Consensus about upsampling to 512 DSD

[audiventory]

9 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

PCM too?

Yes.

 

9 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

No impact on the analogue signal/ratio?

Analog (analog circuits) signal/noise ratio is higher than PCM24 bit.

 

If PCM 16 bit, signal/noise ratio is unchanged too.

 

If no changes in digital domain, there are no changes in analog domain too.

 

Digital volume control should be done properly. See below.

 

9 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

80dB of digital volume control?

From 0 to almost minus infinity. Processing should be done in float point formats and rounded correctly at input and output.

[asdf1000]

8 minutes ago, audiventory said:

Analog (analog circuits) signal/noise ratio is higher than PCM24 bit.

 

All DACs (the analogue stage) ? Better than 144dB SNR?

 

[audiventory]

 

6 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

Better than 144dB SNR?

 

The good audio DACs have noise floor about -118...120 dB. May be there are some exceptions, but I don't know such examples.

 

The digital signal is not "stairs". When digital processing is applied, need to consider it as analog signal with infinite precision by level.

[asdf1000]

6 minutes ago, audiventory said:

 

 

The good audio DACs have noise floor about -118...120 dB. May be there are some exceptions, but I don't know such examples.

 

This all reads too good to be true.

 

I mean no offence to you as a software guy but I need a hardware guy to double check all of this.

 

I'm definitely no expert myself but volume levelling down 80dB with no impact on the analogue SNR seems too good to be true (whether PCM or DSD).

 

 

[audiventory]

6 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

I'm definitely no expert myself but volume levelling down 80dB with no impact on the analogue SNR seems too good to be true (whether PCM or DSD).

 

In digital signal theory many things, that may looks like unobvious.

 

Digital signal is processed like analog, by same formulas.

 

I.e. it is not matter, where the same formula is applied in digital or analog form.

[firedog]

5 hours ago, GUTB said:

Digital attenuation sucks because the result isn't hi-fi. Altough an active preamp stage adds distortion a well-matched preamp sounds much better. Fact.

 

2 hours ago, GUTB said:

if anyone wants to test this fact out for themselves just cut out the preamp and use either your DAC or something like HQPlayer to control volume in a high quality fashion. The SQ will suffer 10 out of 10 times.

 

2 hours ago, GUTB said:

Fact in the neurotypical sense.

 

 Some of the very good, high bit depth digital volume controls are totally transparent and sound fantastic, better than even many expensive preamps. You do realize there are 64bit and above volume controls, that don't suffer from any bit degradation, right?

I haven't compared them to "all" preamps, so can't say they are better than all of them. 

 

Any statement about what "sounds  better" is opinion, not fact. By definition.

 

And your continued misuse of the term "neurotypical" is laughable. Your opinions are your opinions. "Neurotypical" has nothing to do with it and no meaningful use here. 

[opus101]

27 minutes ago, firedog said:

Any statement about what "sounds  better" is opinion, not fact. By definition.

 

It depends what 'better' means. If by 'better' a listener means 'clearer' then it could be simply observation - neither fact nor opinion.

[Summit]

14 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

 

ears need to be distinguished from perceptions

 

 

 

 

 

It must be really hard not to be able to trust your own perceptions and always feel the need to get them verified before you can decided what sounds good or not. The same with food, drinks, love or anything that involves our senses and preference, and which we maybe can have some form of bias to. I would probably go insane if I could not trust my senses and constantly doubt if they are real or just imaging. I guess am lucky that my ignorance of so called “prof” can be such a blessing.  

[audiventory]

2 minutes ago, Summit said:

It must be really hard not to be able to trust your own perceptions and always feel the need to get them verified before you can decided what sounds good or not. The same with food, drinks, love or anything that involves our senses and preference, and which we maybe can have some form of bias to. I would probably go insane if I could not trust my senses and constantly doubt if they are real or just imaging. I guess am lucky that my ignorance of so called “prof” can be such a blessing.

 

If gain control is applied correctly, it absolutelly transparent for signal and, further, ears.

 

Example: If the gain control is applied with 64-bit float point precision, measurement tool with 64-bit float point precision don't detect the impact. To detect the impact, 3...10 times more precise tool is need. The precision far from -144 dB.

[asdf1000]

18 minutes ago, audiventory said:

Example: If the gain control is applied with 64-bit float point precision

 

If we're talking about a 32-bit DAC, 64-bits precision software volume control is not the limiting factor here, right?

[audiventory]

1 hour ago, Em2016 said:

 

If we're talking about a 32-bit DAC, 64-bits precision software volume control is not the limiting factor here, right?

 

Neither 16 bit nor 24 nor 32 bit DACs are not limiting factors in digital gain control.

[mansr]

All analogue electronics have a signal to noise ratio that rarely exceeds 120 dB. A few DAC chips claim as much as 132 dB, but finished products are generally in the 110-115 dB range. The Benchmark DAC3 is an outlier with a specified SNR of 126 dB. This means 24-bit PCM covers the full dynamic range of any DAC or preamp with bits to spare. A digital volume control with proper dither does not lose any dynamic range compared to an analogue attenuator. Obviously, any attenuation, analogue or digital, of a signal in the presence of noise reduces the effective dynamic range. If music is attenuated by a large amount, some of the softer details will be lost. This is inevitable.

