I agree with you on that when it comes to the data reduction part, all the folding stuff. The interesting part is the short impulse response stuff.
Assuming humans can't hear anything above 20 kHz no matter what, increasing the sample rate to some value far above 44 kHz or so should be useless for human listeners, except for some second-order effects: reduced intersample overshoot issues and smaller quantization noise density due to the larger Nyquist bandwidth. The first can be solved more effectively with a bit of digital attenuation and the second with longer wordlengths.
Still, high sample rates are popular among audiophiles. If you are going to use high sample rates anyway, should that be used to extend the audio bandwidth or to shorten the impulse response or a bit of both?
I would say to extend the audio bandwidth, because that will at least be to the benefit of domestic pets (if the bandwidth limitations of microphones and loudspeakers don't spoil it too much) and humans don't hear the difference anyway. The MQA people have a completely different opinion about that, as do people who like DSD, Hans van Maanen with his temporal coherence and many others. It would be nice to know who is right.
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As far as I understand it, MQA claimed that the original 16 MSBs wouldn't be altered. They further claimed that the information in the ultrasonic range would be maintained and encoded in the 8 LSBs. According to them, this would result in 16/44.1 quality true to the original on playback equipment without MQA and 24/192 quality on equipment that support MQA, from the same file.
I think it's reasonable to hold MQA to these claims. I think it's reasonable to allow for third-party verification. They've resisted both.
I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant. That's one of many reasons I make more measurements available for my circuits than anybody else in the industry. That way prospective buyers can see what they're getting. I have nothing to hide.
So are speaker cable lifters and ground boxes. Your point?
Tom
Its like this, suppose this right now is August, 1834, and some engineer guy reports seeing a raised body of water traveling down a river with no known explanation. At that point there is an extraordinary claim, but no extraordinary evidence. So, do we conclude the guy is imagining things that aren't real, or if not that then he must be a liar?
Because that's the type of reaction historically seen in audio forums.
Back to today: People who claimed early ESS Hyperstream II dacs had an unpleasant sound were treated like they were imagining things or liars by some people in audio forums. "These dacs measure below audibility so its impossible for them not to be transparent." "You must be imagining something that isn't real."
Then just recently ESS came up with the next version of Hyperstream modulator. "Now our dacs sound better than ever." They fixed the problem that KSTR finally showed over at ASR after years of work...
So did anyone apologize to all those audiophiles who heard something that was real, but had no extraordinary explanation at the time? NO! We pretend they were never told they must be imagining something.
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Forget MQA, but I don’t under this HiRes format nowadays that is FLAC’ed out at 44.1/48k 24bit instead of the original master recordings ~96-192k and charging users for premium subscriptions (Tidal, Quboz others)
I only had time to check the 2L website and they record in DXD. Now looking at the DXD specs that looks rather like PCM to me, just with a high enough sampling rate that conversion to DSD is less compute intensive. Have I missed something?
You really need some context here. As has been noted most masters leave the studio in some PCM format. Very little in DSD. So is you point (and the point of some random on youtube) that doing the bulk of the DSP work outside that DAC produces a result more pleasing to some listeners in sighted testing? If so thats fine and each to their own. Doesn't mean one method is better and certainly not more accurate compared to the original signal.
In fact back to 8 years ago. If you are going to dredge up the past links to this bad treatment are needed or we have to assume you are in full FUD mode rather than wanting any form of nuanced or reasoned discussion.
Bill, the links all got lost when the forum software was changed. And I didn't save text of wrongful posts.
However, I can remember getting beat up by Syn08 and others for not having absolute proof today of every little thing that can be heard, including different capacitors. Also, I read here in the forum explanations such as I have read at ASR adding up the dBs of distortion of a dac chip, the dBs of the thresholds of audibility and the thresholds of pain to come up with whether flaws in a dac can be audible. You don't remember any of that?
The people doing those calculations told people they couldn't be hearing any flaw, it was impossible. Turned out the people who thought they knew what was impossible didn't even know that the thresholds are not hard limits.
Much less did they know about what looks like noise on an FFT is not necessarily noise at all. Yet to them there was only stationary HD/IMD and noise floor.
The effect was that they worked hard to stifle people from telling the truth about things that affect sound.
We still get some of that today. I explained in multiple threads about Bybees, wire directionality , purple felt pins, and Schumann frequency, probable physical causes and possible measurement techniques. That said, i don't find any physical explanation for pyramids or crystals at this point. But those things all still get lumped together without any interest in taking a serious look at reasonable, plausible scientific explanations for some of them.
However, I can remember getting beat up by Syn08 and others for not having absolute proof today of every little thing that can be heard, including different capacitors. Also, I read here in the forum explanations such as I have read at ASR adding up the dBs of distortion of a dac chip, the dBs of the thresholds of audibility and the thresholds of pain to come up with whether flaws in a dac can be audible. You don't remember any of that?
