Chords New M -Scaler

[Rexp]

On 7/30/2018 at 4:41 PM, Miska said:

 

Of course it gives rise to the THD, and how much finally comes out also depends on high frequency IMD of analog stages of the DAC and amplifiers etc after the DAC.

 

One way to measure it is to compare THD and IMD figures of the DAC between different PCM rates and DSD rates.

 

I think that the audible distortion is more often intrinsic within the recording rather than than caused by the DAC/conversion, what do you think?

[barrows]

4 hours ago, Rexp said:

I think that the audible distortion is more often intrinsic within the recording rather than than caused by the DAC/conversion, what do you think?

It does not matter.  As audiophiles we have no control over how good the recording is (or not).  We can only try and find the best versions of the music we love.

So, we are concerned with the playback equipment and reducing its (unwanted) contributions to the music.

[Andyman]

On 7/30/2018 at 8:08 PM, Miska said:

Personally, I prefer apodizing filters, which can clean and replace (to varying extent) the impulse response of filter used at ADC and/or mastering stages. With typical filter used in DAC chips these days and possibly by Chord you are at mercy of filters used to create source content, so the results may be less consistent across source content.

 

Perhaps someone could develop an end to end solution such that the filters used during recording and mastering were well defined, and a complementary filter option chosen at the dac, thus authenticating the quality of the master...

[ElviaCaprice]

The fact is, Rob Watts recognizes the problems with ADC's and thus his current ongoing development of an ADC.

[barrows]

13 minutes ago, Andyman said:

 

Perhaps someone could develop an end to end solution such that the filters used during recording and mastering were well defined, and a complementary filter option chosen at the dac, thus authenticating the quality of the master...

Or perhaps, someone could pretend they are doing that and then market it to gullible audiophiles...

[Miska]

21 hours ago, ElviaCaprice said:

The fact is, Rob Watts recognizes the problems with ADC's and thus his current ongoing development of an ADC.

 

In practice, you are not going to be able to replace all the ADC's of the world and redo all the past recordings. So, IMO, better approach is to live with something you are given and try to make best out of it, taking into account the way it came to be.

 

Other than that, I'm generally happy with DSD material and most DSD ADC's... Allows you to eliminate problems related to low rate PCM (and filters involved in that).

 

[Miska]

21 hours ago, Andyman said:

Perhaps someone could develop an end to end solution such that the filters used during recording and mastering were well defined, and a complementary filter option chosen at the dac, thus authenticating the quality of the master...

 

Ahh, and of course use extremely short filters (with only few taps) - completely opposite of Chord's while doing so. And then force feed that to everyone without choice.

 

I'm sure Rob Watts will love that idea.

[Miska]

On 7/31/2018 at 1:59 PM, Rexp said:

I think that the audible distortion is more often intrinsic within the recording rather than than caused by the DAC/conversion, what do you think?

 

I would say both, you cannot disregard either. Listener can have more impact on the D/A side, but I think there are ways to make also not so great recordings sound and feel great.

 

I personally listen for example a lot of prog rock and such spanning from 60's to current day. Some old Pink Floyd stuff (Meddle album being my favorite) is not technically as great as some recent stuff from Steven Wilson, but both can be made sound great and engaging.

 

And actually some of the older RedBook masterings for example of Pink Floyd are better than the recent "remasters" which I think are often worse ones.

 

[ElviaCaprice]

45 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

In practice, you are not going to be able to replace all the ADC's of the world and redo all the past recordings. 

Obviously, but it's a start.

[the_bat]

29 minutes ago, Miska said:

And actually some of the older RedBook masterings for example of Pink Floyd are better than the recent "remasters" which I think are often worse ones.

 

That seems to be true of a lot of recent remasters where the main "improvements" seem to be increasing the average level and adding copious quantities of reverb.

[Confused]

27 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

I would say both, you cannot disregard either. Listener can have more impact on the D/A side, but I think there are ways to make also not so great recordings sound and feel great.

 

I personally listen for example a lot of prog rock and such spanning from 60's to current day. Some old Pink Floyd stuff (Meddle album being my favorite) is not technically as great as some recent stuff from Steven Wilson, but both can be made sound great and engaging.

 

And actually some of the older RedBook masterings for example of Pink Floyd are better than the recent "remasters" which I think are often worse ones.

 

Do you have any specific tips for making not so great recordings sound and feel great?  This is a genuine question because there seams to be a strange inverse rule with my music collection, the more I like the music, the worse the recording tends to be.  

 

As as for your remaster comment, I was listening to some Led Zeppelin at the weekend and found pretty much the same thing.

