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Article: Audio Engineering Matters, Not The Format


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On 12/14/2018 at 9:13 AM, The Computer Audiophile said:

Take a step back and please think about the difference between the delivery format and what happens as part of the playback process. 

 

We must separate the file format or music format (PCM/DSD) from what happens “inside” the DAC. Many DACs oversample to 768kHz internally. This shouldn’t be a call to find 768kHz recordings because they must be better. 

Exactly. When HD music started to become readily available, I was unfortunate enough to have the first few HD albums I purchased be spectacularly produced and engineered. I thought, hell, I'm not buying that 256K Apple junk ever again. And screw the CD. 

 

Then I had a few things show up that were reissues of various sorts, where I owned the music on CD, or Apple's better quality compressed format. Hearing near zero difference between what I owned and the new releases on some albums and massive differences on others kicked me into analytical mode. Where I ended up was, not rebuying ANYTHING unless I can hear a sample to see if it's been well re-engineered. Interesting that's hearable on a 256k streamed sample.

 

I also started messing with upsampling to exotic PCM levels, or to DSD. No surprise... for some albums it sounded better, for reasons I couldn't explain. (Thanks for the images, Miska... now I do understand what changes.) For some albums it sounded no different. You can't fix bad engineering with upsampling, and albums with a DR of 3 don't sound any different as an Apple AAC as-is than they do in an HD form upsampled to 4x DSD. I would guess that some things might end up sounding worse upsampled, because you could better hear annoying things. I also found that it only made a large noticeable difference on one of my systems... and not the one with the most expensive DAC, and way more with headphones than through speakers.

 

Where I've ended up is, if I buy stuff that's a casualty in the loudness wars (my first live concert was the MC5, so yeah, I do...), I buy it in a cheap format. The good things that higher def and upsampling can do for sound just don't improve things for flat DR music- or at least not in a way I can hear. An artist I love, clumsily engineered, red book format it is. The good stuff is worth the extra cost for HD. I don't upsample what I stream from my server - only when I'm sitting down to listen deeply in, with headphones, on the one DAC where I know it matters a lot, with a local source. If I'm writing, or printing, or cooking, just living, playing through speakers in any of the four imperfect listening environments I've got, bit perfect is perfect enough.

 

There is such a thing as "good enough." 

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