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Chords New M -Scaler


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13 hours ago, romaz said:

I own HQPlayer.  I find it to be a powerful, versatile and affordable tool.  It definitely has merit.  I have heard many fine upsampling HQP servers with the SGM2015 perhaps being the best sounding of all.  I get together routinely with a group of audiophiles and we listen and compare different pieces of equipment.  With certain DACs, I'm happy to bring out my PC and upsample to DSD512 with HQP because it sounds better.  With other DACs, upsampling to high-res PCM sounds better.  And with Chord DACs, I find that HQPlayer doesn't add anything at all.  With poor recordings that are harsh and bright, I like what DSD does.  With well recorded music, especially unamplified acoustical recordings (i.e. large orchestral performances), I personally struggle with the softer transients of DSD and its relative lack of depth precision.  Go ahead and tell me I'm wrong.  I've listened and compared enough to know what I prefer. 

 

Some people prefer PCM and some DSD. In my experience, the various masterings vastly outweigh differences between the formats.

 

For PCM Chord DACs might be a fine choice, being primarily designed for PCM. Other folks prefer DSD and there are choices such as T+A that one would expect to perform better with DSD upsampling than PCM upsampling.

 

Another choice would be Phasure NOS1a and I would expect @PeterSt's excellent XXHE to outperform the Chord upsampler with his own DAC. Have you compared these two i.e. the "m scaler" with NOS1a? I haven't but would expect XXHE to be the best in this case -- obviously the two are made for eachother!

 

Comparing HQPlayer with Chord hardware is truly apples to oranges. My own listening does not find the faults with DSD that you find. I find that with a well implemented DAC, the output sections are very important, and to my own ear, vastly more important than the server hardware. That's to my own ear, and obviously YMDV.

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On 7/26/2018 at 2:46 PM, ecwl said:

1) See if I have a personal preference for specific filters, maybe even over Chord's

2) See if I can replicate the Blu2/HMS sound using the sinc filter or other filters from HQPlayer

3) See the CPU/GPU load from HQPlayer running these 1 million tap filters

 

Remember that to compare PCM upsampling to DSD upsampling is entirely apples to oranges. PCM upsampling is child's play in the need for CPU resources ... I upsample PCM to 768k on a dual Celeron. 

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22 minutes ago, Andyman said:

 

Are you suggesting therefore that what the M Scaler does is trivial?

I didn’t say that. 

 

It does use a relatively low powered FPGA (Artix-7).

 

What it does is defined by its “software”. Programming the FPGA is very difficult and without knowing details of the implementation, I expect it’s not at all trivial. That’s what you are paying $$$ for.

 

What HQPlayer and XXHE both do are also software. The difference is that these both can be placed on different classes of hardware. 

 

With HQPlayer, for example, you can integrate DSD upsampling with digital crossover and room correction. 

 

The SGM2015 server for example might be limited in number of channels as well as which filters it is capable of using at DSD512 or even DSD1024, for example. HQPlayer has no such limitations.

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35 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

 

Off topic here but I think Ted Smith's DirectStream DAC uses the cheaper and lower powered LX16 - which can up-sample to 20 x DSD rates... something HQPlayer can't do at the moment... 

 

The Spartan-6 is in $20 range, the Artix-7 is $200 ish (I believe) 

 

I don’t know if HQPlayer has upsampling limits because there aren’t DSD2048 DACs etc. I’d let @Miska comment on that.

 

Also no free lunch: using a resource constrained device at a higher rate doesn’t allow more complex filters. That’s the whole point really.

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1 hour ago, Andyman said:

 

No you didn’t - but actually I think you did.

I said that PCM upsampling is child’s play for CPU *resources* ie ARM etc can do. No comment on complexity of software — moreover wasn’t addressing FPGA — ever tried to program one? Not trivial. Try to read what I wrote.

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49 minutes ago, Confused said:

As an example, there are many HQPlayer users that have DACs that work best with PCM, and they use HQPlayer upsampling PCM with the filters of their choice.  I am one such HQPlayer user.  So it seems to me that for someone with a DAC that just happens to perform well with upsampled PCM, then a comparison between the M-Scaler and HQPlayer would be perfectly valid.  

 

Heres a problem: are you asserting the “sound” comes from the software or hardware or both? Think about it. 

 

HQPlayer is not limited to particular hardware. When I first used HQPlayer with my then newly installed NVidia GTX1080 GPU it sounded horrible! Then I moved my DAC to an NAA (over fiberoptic Ethernet) and voila it’s great. That big ugly workstation is spewing all sorts of noise. Not near my audio anymore. That’s just one variable — another is that various HQPlayer modulators & filters work differently with different DACs — has to do with noise shaping and properties of analog low pass filters. How does M-scalar handle DAC other than Chord in this respect?

 

So look at it differently but just because some bloke somewhere got a better sound with x, y or z doesn’t tell us that A is better than x. 

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9 hours ago, esldude said:

Can anyone give an explanation of what the benefits to accuracy of the signal reproduction are with upscaling?  I can only think of lowered aliasing.  

“Pushing” digital noise into a region where an analog filter can remove while least (or ideally not) affecting the audio.

