Digital Drive: Re: Analog vs SACD distortion by Peter Qvortrup Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

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Posted by Peter Qvortrup (M ) on August 15, 2003 at 03:41:46

In Reply to: Re: Analog vs SACD distortion posted by KB on August 13, 2003 at 10:08:53:

Dear KB,

I am heartened by many of the developments in the past 15 years, however, I also see the vast majority of the commercially available products of this type as just another expression of industry opportunism and carpet bagging, there is very little sincerity and commitment to finding the best solution to anything in most of these products.

People who 15 or even just 5 years ago despised valve amplifiers of any ilk are now "re-inventing" this technology and discovering greatness there, what I find discouraging is that so many audiophiles do not remember that these same people 2 years earlier were throwing mud at the selfsame technology they are now praising as the best.

So ask yourself what caused their sudden change of mind on this?

I don't think is was the sound or their love of music, that is for sure.

I started building the tube amplifier market in 1984 when Erik Andersson and I started Audio Innovations, there were NO affordable tube amplifiers then and we took great risks and suffered great discomfort fighting for our beliefs, I still do, but I think the "cause" if you will is worth fighting for, music is being dealt a pretty raw deal by most of the equipment out there whether in recording or reproduction and that HAS to change, otherwise we will end up undermining its glorious message to such an extent that no-one will be able to hear it and we will be forced to return to music of the primitive jungle beat variery and there is not much variety or emotional/intellectual stimulus available there as you know.

As far as down filtering to the mainstream is concerned, none of the stuff most of us play with will ever come close to the mainstream, and be honest if it did would we not have moved elsewhere by the time it did, I think it is in the nature of what we do.

I think combining the best solutions of the past with the best current know how and materials technology is the way forward, I am not a sentimentalist where technology is concerned (with music I certainly am, but that is again a separate matter), there has been so much poor technology developed over the past 100 years, but also some of the best and it seems that the best solutions always came off a blank sheet of paper, never off the pages of an applications manual like most "design" do now, so I invariably end up with "older" solutions, which incidentally also happen to be more expensive.

This has over the years of studying the subject made me increasingly cynical as I have become convinced that most socalled development work done since the start of the 1960's has largely been for commercial reasons, not to do with real sonic quality, like cost, miniturisation, portability neither of which add one iota to the sound quality.

A SONY walkman is a very nice thing to have and use, but it does not represent any great step forward in the quality stakes.

How these "improvements" are then packaged by the advertising departments is a different matter, but I don't think it is a co-incidence that most large electronic companies expenditure on marketing is dozens of times more than their research budgets.

The "I can make the "same" cheaper" syndrome is at such an advanced stage now, that most of the real understanding of how sound works at a fundamental level has gone by the way side in this mad rush.

I think the "repetition echo" is generated by the much higher oversampling rates used in DSD, the same is the case I find in 1-bit 16/44 processers when they are compared to 4 or 8 times oversampled multibit processors.

The effect is similar to the one found when increasing the feedback
in amplification.

Don't forget oversampling multiplies everything including whatever "invisible" errors that may exist in the data stream plus those introduced by power supply variations in the sampling chips themselves etc. etc.

Just a few more thought to bore you with.

Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup

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