

More importantly, the article contains many questionable opinions that are presented as facts.

[kumakuma]

10 minutes ago, Allan F said:

 

More importantly, the article contains many questionable opinions that are presented as facts.

 

Sure it wasn't an article about MQA?

[barrows]

DSD is awesome!  It is really too bad that Sony did such a poor job at marketing DSD/SACD int he first place.  If SACD had replaced CD entirely when it was introduced we would be so much better off now...  All music would be hi res!

I would love it if the standard recording chain was: analog tape-mix in analog-master in analog-then capture to DSD for SACD release and capture in MP3 for low res distribution.  that would have been so great...

[firedog]

3 hours ago, barrows said:

DSD is awesome!  It is really too bad that Sony did such a poor job at marketing DSD/SACD int he first place.  If SACD had replaced CD entirely when it was introduced we would be so much better off now...  All music would be hi res!

I would love it if the standard recording chain was: analog tape-mix in analog-master in analog-then capture to DSD for SACD release and capture in MP3 for low res distribution.  that would have been so great...

Don't actually disagree with any of the above, but I have lots of pure PCM recordings that sound great. If all PCM sounded like those, I wouldn't feel any need for DSD.

[Miska]

At least with DSD you don't need to worry about "blur" and "deblurring" and stuff like that. Because you don't need sharp bandwidth limiting either. 

 

[asdf1000]

21 hours ago, barrows said:

DSD is awesome!  It is really too bad that Sony did such a poor job at marketing DSD/SACD int he first place.  If SACD had replaced CD entirely when it was introduced we would be so much better off now...  All music would be hi res!

I would love it if the standard recording chain was: analog tape-mix in analog-master in analog-then capture to DSD for SACD release and capture in MP3 for low res distribution.  that would have been so great...

 

An old interview with Benchmark's John Siau:

 

"JS: I actually had a SONY engineer say to me one time and this is quite few years ago…he said, “we realized after we got a ways down the road that DSD was kind of a mistake but we had too much invested in it”."

 

I believe the issues discussed in this interview are mostly about DSD as a recording format, not necessarily anything to do with the up-sampling to DSD that many (including myself) do.

 

http://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=74

 

 

[Miska]

1 minute ago, Em2016 said:

An old interview with Benchmark's John Siau:

 

"JS: I actually had a SONY engineer say to me one time and this is quite few years ago…he said, “we realized after we got a ways down the road that DSD was kind of a mistake but we had too much invested in it”."

 

I believe this is mostly about DSD as a recording format.

 

One needs to be more careful doing the recording right. Not your everyday ProTools stuff. Although tools have gotten much better over past decade, and processing power, RAM and storage speeds have become much less of an issue.

 

But John Siau is one of the known DSD-haters anyway. Maybe we would have much less sound quality issues with modern PCM if it would be much harder to work with. Now most of the new PCM coming out from major labels to ruined to no end.

 

OTOH, I know people who like to record in DSD. And I know engineers who like to work on DSD. Sony and Philips dropped the ball long ago on DSD and better not ask them anymore anything about it.

 

[HardrockInMiniMac]

On 22.1.2018 at 2:48 AM, Allan F said:

 

More importantly, the article contains many questionable opinions that are presented as facts.

 

Is that what they call "alternative facts" at the White House?

[Maldur]

On 1/22/2018 at 9:15 AM, firedog said:

 I have lots of pure PCM recordings that sound great. 

Interesting... where You get these pure PCM recordings?

 

Basically all these PCM recordigs are downconverted from DSM aka DSD signal in ADC stage. So, if someone stores ADC delta-sigma output directly to the file, these recordings sounds better than PCM downconverts.

[firedog]

1 hour ago, Maldur said:

Interesting... where You get these pure PCM recordings?

 

Basically all these PCM recordigs are downconverted from DSM aka DSD signal in ADC stage. So, if someone stores ADC delta-sigma output directly to the file, these recordings sounds better than PCM downconverts.

 

Or not. Depends on lots of other factors. The direct ADC output is one small part of the process of what happens before it gets to your ears. 

And forgetting everything else, DSD is not a practical solution for many modern multi track recordings. 

 

And did I use the word "pure"?  don't think so.  It's a red herring term. 

 How many DSD downoads being sold do you think are "pure"?  Some kind of direct output of the SDM of the ADC and then direct to you?   Not many. Most of the DSD available has also been fully or partially turned into PCM at some point of the process before being turned back into DSD. 

 

The whole format war argument is ridiculous. 

[Maldur]

50 minutes ago, firedog said:

And did I use the word "pure"?  don't think so.   

On 1/22/2018 at 9:15 AM, firedog said: "I have lots of pure PCM recordings that sound great." 

 

As barrows said before - "If SACD had replaced CD entirely when it was introduced we would be so much better off now...  All music would be hi res!"

 

And if DAW's/sound editors evolution is not stopped then, they can edit DSD by now and we can avoid PCM in entire process. 

Today we have that computational power to process/edit DSD in pure mode, even in real-time in some cases.

[firedog]

35 minutes ago, Maldur said:

On 1/22/2018 at 9:15 AM, firedog said: "I have lots of pure PCM recordings that sound great." 

 

As barrows said before - "If SACD had replaced CD entirely when it was introduced we would be so much better off now...  All music would be hi res!"

 

And if DAW's/sound editors evolution is not stopped then, they can edit DSD by now and we can avoid PCM in entire process. 

Today we have that computational power to process/edit DSD in pure mode, even in real-time in some cases.

