Phasure NOS1 vs. Pacific Microsonics Model Two

[TimDH]

What seems great here is that Peter is actually exploiting the computer part of computer audio. Can I try to summarize what I think is going on and check with Peter and Mani?

 

1. The XXHigh End massively upsamples. This lets you get an almost perfect impulse response from the DAC- would pretty much eliminate pre and post-ringing. Some high end DACS like dCs and Weiss (medea at 352.8 khz) do this too, but with hardware.

2. XXHigh end uses some proprietary interpolation: "Arc prediction" for a more analogue processing

3. the NOS design avoids filtering done by DAC chips, which Peter dislikes. Again, some high end DAC makers do their own DSP which may result in avoiding the "bad" filtering of DAC chips.

4. By pre-processing the data in XXHighEnd, the computer isn't working hard at the time of playback.

4. The Phasure Dac has extremely low jitter.

 

So I wonder if Peter hasn't (entirely to his credit) recreated much of the hard work done by certain DAC manufacturers, but through software? Is that fair to say? What is hard to know is whether other respected DAC makers such as Metric Halo have incorporated some of these tricks into their hardware designs or not.

 

Also, Mani, Peter, could you comment more on the specs and cost of the PC that you found you need to do the job?

 

Thanks so much,

TDH

 

 

 

[TimDH]

Peter, I am really enjoying this, and I think others are too. Thanks for your responses to my questions- mostly answered now.

 

To recap, the upscaling is key to getting the non-ringing performance, correct? The data are upscaled and then put through your software to get the analogue-like behavior. I shouldn't have used "massive" upsampling, but it's what it takes to get from the source resolution to 384 khz.

 

Also, can you comment more on the PC aspect. Many in this forum try to avoid CPU load, and you say that the processing is in "parallel". Does this mean that the CPU is working hard while XXHighEnd is playing, but it doesn't affect the sonics, or is the CPU load light? I'm also interested in why you say that the energy savings features of laptops make them worse than a standard PC.

 

Thanks again,

TDH

 

[TimDH]

Mani,

I was hoping you could post picture(s) of the PCIe connection from the computer to the NOS DAC. Since I'm a Mac person, I'm not sure if your generic PC these days has a PCIe interface standard, or you need to configure your PC with one specially? Also, any comments on the specs of the PC you use- the question of how much computing power XXHighEnd needs?

Thanks!

TDH