John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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I can get definite ' stereo ' from a DVC driver with ' Left ' to one coil and ' Right ' to the other ......
I.E........... Punch and UnPunch the ' stereo - mono ' button
and hear an obvious differance

The diaphragm can only be in one place at any one time, but the motor is different when the coils are driven differently.

All good fortune,
Chris
 
Okay, and they always master the CD worse because?

At a guess because it sells to a different market. Cheaper, less quality conscious. More likely to buy on loudness i.e. quantity. But they also want to paint the SACD in a better light too for marketing reasons otherwise why invent the format?

If CDs can't be mastered well, then who needs them?

Just because they aren't in cases where there's an SACD too it doesn't follow that they can't be. I have plenty of decently mastered (to my ears) CDs.
 
At a guess because it sells to a different market. Cheaper, less quality conscious. More likely to buy on loudness i.e. quantity. But they also want to paint the SACD in a better light too for marketing reasons otherwise why invent the format?



Just because they aren't in cases where there's an SACD too it doesn't follow that they can't be. I have plenty of decently mastered (to my ears) CDs.

Well, I'm not saying CD's don't sound good. But, no, I don't buy into the notion that they master the CD poorly so the SACD will sound better. The CD layer of SACD's are often some of my very best recordings on CD, yet they are still not as good as the SACD layer, to my ears.

Still, I prefer 24bit/192kHz Bluray sound to SACD's. Lot's of bluray players out there and lots of movies with 24bit/192kHz sound ... shame, shame, shame on the music industry ... all I have to say!
 
The CD layer of SACD's are often some of my very best recordings on CD, yet they are still not as good as the SACD layer, to my ears.

I speculate that your CD player doesn't have the right kind of DAC chip in it. Stanley Lipshitz says (more to the point, shows) DSD is technically flawed, Lynn Olson says the SACD sounds distinctly different from the mastertape. I can't see any reason to disbelieve either of them. But then maybe you value other aspects in the sound of SACD vs CD to those I do. Or perhaps I have too poor an SACD player.

Still, I prefer 24bit/192kHz Bluray sound to SACD's.

Now that's beginning to sound more promising... :p So what does SACD give up to 24/192 to your ears?
 
It's been noted several places on the internet that sometimes the CD layer has even been taken from an existing CD remaster in the case of older music. I have personally listened to a Depeche Mode hybrid SACD which was louder and had more compression on the CD layer.

Abraxalito is exactly correct on the reasons why.

The truth is, SACD was not created in some noble attempt at better audio, that was a secondary result. The primary goal behind SACD was to make a format that was difficult to pirate and then market it as a replacement for the CD. This was back when selling shiny discs was still their only mission.

Does anyone really believe people at Sony thought DSD was so audibly better than 24/96 LPCM? They knew DSD was sufficiently different (annoying) that no consumer PC would play it for years to come and there would be a total lack of cheap software to process it.
 
It's probably just placebo. I believe every single available DAC IC performs worse at 24/192 compared to 24/96.
Personally I've found that all converters require lengthy, even huge warmup times, where all the while they're continuously processing audio material. I would take absolutely no notice of what a DAC sounded like until it's had at least, say, an hour's solid workout, with material having plenty of high frequency content.

Even the miserable chips that come with PC motherboards dramatically improve if you give them a good exercise regime ...

Frank
 
The truth is, SACD was not created in some noble attempt at better audio, that was a secondary result. The primary goal behind SACD was to make a format that was difficult to pirate and then market it as a replacement for the CD. This was back when selling shiny discs was still their only mission.

That's a conspiration theory!
DSD was created at Sony as archiving format for their own use. SACD is just a byproduct of that.
 
By your own admission Frank you like to play with S-D type converters. I'm not sure that chris719 is talking about those types coz they don't change their output frequencies, just their OS ratios internally between 96k and 192k.
Not so much like to play with, I just use what's at hand: I have 2 old players by Yamaha, with multi-bit BB. And the upmarket one does a very nice job ...

The really interesting thing I found with the PC S-D unit, is that once it had warmed up, the SQ fed with an audio track upsampled offline to 192k was superior to the nominally identical 96k version. And superior, in that classic key area where S-D cops the flak: sparkle in the treble ...

Which I interpret as meaning that the less work the electronics have to do to process the signal, internal OS'ng, the better the sound.

Frank
 
By your own admission Frank you like to play with S-D type converters. I'm not sure that chris719 is talking about those types coz they don't change their output frequencies, just their OS ratios internally between 96k and 192k.

Even with SD converters, the datasheet measurements are worse at 192k, mostly because as you said, the OS ratio is going to be lower.
 
That's a conspiration theory!
DSD was created at Sony as archiving format for their own use. SACD is just a byproduct of that.

I suppose, I still haven't heard a valid reason why you can't archive with 24-bit 96 or 192KHz PCM.

You are talking about a company that put a rootkit for DRM purposes on CD's they sold without telling anyone. They also removed a whole somewhat useful feature from the PS3 when they found it could possibly be used to run unauthorized software. Different divisions, I know, same corporate mentality.
 
Ah I haven't been paying attention to the detailed specs of S-D types as they're not my thing any more. Which specs degrade? I can imagine noise does as there's a wider bandwidth.

I do pore over multibit datahsheets though and noticed that PCM63 specs out (THD+N) better than PCM1704 - i put that down to the latter being spec'd at 768kHz and the former at half that. Faster means a higher proportion of the time is taken up in settling - can't be avoided even if there are zero glitches (which manufacturer admits to glitches in audio dacs... :p)
 
When we are talking about the difference between 24/96 and 24/196 how much of the difference is because of the differences in clock Jitter and what does it take to actually get the most of the 24/196? I haven't read any technical information on the difference in quite some time and can't remember the actual spectrum changes between the two formats. I would suspect that the clock needs to be of a much higher order accuracy with the higher frequency to not make it worse instead of better. Am I off here, I remember reading some papers by Theta Digital long ago about clock jitter and the differences of single and multi-bit resolution. Have to refresh my memory here. What is the bit size and rate on Blue-ray?
 
When we are talking about the difference between 24/96 and 24/196 how much of the difference is because of the differences in clock Jitter and what does it take to actually get the most of the 24/196?

I reckon the differences depend mostly on what kind of DAC is in play - S-D or multibit.

For the multibit case the jitter is much less of an issue - its mainly affecting high frequencies because how timing errors translate into amplitude ones is in direct proportion to the frequency being reproduced and its amplitude. Errors due to jitter scale down with amplitude so with quiet signals, the errors are correspondingly quieter.

With S-D there's always a fairly high level (with multibit S-D perhaps 30dB down on full scale) high frequency signal present no matter what the music's doing. Jittering this out of band signal produces noise that shows up in the audio band. When the music's quiet ( say -60dB) the jitter does have to be rather low for that nearby HF signal 30dB higher in amplitude not to change the audio band noisefloor.
 
I suppose, I still haven't heard a valid reason why you can't archive with 24-bit 96 or 192KHz PCM.

Me neither - seeing as I understand DSD to have poorer than Redbook dynamic range at 20kHz (due to the ultrasonic quantization creeping in) I reckon the smart guys will stick with PCM. Perhaps DSD256 fixes this though.

You are talking about a company that put a rootkit for DRM purposes on CD's they sold without telling anyone. They also removed a whole somewhat useful feature from the PS3 when they found it could possibly be used to run unauthorized software. Different divisions, I know, same corporate mentality.

I think, though I'm by no means certain, that DSD originated in the non-division of Sony called Oxford Digital whose technical guru was Peter Eastty, which was later subsumed into the Sony empire.
 
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