The people doing those calculations told people they couldn't be hearing any flaw, it was impossible. Turned out the people who thought they knew what was impossible didn't even know that the thresholds are not hard limits.
Much less did they know about what looks like noise on an FFT is not necessarily noise at all. Yet to them there was only stationary HD/IMD and noise floor.
The effect was that they worked hard to stifle people from telling the truth about things that affect sound.
We still get some of that today. I explained in multiple threads about Bybees, wire directionality , purple felt pins, and Schumann frequency, probable physical causes and possible measurement techniques. That said, i don't find any physical explanation for pyramids or crystals at this point. But those things all still get lumped together without any interest in taking a serious look at reasonable, plausible scientific explanations for some of them.
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Well was there ANY proof anyone could hear this artifact? Sighted listening need not apply. Audiophiles have been hearing things for the last 50 years that are not there, so it's only right that sensible people question that. You on the other hand seem to believe almost everything you read or are told.
So we are back to no evidence and you using the example of a new chip coming out to go 'hah that proves it'. I fail to see the proof at any step here.
But if someone is happy with their music reproduction system then that is always a good thing, however crude it may seem to the various audio cliques out there. After all we are listening to music most of which we have no idea how it is supposed to sound anyway...
So we are back to no evidence and you using the example of a new chip coming out to go 'hah that proves it'. I fail to see the proof at any step here.
But if someone is happy with their music reproduction system then that is always a good thing, however crude it may seem to the various audio cliques out there. After all we are listening to music most of which we have no idea how it is supposed to sound anyway...
Sometimes you need to test out what is claimed. Sort of lost the opportunity with MQA for now, but Hyperbole IV evaluation yes, that’s in the work elsewhere🙂
… and if it turns out to be really that good we can forget about DSD!
… and if it turns out to be really that good we can forget about DSD!
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No, that is the gist of it, 2L records in DXD almost exclusively which is nothing other than 32 bit high data rate audio. I included them because they feature unusual music which is also well recorded. (Check out their comparisons between formats)
The others listed claim to record primarily in DSD
How is that even remotely applicable here?
MQA made claims that could easily have been verified by file comparisons. When third parties tried to verify their claims, they were blocked from doing so. MQA has not provided any data to support their claims. They basically say, "our stuff is great! Trust us!" and hope that nobody finds out the truth.
On top, MQA's description of how their technology works seems to defy fundamental sampling theory.
Tom
There is no "proof' in science, as I think you know. There is such a thing as anecdotal evidence which is a lot what we have when dealing with humans. A lot of drug side effects in the USP monographs are based on patient reports. Sometimes such information is the best we have. We just have to deal with it. Not every different capacitor design is going to get formal, publication quality listening tests. Nobody has the resources to do such things on a massive scale. Doesn't mean its all imaginary.
BS. I know people with a remarkable ability to debias themselves in sighted listening. Moreover, ThorstenL is back and active in the forum in Marcel's RTZ FIRDAC thread. He has described something that I completely agree with, which is to the effect that if multiple people independently report hearing the same thing, there is a good chance there is something to it.
Also, a lot of what people have claimed to have heard has turned out to be real, its the engineers who were in denial. Such things include Bybees, purple felt pens on CD edges, Schumann frequency, etc.
Now I think you are imagining things that aren't real. I just said I don't find any evidence for crystals or pyramids, for example. I have no problem saying if I don't see a way something could influence sound, and I have said so in multiple cases.
Again, there is no proof in science which I think you know very well.
Regarding the new chip, it wasn't ESS who said the old chips couldn't have a sound because measurements "prove" it; it was engineers who didn't understand psychoacoustics and or the kinds of artifacts sigma delta modulators can produce. You can ask MarcelvdG if you don't think so. He wrote the Valve DAC article for Linear Audio. His day job is as an analog IC designer, which IIUC includes DAC design and evaluation. He can tell you the kinds of nasty things sigma delta modulators can do, including things that don't show up well on AP analyzers.
Getting back to ESS, in fact it was ESS who said audiophiles were hearing something real. They were apparently trying to educate the know-it-all EEs who didn't know as much as they believed they did.
Sometimes we know and other times we don't. There is a very good vinyl setup here to compare with CD. There are also real instruments here. There are people who have a good piano in their house too. We know what our instruments sound like. If they sound clearly fake on what is supposed to be a serious recording, something must be wrong. If you take the recording to my house and all of a sudden it sounds far more real, you can get a pretty good idea of where the problem most likely is.
That may be true for people who haven't kept up with modern sampling theory. Maybe go look up things like "Compressed Sensing." It can work remarkably well in some cases.
The gold standard for DSD in the recording business these days seems to Merging Technologies Pyramix software, along with their Horus hardware. They have complete systems the can do a lot of mixing and mastering while staying in DSD. There are AES papers on the math involved. Recently it was announced that HQ Player software was licensed for use in Merging Technologies systems.
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