CHORD ELECTRONICS DAVE

[esimms86]

So when are dealers going to start taking orders for Dave and when will Dave be shipping to the US?

 

[ChordElectronics]

 
So when are dealers going to start taking orders for Dave and when will Dave be shipping to the US?

You'll be pleased to know that our dealers in the US have already started taking orders. We're still finishing Dave off, but expect to begin shipping mid to late October.

 

[Raika]

can we see Rob watts talk about the new chord dave ?

 

[DaveRedRef-III]

This question is directed to Rob Watts (though others are of course welcome to comment)
I have been a fan of Chord equipment for many years now, having owned the Red Reference 1, 2 and 3 plus one of their current power amps. The sound is always clean, musical and well engineered. I am so taken by the specs and the logic of your work on DAVE that I am wondering if I bought the DAC and linked it digitally via my Red Reference 3 CD player would I still benefit from the benefits of this groundbreaking product?
 
My concern is that the RR3 will up-sample the CD data and (I assume) use its own onboard clock in the process. Will this conflict or compromise the sound in any way? 

 

[DaveRedRef-III]

Whilst we await more information and reviews on the new DAVE DAC I thought I would make an observation regarding the somewhat modest 44.1/16 protocol as an enduring delivery medium and why I belief in what Chord and Rob Watts are doing compared to some other solutions out there.
 
Over the last 12-18 months it has become ever clearer that CD playback has been limited for decades by the D-A conversion process rather than an inherent lack of musical information stored on the medium. 44,100 samples per second is still a lot of information if you can present it properly I think. Some product providers have gone down a pure DSD route for up-sampling and playback of PCM data and there have been some rave reviews of products from DCS and PS Audio in particular more recently as they have shown there is far more information buried in the 44.1/16 format than we had previously realised. Meridian with their MQA software solution has also come to the same conclusion on PCM I believe. Others, like Chord, are finding their own proprietary new technology is delivering significant improvements too. In the past I have spent a huge amount of time auditioning front end products from well respected manufacturers like DCS, Meitner, Esoteric, Musical Fidelity, T&A to mention just a few. For my sins I was an SACD junkie for a while but I eventually concluded SACD/DSD had a flaw. To my ears DSD was not musical to the extent that PCM was musical. I wanted DSD to be the answer because I liked the way it imaged and presented itself but I found it drove me away from some of my favourite albums over time. The DSD versions just didn't touch me emotionally in the same way that PCM did. For those of you able to borrow copies, I would recommend listening to the SACD/DSD stereo mastering of Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker album compared to the Doug Sax mastering of the earlier CD only release. The SACD version simply has no soul (to my ears at least). The CD layer from the SACD came from the DSD master I believe and even the CD version is lifeless/unemotional. Somehow DSD had taken the life out of the recording. I stopped playing this recording some time ago thinking I had gone off the album. This is not an isolated case I would add. I have listened to very many SACD/DSD recordings over the years and over and over i found the same problem. Recently I re-purchased the Doug Sax PCM mastering (having previously given my original copy to a friend when I bought the SACD/CD) and found the Doug Sax CD version of Heartbreaker still delivered all that 'heartbreaking' emotion I first heard and loved. Even the dynamics on the DS mastering are exceptional in 16 bit. Of course we hear bad masterings of CD's as well from time to time but I do not find anywhere near the same propensity to fail to deliver musicality from the PCM based protocol. In short I tend to find DSD recordings lethargic and lacking real emotion or musical bounce, which is perhaps why DSD has established itself in the one HiRez genre where you can, to an extent, get away with limited musicality - Classical Music. For me musicality is the most important attribute of good hifi. That is what drew me to music in the first place. That is why I learned to play an instrument and why I have been buying Chord Electronics front ends. I am sure other brands out there deliver good musicality too but my point is, with the possible exception of Meitner who have recognised this fault in DSD and tried hard to really understand it rather than just throw a new expensive clock at the problem, I am still not seeing 'Musicality' heralded in the current rave reviews of 100% DSD up-sampling products. Like many others I have a very large and costly CD collection. CD's are PCM based and so it matters to me that I am buying into something that is designed to fully address the attributes of that protocol. I believe Rob Watts has been on the right track for some time with his ever improving WTA based solution. I look forward to listening to the DAVE DAC and reading some professional reviews too in due course.

