Why does the soundstage sound different (often better IMHO) in high rate DSD like DSD256 Vs native Redbook to a DAC with a Chip that upsamples to ultimately do SDM conversion.

[fas42]

The simple answer is that the quality of replay of digital sourced material is extremely fragile, and every tiny interference and noise factor, and slight misbehaviour in the chain, somewhere, can and mostly likely will, have an audible impact.

 

Contrary to what most believe, it has close to zero to do with how impressive various numbers of performance of bits of the digital side of things are. What really matters is how robust the chain is, to keeping under control the nasty influence of unwanted electrical cross contamination. Which of course, no-one measures ... .

[fas42]

14 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Or wrong things are being measured... Or the things aren't inaudible in the end...

 

I have my own opinion on these matters...

 

 

Yes, the 'wrong things' are what are always measured - which is why it's typically such a torturous path for people to evolve a system into producing highly convincing playback.

 

It seems only experience and an instinct for what needs to be done gets results in a more straightforward manner ... still.  Again, noise and interference are the enemy; and numbers are not the heroes, galloping up to the rescue!

 

If one has worked on 'debugging' rigs multiple times then you know how precarious the stability of the SQ is; it's a trivial exercise to cause the subjective quality of what you hear to completely collapse - going from highly engaging to 'unlistenable', simply by making a small change in the physical environment - not all the king's men, who don't know what just happened, can put the system together again ...

 

What did happen? Well, the subtle change allowed the level of electrical interference to rise just enough, for the clarity of sound to deteriorate beyond a critical point; and the human hearing system's ability to compensate is over stretched - it gives up. At this point, you are no longer enjoying listening to music; rather, you are constantly reminded that the apparatus in front is faking a musical event, and not doing a very good job of it.

[fas42]

16 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Not always, I believe I measure number of relevant things.

 

I'm sure that there are hints in what conventional measurements give us which indicate issues - however, I have not read anything which neatly ties the normal numbers which can be obtained, to what is heard.

 

16 hours ago, Miska said:

 

 

That is something that can be measured pretty easily.

 

 

Well, that's news to me . I don't think I have read anywhere where someone has done research on the resistance of a complete audio chain to noise/interference, as regards the impact on subjective SQ ...

[fas42]

17 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Then you haven't been reading my postings much...

 

Things like NAA also exist for a reason, which is more than one.

 

 

Yes, you're very technical ... but then I read something like

 

where you said

 

Quote

I take objective-subjective approach to my work, so I want things to measure well and once they measure well they also need to sound good. Otherwise I'm not happy and wouldn't have peace of mind. But ultimately you need to make your own choice based on your particular hearing sensitivities and the material you listen.

 

IOW, exactly where most people are ... there is a lack of knowledge on what precisely to measure, so that one can say that the presentation passes a certain standard of acceptability.

[fas42]

On 9/3/2023 at 9:01 AM, Miska said:

 

No, there's no lack of knowledge.

 

 

IOW, if you were only able to extract a set of measurements, and never actually hear, listen to the playback, you could confidently predict whether you could live with the SQ, or not - yes?

[fas42]

10 hours ago, Shadorne said:

 

Both @Miska @bogi and several others, if l paraphrase correctly, believe there is something wrong enough to be audibly detrimental with the quality of the processing in chip-based SDM DACs, and pc-based processing eliminates this problem. I FULLY AGREE - this is unproven but it seems 99% likely to be the issue.

 

...

 

I welcome other suggestions.

 

My experience is that human hearing can accommodate all sorts of technical deficiencies of various sorts - but a combination of too many issues becomes too much ... the ability of the ear/brain to process the sound it's hearing, and handle the necessary unraveling is overloaded, and it "sounds bad!". There is no single anomaly in itself which means a thumbs up, or a thumbs down - two rigs which have totally different sets of 'problems' could both be entirely acceptable; or alternatively, could both be disturbing to listen to - it's the combinations which matter, not the individual 'shortcomings', in isolation.

[fas42]

15 hours ago, Miska said:

 

You were talking about noise and interference.

 

 

The nub is this, that which I said earlier,

 

Quote

I don't think I have read anywhere where someone has done research on the resistance of a complete audio chain to noise/interference, as regards the impact on subjective SQ ...

 

Can you measure this, or not?

[fas42]

3 hours ago, davide256 said:

Sound stage is mostly a function of treble and treble overtones of lower frequencies. Speakers with fast treble drivers will sound stage better than slower speakers. Ergo if the solution you employ is fast, undistorted by resonances and accurate for dynamics it can sound stage well. As to the OP's original question, it remains

a no brainer that DSD up-sampling can sound stage better by pushing D-A  filter artifacts outside the range of human hearing, something which PCM up-sampling never seems to accomplish. Nit picking about much smaller order phenomena doesn't get us anywhere unless one can empirically demonstrate that the error

is humanly detectable

 

The nature of the speaker may help with soundstage perception, depending upon anomalies elsewhere - but it's only a very small player in the game. A sorted reproduction chain with a very low cost, normal speaker will present a soundstage vastly superior to that of an exotic speaker costing 100's of times more, if the latter is driven by a substandard set of electronics ... it's the overall integrity that determines the quality of the listening experience; not the 'quality' of individual components.

 

Once one has a handle on what is going on, it's quite easy to make the soundstage collapse, by simply 'damaging', degrading some link in the chain, anywhere in the path.

[fas42]

All this sort of thing occurs because digital reproduction is very, very prone to altering the subjective clarity of low level detail in a recording - the slightest variation in "how it's done" impacts that clarity, which means there is this endless debate about the 'right way'.

 

It would be nice if human hearing wasn't so sensitive to this stuff ... but, it is. So, "pick your poison" - really accurate reproduction is possible, but requires more than the usual fiddling around with the technical settings of the design ...

[fas42]

19 hours ago, bogi said:

Like I mentioned above in some post, soundstage is created in our brains. We are clearly coming into subjective waters here. Then we need to assume a listener to be part of a listening chain and attribute listening test results to a specific listener. IMO no generalization of individual listening test results is appropriate. I also cannot associate such a listening test results to word 'objective'.

 

 

My experience with 'soundstage' has always correlated with what others around me have experienced. Unless they were fully paid up 'audiophiles', . The latter have at times reacted positively to very obviously defective reproduction; and showed lack of interest, boredom with 'natural', realistic replay ... IME .

 

Good sound stage means that it's easy to relate what you're hearing to sounds made by musicians, instruments - it throws up a convincing illusion which in the best instances is impossible to "hear past". If you're always aware that you are listening to some sort of imitation, having a certain degree of "paleness", then you experiencing below what's possible soundstaging.

 

19 hours ago, bogi said:

There are many aspects of sound quality, one of them is soundstage. People can easily disagree on anything sound quality related, including which aspects of sound quality are more important etc. Hunting for objectiveness does not bring sense to me.

 

Good sound quality delivers everything. Including soundstage. The biggest problem is the general poor quality of measurement methods, which are in the league of the Blind Men and an Elephant parable - small parts of the story can be determined with great accuracy, but the gestalt, which is so obvious at a subjective level, is MIA ...