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Still very interesting

Posted by Charles Hansen (M) on October 18, 2017 at 04:15:42

In Reply to: RE: Very interesting posted by John Elison on October 15, 2017 at 19:11:48:

Thanks for sharing the extra details of how you are doing your comparisons. It still doesn't change my basic point. Either:

1) There is something special about double-rate DSD that allows inexpensive equipment ($1000) to sound better than even a $100,000 dCS stack.

2) Teac has figured out how to build a ADC + DAC for $1000 that outperforms everything else on the market, even at 100x the price.

3) The Teec operating with double-rate DSD has exceeded the resolution limit of either your system or your listening ability.

Based on my experience, DSD is similar to tubes - it is much easier to design equipment that sounds good with both technologies than when designing with PCM or transistors. The catch is that tubes wear out, and DSD (regardless of the sampling rate) is (as one of the co-developers has publicly stated) "a phenomenally clumsy format with no sonic benefits" EXCEPT when used as you are using it - a strict conversion process ONLY.

Normally recording (digital or analog) requires manipulation of the signal - level adjustments, mixing, EQ, compression, reverb and/or echo, and thousands of more techniques that are literally impossible to implement with only 1-bit data.

Since you are simply converting the audio from the analog domain to the digital domain, there is far less to go wrong by using DSD. I am very curious if you have tried this test with lower sampling rates - eg, single-rate DSD. The particular designer who made the above quoted statement about DSD also says that going beyond the standard 64x rate actually degrades the sound quality, rather than improving it. And obviously the file size scales linearly with the sampling rate, so that with double-rate DSD, one is left with file sizes twice that of single-rate, and even larger than 192/24. Further compounding the problem is that PCM is readily and cheaply (free!) compressible with FLAC. In contrast, the counterpart loosless algorithms to compress DSD for SACDs were developed by Philips and have not been released for general use. The result is that a double-rate DSD file will be well over twice as large as a 192/24 FLAC file. This may or may not be of concern to you, as digital storage continues to fall in price.

Yet I would still be curious to find if your experience is consistent with his - that the lower single-rate DSD file sounds better than the double-rate DSD file.

(By the way, the Burr-Brown DAC chip used in your TASCAM re-modulates the 1-bit DSD audio data to 5 or 6 bits for presentation to the actual current sources used to generate the analog current output. That signal then passes through several op-amps, first to be converted to voltage, likely another stage to use the balanced outputs from that particular DAC chip through a differential amplifier to reduce the level of common-mode switching noise created by the operation of the DAC chip, and almost certainly a final output buffering chip - so probably 3 op-amps in the analog signal path just after the DAC chip. These must also be sonically transparent, which begs the question of why not just use a $200 phono stage that uses those same op-amps?)

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