 

[joeexp]

Apart from that there is less than 1% of recorded music available in DSD format - That really kills it for me...

 

[OK-Guy]

DaveRedRef-111... Rob's currently on his travels so there may be a delay in replying to your excellent informative post... it's well documented that Rob prefers Red-Book to other formats but I'm not in both your leagues so won't try to get into the technical malarkey... my thinking being if Obi-Rob says it the best route then that's the Yelllow-Brick Road I travel down, hth...

 

[Bonesy Jonesy]

Also looking forward to hearing DAVE especially against my Blu CD Transporter twin output linked to my QBD76 DAC to give 176kHz up sampling rate (2 x 88kHz).  
 
I think the Blu & QBD76 combo is up there with some of the best CD & direct digital sources.  It gives full musicality with superb definition, clarity and soundstage across all frequency ranges.   Its almost analogue / vinyl sounding without the clicks and pops and with greater clarity etc. 

 

[DaveRedRef-III]

Thanks for the information on Rob Watts movement ok-guy.
 
BJ
I guess if the Blu CD Transporter twin output linked to the QBD76 DAC was a good match then there may be hope for an RR3 + DAVE combination (fingers crossed).

 

[Kakki]

It looks like we have Dave in Tokyo International Audio Show 2015 in this weekend... what an exciting moment!!
(Don't know if we can actually hear the real Dave sound though...)

 

[DaveRedRef-III]

Btw just to clarify above, I mention the DSD mastering of Ryan Adams 'Heartbreaker' album. I meant the DSD Re-Mastering. I believe the original recording was all tape.

 

[DaveRedRef-III]

To continue the musicality theme I have found it interesting that there is an assumption in audio that musicality comes from good timing, hence DSD manufacturers have been using ever faster clocks to improve this weakness in the DSD format. However I have noticed that musicality can be affected significantly by placement/setup of 3 way speakers. How is this possible if it is all down to timing issues? A monitor speaker on the other hand is nigh on impossible to affect musicality in the setup. If the system is musical it pretty much stays musical whatever. I wonder if the complexity of 3 ways is showing us part of the answer. Could it be phase too that affects our perception of musicality. I seem to remember Rob mentioned recently that DAVE's sound stage goes deeper with PCM based material whilst DSD goes wider. Only phase can do this. Perhaps DSD has a skewed phase problem?

 

[Rob Watts]

  It looks like we have Dave in Tokyo International Audio Show 2015 in this weekend... what an exciting moment!!
(Don't know if we can actually hear the real Dave sound though...)

Yes John Franks is there with a Dave. It is very close (if not the final solution) to the eventual production standard for PCM but DSD does not have the new non decimating DSD filters - I only just managed to get the Xilinx to run two separate programs one for PCM and one for the non decimating DSD a couple of days ago.
 
So I hope you can enjoy! We will both be in Jakarta in early October.
 
Rob

 

[Rob Watts]

To continue the musicality theme I have found it interesting that there is an assumption in audio that musicality comes from good timing, hence DSD manufacturers have been using ever faster clocks to improve this weakness in the DSD format. However I have noticed that musicality can be affected significantly by placement/setup of 3 way speakers. How is this possible if it is all down to timing issues? A monitor speaker on the other hand is nigh on impossible to affect musicality in the setup. If the system is musical it pretty much stays musical whatever. I wonder if the complexity of 3 ways is showing us part of the answer. Could it be phase too that affects our perception of musicality. I seem to remember Rob mentioned recently that DAVE's sound stage goes deeper with PCM based material whilst DSD goes wider. Only phase can do this. Perhaps DSD has a skewed phase problem?

There are actually two independent issues going on with DSD that limits the musicality - and they are interlinked problems.
 