Okay, but I didn't mean what you meant. I meant the PCM  wasn't ever in any other format like DSD or tape, which is what the post I was reacting to was referring to. I don't think the fact that most ADC work first internally in SDM mode, before producing their  actual PCM output means a thing.

 

And again, you are implying somehow that as opposed to PCM,  DSD recordings are pure. It just isn't so in the real world, even at a site like nativeDSD.com.

 

There are all sorts of PCM processing going on in lots of DSD files that are available to the consumer. Yes, today we can do edits of DSD, but even that isn't technically "pure" because the small snippet used for the edit is converted to DXD.

And any DSD you own that's been mixed isn't "pure". May have been tape processed; if it's mixed at all it's probably been processed in PCM, etc. 

[GUTB]

DSD is better than PCM — that’s a fact.

[Miska]

1 hour ago, firedog said:

There are all sorts of PCM processing going on in lots of DSD files that are available to the consumer. Yes, today we can do edits of DSD, but even that isn't technically "pure" because the small snippet used for the edit is converted to DXD.

 

Only if you use tools that use DXD (Pyramix). But still only for those small parts. Maybe I should make my own audio editor?

 

1 hour ago, firedog said:

And any DSD you own that's been mixed isn't "pure". May have been tape processed; if it's mixed at all it's probably been processed in PCM, etc.

 

Multi-level SDM isn't PCM or then you don't understand how it works. Or if it is, then DSD is also PCM and we can stop the bullshit.

 

Processing in DSD can be as much pure as PCM processing can be pure. Really.

 

Point is that there is no decimation to lower sampling rates. I can play 5.0 channel DSD256 to stereo downmix. And all processing is done at native 11.2896 MHz sampling rate. In fact I usually want the output at DSD512, so  after processing at 11.3 MHz it is converted straight to 22.6 MHz DSD512.

 

By the way there are number of recording and mastering studios these days that use analog desks, even if they use digital recording. So mixing goes through D/A and to a new A/D. And those desks are not old:

https://ams-neve.com/88rs/

https://ams-neve.com/genesys/

http://rupertneve.com/products/high-voltage-discrete-mixer/

http://www.solidstatelogic.com/studio/aws

http://www.solidstatelogic.com/studio/duality

 

1 hour ago, firedog said:

I don't think the fact that most ADC work first internally in SDM mode, before producing their  actual PCM output means a thing.

 

That is certainly the key point. It is stupid useless massive down-conversion and then again from PCM back to SDM for the DAC. And then you get all the time domain problems MQA is trying tout about. None of that exists in DSD because you never practically need to do any band limiting.

 

Although at 352.8/384k rates band-limiting hardly touches any music signal even with best wide-band microphones. And certainly not anymore at 705.6/768k rates.

 

As an example, for my digital room correction for analog sources (vinyl and such), I now run my ADI-2 Pro AE ADC either at 768/32 PCM, or DSD256. And output always DSD512. That data is never converted to slow speeds and accuracy as 352.8/24 DXD is. Everything happens in realtime. This wasn't possible at reasonable cost 10 years ago.

 

[esldude]

On 1/21/2018 at 6:45 PM, Ralf11 said:

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/dsd-vs-pcm-myth-vs-truth.581230/

 

thoughts?

My thinking is don't get info from Steve Hoffman forums.  People who really know how things like this work typically get banned. So all of your best sources of info have already been filtered out.

[elcorso]

9 minutes ago, Miska said:

Only if you use tools that use DXD (Pyramix). But still only for those small parts. Maybe I should make my own audio editor?

 

I think it would be a great thing !!!

 

Anyway too much editing destroys the music (what happens many times in PCM recordings).

The extraordinary recordings of this world have very little editing.

 

Roch

 

PS/ Last night I was listening two albums listed here in CA, on the "music to test audio equipment" thread. They were unlistenable (to my ears) until I upsampled to DSD.  (By settings mistake I was upsampling to 352.8 / 384 PCM).  Of course not totally repaired by DSD, but listenable at least.

[elcorso]

6 minutes ago, esldude said:

My thinking is don't get info from Steve Hoffman forums.  People who really know how things like this work typically get banned. So all of your best sources of info have already been filtered out.

 

Incredible !!! 

 

Roch

[esldude]

3 minutes ago, elcorso said:

 

Incredible !!! 

 

Roch

Did you mean incredible, but true?

[elcorso]

Just now, esldude said:

Did you mean incredible, but true?

 

Of course.

 

Roch

[firedog]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

Multi-level SDM isn't PCM or then you don't understand how it works. Or if it is, then DSD is also PCM and we can stop the bullshit.

 

Processing in DSD can be as much pure as PCM processing can be pure. Really.

 

 

I understand that it can be. But the reality is that there aren't many DSD recordings available to the consumer that haven't been converted to either DSD or analog or both at some point as part of the processing and mastering. Small ensemble classical and jazz groups recorded live - maybe; other types of music and something that needs mixing - probably not pure DSD at all. 

[Allan F]

6 hours ago, HardrockInMiniMac said:

 

Is that what they call "alternative facts" at the White House?

 

No. Those are more accurately described as misrepresentations or outright lies.

[firedog]

1 hour ago, firedog said:

 

I understand that it can be. But the reality is that there aren't many DSD recordings available to the consumer that haven't been converted to either DSD or analog or both at some point as part of the processing and mastering. Small ensemble classical and jazz groups recorded live - maybe; other types of music and something that needs mixing - probably not pure DSD at all. 

Of course I meant to write "converted either to PCM or analog or both"

[One and a half]

@Ralf11 the author of the piece you refer was shafted from CA some time ago. Pushing his own barrow too much was one of them, the other was to claim all software players sounded the same....

Never mind all that, water under the bridge.