Best Digital Filter Chips and Info?

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fastcat95

Member
Joined 2003
Hello to All:

I want to ask (take a mini poll) as to what people think
are the best digital filter chips that have been on the
market in terms of sound quality. They could be either
current or past production.

Also, does anyone know of web sites that discuss things
like digital filter impulse response and associated issues?

Thanks to all in advance!

fastcat
 
JohnW

JohnW

Member
Joined 2004
Fastcat,

No Question, the Pacific Microsonics PMD100 / PMD 200 HDCD filters - IMO nothing comes even close... other filters give digital filters a bad name.

Besides these - next best would be the YSF210 Yamaha 22bit.

The NPC filters (as badged by Burr Brown / TI) always seem to lean on the side of being bass-heavy & poor sound staging compared to the neutral sounding Yamaha’s and HDCD filters.

John
 
F

fastcat95

Member
Joined 2003
JohnW:

A bit amazing that the PMD100 & 200 are still the
best sounding digital filter chips. I would have
thought that some manufacturer ( TI, AD, NPC,
etc.) might have come up with something better
at handling the digital filtering. I guess that Keith
Johnson & company (Pacific Microsonics) were
just that much better (or ahead) of the crowd.

Fastcat
 
jean-paul

jean-paul

Disabled Account
Joined 2002
YM3623B is a digital receiver ( DIR ) like Crystal CS8412 etc.

BTW the PMD100 is nothing but neutral IMO on non-HDCD recordings which made me choose other filters at that time. Fastcat, if you include combined digital filter+DAC chips there are other candidates as well.
 
kiwi_abroad

kiwi_abroad

Member
Joined 2001
In a lot of cases, modern DAC's have built in digital filters eg AD1955 and PCM1792, and many others. Some allow the internal digial filter to be bypassed, so you have to hook up an external one. The question is, how do the internal filters compare to the external ones. One would hope the the internal filters are customized / optimized for the DAC they are part of.

Adrian
 
percy

percy

Member
Joined 2004
I know I am reviving a very old thread but I was searching about the same subject so I thought I'd just bump this up.

The SM5842/7 and PMD100/200 seem to be the only decent digital filters that have ever been around. Arn't there really no new digital filters that are as good, if not better, than these filters ?
Digital filters have always appealed to me over 'Sample Rate Conversion' for oversampling 44.1Khz because of the integer oversampling ratio and also a higher ratio(8x) than typical ASRC(192khz).


Are there any modern DSP processors or solutions that could be substituted for these filters ?

I am also not opposed to the idea of doing a pic based diy filter.
 
Bernhard

Bernhard

Member
Joined 2002
I strongly believe that this one is the best digital filter currently available:

bestdf.jpg


:clown: :clown: :clown:
 
J

Javin5

Member
Joined 2006
I agree that the PMD100 mentioned above is indeed an excellent filter chip. I'm saying this, because I have a CD-player with a PMD100 and can directly A/B compare it with an ESS Sabre DAC. I'm not sure if the PMD100 is still in production or available, and I'm not sure about the PMD200 either. I have not seen these chips in any of the any newer CD-Players, but I may miss some info here..

From what I have heard, the PMD200 should be even better. However, it has different pin numbers and pin layout, so there is no simple replace/upgrade path from the PMD100 to the PMD200.

I might add, that my subjective impression is that the PMD 100 sounds also really good on non-HDCD discs.
 
S

Skorpio

Member
Joined 2004
philpoole said:
Thought I'd chip in.

My TDA1541A DAC started off NOS, then 4x OS with SAA7220, then I moved up to PMD100, and I can safely say the latter is by far the best.
Using TDA1541A, with 16 bits, I'm not really doing this for HDCD. With just standard CDs it sounds great.
Click to expand...


With 16 bits, did you try it both with and without dither?
 
P

philpoole

Member
Joined 2004
Well, my first implementation with TDA1541A was NOS, and I was really pleased with it. Then, wanting to try OS and see what all the fuss was about, I added an SAA7220P/A, upgraded to a P/B, and I was really pleased with the results. I did initially wonder where all the bass went (NOS has less treble than you should expect), but after aclimatising, it was worth it.
Then, I decided I'd try what some would call a proper digital filter (well, that's unfair, some argue the SAA7220 has flaws) to see what the fuss was about, and it was further improvement. Really pleased with the result.
I don't think I'd go back to NOS, despite it worked well, and was simple to implement.

I'm using a simple opamp IV and passive analogue filtering - which is definitely the weakest link as its loading the opamp stage too much. This is my next area to work on - if I ever get round to it.

Cheers,
Phil
 
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