With all due respect to Rob Watts, and I mean no disrespect to him or Chord, the idea that the M-scaler or the Dave has fundamentally changed digital audio science is patently absurd. When you measure even inexpensive DACs like the Topping 90, it has every type of distortion below -120dB. The science of DACs has been well known for over 50 years. Shannon’s information theory that established digital audio was done in the late 1940s.
If you point me to one scientific article published in an established IEEE journal on digital signal processing or information theory or even the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society that proves Chord’s design is superior, I’ll eat my hat. If you read John Atkinson’s review of the M-scaler in Stereophile, you’ll see he questions the very premise that a million tap filter is intrinsically better than other approaches. There’s really only subjective evidence and here it’s all one’s opinion vs someone else’s.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy listening to my M-scaler and the Dave. It’s a perfectly fine sounding digital audio front end. But I don’t for s moment believe it’s out of the ballpark superior to brands like dCS, who by the way haven’t used off the DACs for more than 30 years! There are many audiophile brands that use customized DAC solutions, e.g., TAS did a very favorable review of the Denafrips discrete ladder R2R DAC a few months ago.
I’m not trolling. I’m simply saying don’t get taken in by voodoo. If you genuinely want to improve your listening experience invest in good headphones or loudspeakers, pay attention to your listening room and above all attend live concerts. I can’t bear to listen to the m-scaler or the Dave for a few days after hearing a live concert by the San Francisco symphony. There’s simply no comparison between live vs. reproduced sound. I wish we would focus on the weakest link in the chain, and to me, that’s not the DAC or the upsampling algorithm. My two cents, but backed by every serious scientist in digital audio processing I know of. If you point me some scientific literature that proves me wrong, I’d love to read it!