 

Also consider the listening environment. Music played at a high volume has peaks around 100 dB SPL. A very quiet room has an ambient noise level of 20 dB SPL. There is thus, in practice, at best 80 dB of useful dynamic range, a bit more with headphones.

[Le Concombre Masqué]

On 6/29/2018 at 1:32 AM, fas42 said:

 

Laptops have a "fatal flaw" - at least the ones I've used. There is no air filter anywhere in the moving air path - which means the cooling fins steadily get plugged up with gunk. In the places where it's impossible to physically get at this dust to remove it. And the fan works harder and harder, trying to push air through this muck ...

 

One laptop I took to pieces, now and again, when the fan speed went through the roof. And cleaned out the debris. Ahhh, relief ... ! With the current one, tipping it on its side so the fan outlet is uppermost, and blasting through that with a hand air puffer for quite a while forces enough of the dirt to go back out the way it came - lasts for about a year.

cooling pad arrived on time for the hottest day.

 

With laptop sitting less than 3 m away from listening position, I know its here ie during the aria of the Goldberg variations and forget about it after : I can most probably live with the fan noise but it's not dead silent

 

I think I can keep latest HQP (I suspect it's more heat triggering than previous versions) + fav settings while convolving and upsampling 24/192 and SACD  ; MBP still gets hot but can't hear its own fans : hot but not as hot

 

I plugged the pad in a 5V phone adaptor then in a wall socket and won't investigate if it impacts the computer's "ground plane" or whathaveyou 

 

Wonder if it will help some of you upsampling to 512...

 

BTW, since the question is about consensus of belief (I've never heard 256, least 512 in my system), from Miska's posts I saw quite a while ago I thought 256 looked almost as good as 512 and wonder if 512 i's worth cost, computer power and stress, heat....

 

I think I'll be tempted by a pure 256  DAC with no filter but great analog and power sections

[jabbr]

7 hours ago, GUTB said:

 

In theory with enough bandwidth digital attenuation shouldn’t impact the sound. However in reality a discrete analogue line stage is needed to get the best results.

 

The advantage of a line stage is not with volume control, rather matching impedance and level.

 

Quote

 

Matched to the amp and lesser extent the source. Make sure impedance ratios are appropriate and don’t use a pre with a lot of gain with a high-gain amp, and as with everything else go by ear.

 

A pre can be as simple as a current amplifier / buffer eg the well known pass “b1”

Quote

if anyone wants to test this fact out for themselves just cut out the preamp and use either your DAC or something like HQPlayer to control volume in a high quality fashion. The SQ will suffer 10 out of 10 times.

If you have a pre you like with you amp and use HQPlayer as a volume control the SQ won’t suffer.

[Jud]

I think just the thermal noise of the electronics raises the noise floor to somewhere around the 21 bit range. But I've always been a little fuzzy about how the math used by the DSP algorithms relates to decibels coming out of the speakers or headphones.

[semente]

5 hours ago, Summit said:

 

It must be really hard not to be able to trust your own perceptions and always feel the need to get them verified before you can decided what sounds good or not. The same with food, drinks, love or anything that involves our senses and preference, and which we maybe can have some form of bias to. I would probably go insane if I could not trust my senses and constantly doubt if they are real or just imaging. I guess am lucky that my ignorance of so called “prof” can be such a blessing.  

 

Taste, unlike measurable accuracy, is not static. It changes with time, with education, with culture with experience.

 

In my experience measurable accuracy has generally coincided with good or pleasurable sound experience. Making use of both measurements and listening assessments seems likely to provide better results than tasting alone.

 

[firedog]

5 hours ago, opus101 said:

 

It depends what 'better' means. If by 'better' a listener means 'clearer' then it could be simply observation - neither fact nor opinion.

You're making a distinction without a difference. "Clearer" is still that listener's opinion. What if what you call "clearer" I call "artificial" sounding?

 

Everyone's "observations" are unique. No two of us perceive exactly the same thing when listening to playback and even if we did, that doesn't mean our evaluation or judgement of it would be the same. 

[mansr]

20 minutes ago, semente said:

Making use of both measurements and listening assessments seems likely to provide better results than tasting alone.

Tasting is fine, but it can't hurt to check arsenic levels first.

[opus101]

5 minutes ago, firedog said:

"Clearer" is still that listener's opinion. What if what you call "clearer" I call "artificial" sounding?

 

Its not an opinion, rather its a description that can be cross-examined. For example the listener can be questioned about what they noticed with a clearer system that they didn't with a less clear one. If you call 'clearer' 'artificial' sounding that would be just opinion I agree as its not open to cross-examination. What might it mean?

 

Whilst its true that everyone's observations (note lack of scare quotes) are unique that doesn't detract from descriptions being agreed upon by various impartial observers.

