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Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

RE: CS4398: extreme opposite of the large tap length Chord DAC?

There is no "objectively better" when one is measuring distortion along multiple dimensions, unless all the available objective measurements come out better for one of the choices. Given the nature of filter tradeoffs this is mathematically impossible. The tradeoffs are an inescapable result of the filtering required to conform to the Nyquist requirement. One such tradeoff is duration of ringing vs. high frequency extension.

If the recording is made with a good apodizing filter there will be no energy at the Nyquist limit and, indeed, no energy in a guard band close to the Nyquist limit. In this case, and only in this case, then the "correct" reproduction of the recorded data will be a perfect sinc filter. However, this reproduction will not correspond to the original analog signal, nor what the producers heard if their DAC used something other than a perfect sinc filter. My experience shows that recordings made with apodizing filters will sound best when played back with a perfect sinc filter, but most recordings are not made this way. Most recordings are made with an imperfect sinc filter and most of these will sound better when played back with an apodizing filter in the DAC. However, playing back an apodized recording with an apodizing DAC will produce an inferior playback, because of unnecessary high frequency rolloff and transient smearing.

These effects are audible and appreciated by recording engineers who have taken the time to train themselves to hear the distortions and related tradeoffs. Filtering associated with the 44.1 kHz sampling rate has been proven to be audible by double blind listening tests.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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