The first issue is down to the resolving power of DSD. Now a DSD works by using a noise shaper, and a noise shaper is a feedback system. Indeed, you can think of an analogue amplifier as a first order noise shaper - so you have a subtraction input stage that compares the input to the output, followed by a gain stage that integrates the error. With a delta sigma noise shaper its exactly the same, but where the output stage is truncated to reduce the noise shaper output resolution so it can drive the OP - in the case of DSD its one bit, +1 or -1 op stage. But you use multiple gain stages connected together so you have n integrators - typically 5 for DSD. Now the number of integrators, together with the time constants will determine how much error correction you have within the system - and the time constants are primarily set by the over-sample rate of the noise shaper. Double the oversampling frequency and with a 5th order ideal system (i.e. one that does not employ resonators or other tricks to improve HF noise) it converges on a 30 dB improvement in distortion and noise.
 
So where does lack of resolution leave us? Well any signal that is below the noise floor of the noise shaper is completely lost - this is completely unlike PCM where an infinitely small signal is still encoded within the noise when using correct dithering. With DSD any signal below the noise shaper noise floor is lost for good. Now these small signals are essential for the cues that the brain uses to get the perception of sound stage depth - and depth perception is a major problem with audio - conventional high end audio is incapable of reproducing a sense of space in the same way one can perceive natural sounds. Now whilst optimising Hugo's noise shaper I noticed two things - once the noise shaper performance hit 200 dB performance (that is THD and noise being -200 dB in the audio bandwidth as measured using digital domain simulation) then it no longer got smoother. So in terms of warmth and smoothness, 200 dB is good enough. But this categorically did not apply to the perception of depth, where making further improvements improved the perception of how deep instruments were (assuming they are actually recorded with depth like a organ in a cathedral or off stage effects in Mahler 2 for example. Given the size of the FPGA and the 4e pulse array 2048FS DAC, I got the best depth I could obtain.
 
But with Dave, no such restriction on FPGA size applied, and I had a 20e pulse array DAC which innately has more resolution and allows smaller time constants for the integrator (so better performance). So I optimised it again, and kept on increasing the performance of the noise shaper - and the perception of depth kept on improving. After 3 months of optimising and redesigning the noise shaper I got to 360 dB performance - an extraordinary level, completely way beyond the performance of ordinary noise shapers. But what was curious was how easy it was to hear a 330 dB noise shaper against a 360 dB one - but only in terms of depth perception. My intellectual puzzle is whether this level of small signal accuracy is really needed, or whether these numbers are acting as a proxy for something else going on, perhaps within the analogue parts of the DAC - I am not sure on this point, something I will be researching. But for sure I have got the optimal performance from the noise shaper employed in Dave, and every DAC I have ever listened too shows similar behaviour.
 
The point I am making over this is that DSD noise shapers for DSD 64 is only capable of 120 dB performance - and that is some 10 thousand times worse than Hugo - and a trillion times worse than Dave. And every time I hear DSD I always get the same problem o perception of depth - it sounds completely flat with no real sense of depth. Now regular 16 bit red book categorically does not suffer from this problem - an infinitely small signal will be perfectly encoded in a properly dithered system - it will just be buried within the noise.
 
Now the second issue is timing. Now I am not talking about timing in terms of femtosecond clocks and other such nonsense - it always amuses me to see NOS DAC companies talking about femtosecond accuracy clocks when their lack of proper filtering generates hundreds of uS of timing problems on transients due to sampling reconstruction errors. What I am talking about is how accurately transients are timed against the original analogue signal in that the timing of transients is non-linear. Sometimes the transient will be at one point in time, other times delayed or advanced depending upon where the transient occurs against the sample time. In the case of PCM we have the timing errors of transients due to the lack of tap length in the FIR reconstruction filter. The mathematics is very clear cut - we need extremely long tap lengths to almost perfectly reconstruct the original timing of transients - and from listening tests I can hear a correlation between tap length and sound quality. With Dave I can still hear 100,000 taps increasing to 164,000 taps albeit I can now start to hear the law of diminishing returns. But we know for sure that increasing the tap length will mean that it would make absolutely no difference if it was sampled at 22 uS or 22 fS (assuming its a perfectly bandwidth limited signal). So red book is again limited on timing by the DAC not inherently within the format.
 