[OldBigEars]

On ‎7‎/‎23‎/‎2018 at 9:41 AM, mansr said:

Rob Watts is technically correct in that a longer filter gives a more accurate reconstruction. However, I'm certain that nobody can hear the difference between 100k and 1M taps. Conferring such great importance on the filter length falls, in my opinion, in the same category as talking about skin effect at audio frequencies: real phenomena of limited or no relevance to audio applications.

 

I'm sure Rob's relieved that his idea was *technically correct*, and has been officially approved. LOL

[tedwoods]

6 hours ago, Miska said:

 

I would say both, you cannot disregard either. Listener can have more impact on the D/A side, but I think there are ways to make also not so great recordings sound and feel great.

 

I personally listen for example a lot of prog rock and such spanning from 60's to current day. Some old Pink Floyd stuff (Meddle album being my favorite) is not technically as great as some recent stuff from Steven Wilson, but both can be made sound great and engaging.

 

And actually some of the older RedBook masterings for example of Pink Floyd are better than the recent "remasters" which I think are often worse ones.

 

I agree.

I like most of what this label releases (specializes in prog) though:   http://www.esotericrecordings.com/newreleases.html 

It seems they are an exception to the rule, as their re-masters are much better than the previous offerings by "Reperoire".

[Fokus]

3 hours ago, OldBigEars said:

 

I'm sure Rob's relieved that his idea was *technically correct*, and has been officially approved. LOL

 

Save the sarcasm.

 

That is not what Mans meant. Watts' approach is a direct and thorough application of the sampling theorem. As such it is not even 'his idea', he is just following the book. Contrary to most, who either take shortcuts (mainstream industry, for reasons of economy), or mangle the entire caboodle (the niche industry, out of ignorance and/or to distinguish them from mainstream).

 

 

[beautiful music]

On 7/24/2018 at 8:14 PM, ecwl said:

That’s an excellent point and thanks for sharing your Mojo measurements in the past. That said, I think in terms of noise shapers: 

Mojo/Hugo: 5th order noise shaper
Hugo 2: 11th order noise shaper
Hugo TT 2: 12th order noise shaper
DAVE: 17th order noise shaper

so maybe it’s better now?

Can you share the Mojo measurements link that was done by @Miska ?

[ecwl]

1 hour ago, beautiful music said:

Can you share the Mojo measurements link that was done by @Miska ?

 

[auricgoldfinger]

Here's more information from none other than Rob Watts himself for you guys to argue over.

 

 

 

So in summary - the M scaler is trying to reproduce the original bandwidth limited analogue signal perfectly without any changes - and because it is identical to a sinc function to 16 bit accuracy, it will do this perfectly to a better than 16 bit accuracy.

And yes my DAC's are different - they do not use DSD but pulse array for the DAC conversion - and this is done so that the analogue has no distortion, no small signal non-linearity, and crucially no noise floor modulation, which is highly audible. DSD can't do this at all, nor will it ever be capable of doing this because of fundamental limitations to a 1 bit methodology.

As to DSD - a DSD bitstream looks nothing like the original analogue signal, as it adds huge amounts of out of band noise - with DSD64 you are -20 dB down at 100kHz. Moreover, if you simply low pass filter it, you get large amounts of distortion and noise, as the signal activity (switching) is signal dependent. DAC conversion is very very tough to do with low distortion and noise. Pulse array has constant switching activity, and has no added distortion, and more importantly no noise floor modulation. But pulse array requires PCM for it too work, so DSD must be converted to PCM; and we need to remove the dreadful RF and out of band noise with DSD too. So this noise gets removed, with a 220 dB stop-band filter - and we get complete removal of the HF noise and distortion that DSD creates.

Actually this is the same process in principle to PCM, in that the only way of recovering the original analogue signal before the DSD modulator is to filter it; I am trying to do exactly the same, recover the original analogue signal that was in the ADC....

Rob

 

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/hugo-m-scaler-by-chord-electronics-the-official-thread.885042/page-14#post-14397880

 

[adamdea]

Apologies if this has been covered already, but it amuses me that the scaler thing does not have usb out. Funny how we were supposed to this that s/pdif and its inherent jitter /long term clock matching problem was supposed to be THE issue. And that was at 44.1kHz not 768kHz.

[BigAlMc]

Just read all ten pages of this thread and not one of you bozo's answered the all important question! Will this thing improve @BigAlMcs system! ?

 

Short answer I suspect is not without significant changes, as I'm not even close to being willing to consider parting with my Directstream DAC and because I have a heavily optimized USB flow.