 

In an ideal world, the audio could be perfectly separated from ultrasonic noise which would be well above 100 kHz — and 100 kHz could be a gentle corner slope. 

I

Maybe thats just a longer longer explanation of the benefit of lowered aliasing?

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10 minutes ago, rayl1234 said:

 

And it also looks like a DAC so it can be inserted anywhere a DAC can, without fuss. This is not true for software I’ve seen. 

Right! Because my software is out of sight and so has zero bling factor ?

 

Luckily my fiber switches with brightly colored but very thin cables look really sweet

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48 minutes ago, ecwl said:

If you are using Chord Qutest, Hugo 2, Hugo TT 2, DAVE, the oversampling is done with 49,000-164,000 taps (or M-scaler 1 million) WTA filter to 16fs and then another WTA filter from 16fs to 256fs and then another linear interpolation filter to 2048fs and then to 5-bit 104MHz with 11-17th order noise shaping. 

 

Ok, so not just about the taps ? Do you have technical data or measurements to indicate that this process is better. I bet the final SQ has more to do with the final analog output stage than this specific digital chain. 

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15 minutes ago, ecwl said:

I am not sure what @jabbr is trying to say here. 

You are the one who suggested that Chord measurement be compared to HQPlayer measurements and entirely unfair to compare a “DSC1” design to a commercial product — it is an example of a discrete DAC that’s all. More fair to compare T+A just for example. 

 

What Im saying is that until proven otherwise my own impression is that among well designed and implemented DACs, SQ differences are far far far more dependent on the analog output stages. I’m not the only one who believes this, for example Charles Hansen has strongly said the same.

 

Again if you want to convince me otherwise, I’d be willing to look at measurements and always willing to look at a good technical discussion. 

 

Indeed if you prefer the Chord SQ, then by all means go with the entire “stack”. Since you are comparing this with HQPlayer you need to demonstrate that the Chord SQ that you like is other than the Chord analog output section. Or not, your choice but that’s what Im saying.

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16 minutes ago, ecwl said:

But I still think for me to decide which DAC/system to live with, I need to hear the system. That's why I feel the need to listen to HQPlayer+DSC1 at some point in the future.

Fair enough. Again HQPlayer+DSC1 isn’t a system. If you want to compare systems stop talking about HQPlayer. 

 

Perhaps compare Chord with T+A or  Estelon (haven’t heard but would love to) — both of these use HQPlayer as software. 

 

You then could compare Chord (PCM) vs Estelon (DSD)

 

If you want to stick with PCM, perhaps use @PeterSt entire stack of server running XXHE into NOS1a/G3 and out into his designed speakers. End to end system.

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17 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Thanks. My impression is you've built one and provided at least some information about it, though I haven't seen much of what you may have said. I thought you may have provided enough information for someone else to build a duplicate or modification, but I stand corrected.

I’m very familiar. It’s a terrific design particularly for learning about how a discrete DSD DAC works. He doesn’t concentrate on the analog output stage too much aside from very well designed active filters. 

 

Consider it a reference design rather than a commericial implementation. 

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8 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Talking about the DSC-1, or something Mansr has discussed?

I haven't seen @mansr's work. Is there a link available?

 

There is no "DSC1" commercial implementation.

There are DSC1 derivatives commercially available (at least as boards/kits) but best I can tell use transformer output stages which I'm not interested in. There are also posted schematics which discuss balancing, etc. So the DSC1 is not a specific commercially available product. I don't know the details of the Estelon implementation but understand that this includes hqplayer's naa integrated with a discrete DSD DAC.

 

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12 hours ago, ecwl said:

This is one of the main reasons he says he designed the pulse array DAC which is like a discrete elements version of ultra-high frequency multiunit SDM DAC using thermometer code with an extra twist which is constant switching, not in the usual sense of dynamic element matching (DEM) but in the sense that the same number of elements are constantly switching so that the switching noise is always the same which would control jitter and also eliminate noise floor modulation

An excersize for the mathematicians among us would be to design a thermometer code which has a constant number of “1”s despite the scalar value.

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34 minutes ago, ecwl said:

All of you are right. I don't know how Pulse Array DAC works. And Rob Watts only "vaguely" describes it on the Head-Fi forum. But of course, why should he have to share it if most other DAC designers don't share every exquisite detail? Everybody has their secret sauce whether it's for real or not.

 

Anyway, this is my speculation of how it works. But I'm pretty sure I'm wrong in some ways. I thought most of you who have been commenting have read this already since it's at the start of this thread but clearly not.

 

 

 

 

So you are clearly missing the entire point of my last post... since you seem to be interested in speculating about how it might work you might want to take my comment at face value. ?

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  • 2 months later...
1 hour ago, Shadorne said:

 

Sorry this is off topic but I am trying to understand if software upsampler or M-sampler is the way forward and where do they add the most benefit. What kind of DAC is needed?

Let's start with this 250 Ghz thing ... perhaps go back and check everything you've written

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2 hours ago, Shadorne said:

I don’t know about the marketing. It sounded like they just padded with zeros up to 250 GHz in order to allow small timing adjustments at 4 picosec (by simple register shift at 250 GHz).

 

 

This is whacky and off topic. The only circuits that operate at these speeds are research. There is no consumer logic that operates at 250 GHz 

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