Actually, it is the way that Rob's DACs handle plain-old vanilla Redbook recordings that most surprised me - they sound foot-tappingly good in a way that had me scratching my head! LOL
+2^16...
Working as an audio designer is a lot of fun - my working day is just playing at my hobby (so my wife tells me). But there is a lot of slog - I can spend 9 months on coding, and when I come to listen to it I get just a small (and expected) improvement in sound quality. But I am cool with that, Rome wasn't built in a day and big things happen with lots of tiny steps. But when I am doing a listening test I have specific expectations - like improving noise floor modulation will make it sound smoother for example - so I build up detailed expectation of what the changes will bring.
Not so when I first heard the Hugo/Mojo code.
Now I had spent a lot of effort reducing RF noise, improving jitter performance, for the internal interpolators within the DAC. And I was expecting it to sound a bit smoother and more natural. There were also other improvements I had made, but I was not expecting much change over the Qute DAC which Hugo was most like as it had the same 4e pulse array DAC.
But hearing the new code was by far the biggest unexpected change in sound quality I have ever experienced - now it wasn't about the normal things we talk about - instrument separation, details, sound-stage etc - but the way that you could engage with the music - toe tapping, being able to hear the way instruments "talk" to one another, just being able to forget about the sound and simply enjoy the music. I simply had not had that engagement with music before.
Obviously, I was very excited about the musicality improvements, but I just had no idea where and why I was getting this big change - so it was extremely puzzling, as it identified a big hole in my knowledge. But that's where as a designer things get very exciting, as I work primarily to get better sound through understanding what is going on.
Eventually, with the Dave project, I got to understand what I had accidentally stumbled upon. What was really weird was that from an engineering perspective we are talking about very subtle things - very small improvements in the accuracy of timing as the signal goes from sampled data back to a continuous analogue signal. But these tiny changes, to me at least, have a profound way of how I enjoy music.
Rob