[semente]

14 minutes ago, opus101 said:

 

Its not an opinion, rather its a description that can be cross-examined. For example the listener can be questioned about what they noticed with a clearer system that they didn't with a less clear one. If you call 'clearer' 'artificial' sounding that would be just opinion I agree as its not open to cross-examination. What might it mean?

 

Whilst its true that everyone's observations (note lack of scare quotes) are unique that doesn't detract from descriptions being agreed upon by various impartial observers.

 

Speakers with exaggerated "presence" are usually described as "detailed" or "resolving"... You see this over and over when JA compares his measurements with the critic's assessment.

Same is true for cone resonances in that same frequency band.

 

If pro reviewers can't tell distortions from accuracy then what's the point in reviewing?

[firedog]

6 hours ago, Summit said:

 

It must be really hard not to be able to trust your own perceptions and always feel the need to get them verified before you can decided what sounds good or not. The same with food, drinks, love or anything that involves our senses and preference, and which we maybe can have some form of bias to. I would probably go insane if I could not trust my senses and constantly doubt if they are real or just imaging. I guess am lucky that my ignorance of so called “prof” can be such a blessing.  

You are free to trust you own perceptions as much as you want- no one can argue with what you hear. 

What is disputable is when you say your perceptions “prove” something to anyone other than you; or when you do a sighted comparison and don’t accept that you may have subconscious biases that affect what you hear. 

The classic example is wine tasting, where it has been shown that even experts judge wines totally differently when the tasting isn’t sighted. When it is sighted, the more expensive\more well regarded wines pretty much always win.

Some people would rather do a non sighted comparison, as it may prevent them (among other things) from spending money on an item that doesn’t really sound better than a less expensive item or an item they already own.

[barrows]

9 hours ago, GUTB said:

if anyone wants to test this fact out for themselves just cut out the preamp and use either your DAC or something like HQPlayer to control volume in a high quality fashion. The SQ will suffer 10 out of 10 times.

I have done this, and the result was that once I got the output stage of my DAC sorted, the no preamp option was a a sonic improvement.  So 10 out of 10 is not correct.  Many others are having the same result.

I kept my preamp for awhile, while I worked on the DAC, at first with preamp was better, then the DAC output stage received an update which raised its current drive capability by a factor of two.  Once this change was made, and the DAC direct was tested, DAC direct was better.

 

The preamp during these tests was an Ayre K-5xe-MP, which is a bit of a giant killer at its price.

 

Bottom line on DAC direct is that as long as the output stage of the DAC has enough oomph (current capability) to drive the input stage of the amplifier correctly, and the digital volume control is well implemented, DAC direct will be more accurate.

Adding a preamp at this point can only add distortion/noise; now one may "like" the distortion/noise added by a preamp, but that approach is not accurate.

 

BTW, there is a new digital volume control approach out there now, LeedH, which claims to be transparent even at large amounts of attenuation.  I have not yet heard a technical explanation of how it does this, but Solution has adopted it for their products, and it is rumored that it is going to be added to Audirvana Plus.

[GUTB]

10 minutes ago, barrows said:

I have done this, and the result was that once I got the output stage of my DAC sorted, the no preamp option was a a sonic improvement.  So 10 out of 10 is not correct.  Many others are having the same result.

I kept my preamp for awhile, while I worked on the DAC, at first with preamp was better, then the DAC output stage received an update which raised its current drive capability by a factor of two.  Once this change was made, and the DAC direct was tested, DAC direct was better.

 

The preamp during these tests was an Ayre K-5xe-MP, which is a bit of a giant killer at its price.

 

Okay, one vote for "modded DAC beats solid state pre". The fact that you doubled the DAC's current delivery seems to indicate that you implemented a serious upgrade to the analog circuitry.

[barrows]

5 minutes ago, GUTB said:

 

Okay, one vote for "modded DAC beats solid state pre". The fact that you doubled the DAC's current delivery seems to indicate that you implemented a serious upgrade to the analog circuitry.

No, not modded DAC.  My DACs are DIY.  But the output stage in question here is not different from that of many, many commercial DACs.  In fact, most commercial DACs that I have seen the output stage of will have plenty of current output to properly drive the input stage of an amplifier.  In fact, the output buffer design of most DACs is often EXACTLY THE SAME CIRCUIT used on the output of most preamps in terms of current capability.

There are very few DAC-AMP combinations in my experience which could benefit from another gain/buffer stage in the signal path.

[GUTB]

20 minutes ago, barrows said:

No, not modded DAC.  My DACs are DIY.  But the output stage in question here is not different from that of many, many commercial DACs.  In fact, most commercial DACs that I have seen the output stage of will have plenty of current output to properly drive the input stage of an amplifier.  In fact, the output buffer design of most DACs is often EXACTLY THE SAME CIRCUIT used on the output of most preamps in terms of current capability.

There are very few DAC-AMP combinations in my experience which could benefit from another gain/buffer stage in the signal path.

 

Alright a unicorn DAC which obviously disqualifies itself from discussion.

 

Care to name an example of a DAC and amp that won’t benifit from a pre?