 

But would appreciate some more expert input on the following. The M-Scaler sounds very impressive but it has USB input but no USB output. Therefore I could potentially put it after my TX-USBultra but not before.

 

So if I have a TX-USBultra (clocked by an SoTM OCX-10 reference clock) providing a very, very nice USB signal to my DAC. In theory would feeding that USB signal into an M-Scaler have potential benefits or be a dumbass idea?

 

Would the M-Scaler take that very nice USB signal and scale it to 386Khz or whatever making it even nicer? Or would the M-Scaler completely reclock/rejig the signal to the extent that the efforts (money spent!) on the TX-USB-Ultra/OCX-10 were rendered pointless or lost?

 

Cheers,

Alan

[adamdea]

36 minutes ago, BigAlMc said:

Just read all ten pages of this thread and not one of you bozo's answered the all important question! Will this thing improve @BigAlMcs system! ?

 

Short answer I suspect is not without significant changes, as I'm not even close to being willing to consider parting with my Directstream DAC and because I have a heavily optimized USB flow.

 

But would appreciate some more expert input on the following. The M-Scaler sounds very impressive but it has USB input but no USB output. Therefore I could potentially put it after my TX-USBultra but not before.

 

So if I have a TX-USBultra (clocked by an SoTM OCX-10 reference clock) providing a very, very nice USB signal to my DAC. In theory would feeding that USB signal into an M-Scaler have potential benefits or be a dumbass idea?

 

Would the M-Scaler take that very nice USB signal and scale it to 386Khz or whatever making it even nicer? Or would the M-Scaler completely reclock/rejig the signal to the extent that the efforts (money spent!) on the TX-USB-Ultra/OCX-10 were rendered pointless or lost?

 

Cheers,

Alan

You have to weigh up the relative benefits of introducing inaudible jitter with the M-scaler as against the very real danger that by not using it you will leave in inaudible images at mulitples of 2x the upsampled frequency of your dac due to its using zero of first order hold approximation in the next stage of upsampling for sd modulation.

which one has the prettier box?

[ElviaCaprice]

The M-Scaler is really built for Chord DAC's already made to take advantage of it's full abilities.  Personally I wouldn't recommend it for any other DAC at this point.  

[BigAlMc]

1 minute ago, adamdea said:

You have to weigh up the relative benefits of introducing inaudible jitter with the M-scaler as against the very real danger that by not using it you will leave in inaudible images at mulitples of 2x the upsampled frequency of your dac due to its using zero of first order hold approximation in the next stage of upsampling for sd modulation.

which one has the prettier box?

 

Dude I thought you and I were in the same ballpark if not page when we posted at pretty much the same time referring to USB. Guess not! 

 

The Chord defo has the prettier box. It's very cute. 

 

Question stands if anyone wishes to opine with more than sarcasm. 

 

Cheers, 

Alan

 

[BigAlMc]

21 minutes ago, ElviaCaprice said:

The M-Scaler is really built for Chord DAC's already made to take advantage of it's full abilities.  Personally I wouldn't recommend it for any other DAC at this point.  

 

Thanks Elvia, 

 

Yup - I feared as much. The Chord Dave is probably the only DAC I would consider swapping my Directstream for - if I were ready, which I'm not. 

 

The Directstream with its upsampling to DSD is probably a particularly bad synergy with the M-Scaler. 

 

Still an intriguing bit of kit tho. 

 

Cheers, 

Alan

[adamdea]

Just now, BigAlMc said:

 

Dude I thought you and I were in the same ballpark if not page when we posted at pretty much the same time referring to USB. Guess not! 

 

The Chord defo has the prettier box. It's very cute. 

 

Question stands if anyone wishes to opine with more than sarcasm. 

 

Cheers, 

Alan

 

I think technology is interesting and I sort of like the idea of aspiring towards perfect DA. But how do you compare the relative importance of two rather different ideas of which part of the process to polish to within an inch of its life? If you buy into the cult of Watts then you can probably ignore usb as IIRC he prefers S/PDIF. In which case buy with confidence. But don;t be surprised if there's a 2 million tap model next year.

 

[ElviaCaprice]

3 minutes ago, BigAlMc said:

 

Thanks Elvia, 

 

Yup - I feared as much. The Chord Dave is probably the only DAC I would consider swapping my Directstream for - if I were ready, which I'm not. 

 

The Directstream with its upsampling to DSD is probably a particularly bad synergy with the M-Scaler. 

 

Still an intriguing but of kit tho. 

 

Cheers, 

Alan

If your going to spend 4k pounds for an m-scaler, then you might as well get a Qutest or Hugo 2 to take full advantage of it.  Otherwise TT2 or DAVE are the other choices.