Unfortunately, DSD also has its timing non-linearity issues but they are different to PCM. This problem has never been talked about before, but its something I have been aware of for a long time, and its one reason I uniquely run my noise shapers at 2048FS. When a large signal transient occurs - lets say from -1 to +1 then the time delay for the signal is small as the signal gets through the integrators and OP quantizer almost immediately. But for small signals, it can't get through the quantizer, and so it takes some time for a small negative signal changing to a positive signal to work its way through the integrators. You see these effects on simulation, where the difference of a small transient to a large transient is several uS for DSD64. 
 
Now the timing non linearity of uS is very audible and it affects the ability of the brain to perceive the starting and stopping of instruments. Indeed, the major surprise of Hugo was how well one can perceive that starting and stopping of notes - it was much better than I expected, and at the time I was perplexed where this ability was coming from. With Dave I managed to dig down into the problem, and some of the things I had done (for other reasons) had also improved the timing non-linearity. It turns out that the brain is much more sensitive that the order of 4 uS of timing errors (this number comes from the inter-aural delay resolution, its the accuracy the brain works to in measuring time from sounds hitting one ear against the other), and much smaller levels degrade the ability for the brain to perceive the starting and stopping of notes.
 
But timing accuracy has another important effect too - not only is it crucial to being able to perceive the starting and stopping of notes, its also used to perceive the timbre of an instrument - that is the initial transient is used by the brain to determine the timbre of an instrument and if timing of transients is non-linear, then we get compression in the perception of timbre. One of the surprising things I heard with Hugo was how easy it was to hear the starting and stopping of instruments, and how easy it was to perceive individual instruments timbre and sensation of power. And this made a profound improvement with musicality - I was enjoying music to a level I had never had before.
 
But the problem we have with DSD is that the timing of transients is non-linear with respect to signal level - and unlike PCM you are completely stuck as the error is on the recording and its impossible to remove. So when I hear DSD, it sounds flat in depth, and it has relatively poor ability to perceive the starting and stopping of notes (using Hugo/Dave against PCM). Acoustic guitar sounds quite pleasant, but there is a lack of focus when the string is initially struck - it sounds all unnaturally soft with an inability to properly perceive the starting and stopping. Also the timbre of the instrument is compressed, and its down to the substantial timing non-linearity with signal level.
 
Having emphasised the problems with delta-sigma or noise shaping you may think its better to use R2R DAC's instead. But they too have considerable timing errors too; making the timing of signals code independent is impossible. Also they have considerable low level non linearity problems too as its impossible to match the resistor values - much worse than DSD even - so again we are stuck with poor depth, perception of timing and timbre. Not only that they suffer from substantial noise floor modulation, giving a forced hard aggressive edge to them. Some listeners prefer that, and I won't argue with somebody else's taste - whatever works for you. But its not real and it not the sound I hear with live un-amplified instruments. 
 
So to conclude; yes I agree, DSD is fundamentally flawed, and unlike PCM where the DAC is the fundamental limit, its in the format itself. And it is mostly limited by the format. Additionally, its very easy to underestimate how sensitive the brain is to extremely small errors, and these errors can have a profound effect on musicality.
 
Rob

 

[Mython]

I'm enjoying your technical commentaries, Rob, even though I admit that a proportion of it goes over my head! 

 
 
DAVE will be a stretch too far for my pocket, at this immediate point in time, but I am still extremely keen to hear it - more so on fullsize hi-fi than headphones/CIEMs, since I feel these are more likely to showcase the spatial imaging talents of the DAC.
 
I would love to hear the following track, at decent SPL, through the DAVE, into some Chord monoblocks and decent fullrange speakers:
 
 

 
I may just turn up at the Bristol Show 2016, clutching this CD, making a bee-line for the Chord room, though I anticipate it'll probably be standing-room only!