[Dusty Chalk]

Quote:

Originally posted by theaudiohobby Joe made a big deal about the noise and then committed the ultimate booboo...

Would appreciate it if you were to stop insulting the reading audience's intelligence and telling us how to interpret the data you give (I.E. "spin-doctoring" -- I hate that). We're perfectly capable of figuring out that you're wrong by ourselves, without you having to remind us of just how wrong you are.

 

[Czilla9000]

Still.......as I have said all along......DSD may be ambrosia but if it has to be converted to PCM for editing then the whole argument is moot. You might as well use DVDA.


And like Joe said, often times Sony "DSD" products pack loads of PCM stuff.


I have been doing tons of research on Class D digital amps recently and found out that Sony's own "DSD Direct Digital Drive" first converts the DSD stream to PCM and then converts it to PWM for amplification.

EDIT: So both the formats truely are better than the CD, even past 8,000 Hz? Can both of you say that?

 

[theaudiohobby]

Joe,

you must be kidding me, how can it offer more time resolution that nobody can hear, pls. Your logic simply does not hold water, if it were so there will be no need for 192/24 since most of the advantages it offers over 96/24 will then be inaudible, but you and I know that is not so. it does not take genius to see that the transient response of the output signal is proportional to the sampling frequency, and the leap from 192Khz to 2.8mhz is rather large, don't you think, I personally am persuaded though I do not have graph to prove at present that the difference btw transient response of outgoing SACD signal and the incoming signal is infinitely small. I hope you can see the attached if can't look at fig 5 on this paper
for the relationship btw the transient response and the sampling frequency.

You said

Quote:

And the DAC in the Pioneer gives better performance than the Elgar without having to do that

Look at the linearity graph for the pioneer

It is much worse than the weiss, not to speak of the Elgar. You do not need a genius to tell which component will sound truer to the incoming signal.

Lastly considering that the DCS Elgar Plus produced the higher jitter at 147.8 and yet was more linear wrt to the incoming signal, will that not validate the DCS statement that the jitter is lost in a higher noise floor?

 

[Joe Bloggs]

If you are so smart perhaps you can explain what linearity error has to do with signal-related jitter, when signal related jitter is already explicitly plotted in the jitter spectrum.

 

[theaudiohobby]

Dusty Chalk said

Quote:

Would appreciate it if you were to stop insulting the reading audience's intelligence and telling us how to interpret the data you give (I.E. "spin-doctoring" -- I hate that).

Have I rattled your belief system Dusty. Get on the program, if you feel I misused the graphs or measurements in any way state your objections in a post.

Czilla9000 said

Quote:

So both the formats truely are better than the CD, even past 8,000 Hz? Can both of you say that?

I can of DVDA, can Dusty Chalk and Joe B say the same of DSD/SACD? I await

 

[theaudiohobby]

Quote:

If you are so smart perhaps you can explain what linearity error has to do with signal-related jitter, when signal related jitter is already explicitly plotted in the jitter spectrum.

I do not need to, if you cannot figure out for yourself how the linearity plot of an outgoing signal variation wrt the incoming signal wrt to time relates to jitter then you should not be posting contentious comments about jitter on this thread.

 

[theaudiohobby]

folks, I have to catch some sleep, i will continue on the thread later.

 

[Dusty Chalk]

Quote:

Originally posted by theaudiohobby Have I rattled your belief system Dusty.

Not at all. I am of the camp of that they both sound pretty damn good, both superior to CD, but both having their strengths and their weaknesses, even if only in the implementation. I still feel that way. I am just (a) trying to understand why; and (b) trying to understand why you feel that DSD has such a clear superiority. I haven't heard a clear-cut, non-debunkable argument as to one being clearly superior to the other. A lot of close calls, but that supports the argument that they're close, rather than vastly different/superior/inferior.

WRT time accuracy -- I'm still stuck on the image of a single transient, and how it would get translated to what I understand as DSD -- a single bit indicating whether or not the next value is higher or lower than the previous one. Using DSD, a single transient (say, a square wave) would take x number of sample slices to reach full amplitude (under optimal conditions), whereas high-rate PCM would respond immediately (one sample slice). Explain me that, batman.

What I don't like about your spin-doctoring (and I apologize for the crankiness of my previous post -- I probably shouldn't post after my bedtime [size=xx-small]yes, like I'm doing now, but I'm going to try to remain polite this time[/size]) is that you jump all over the place. You're already convinced of the "proof in the pudding" of the dCS Elgar, that it takes you from step n to n+1, QED, but none of us are hardly with you on that. So it upsamples to DSD, so what? Just another option, as far as I can see. It does a damn fine job of PCM, from where I'm standing. We're just not with you on that, and telling everyone that you've "won" this argument because of something that Joe put in one of his posts as an example of something is "arguing the ego" rather than "arguing the facts". He cited something to back up one of his claims/questions/whatever, and you just claim victory because he should not have brought it up at all. Sounds like you're playing poker, bluffing, rather than having a technical discussion. A real technical discussion would end with, "well, have you heard both of these? Alright then..." Because really, it's all up to our ears.

PS I did state one or two objections -- you totally disregarded those:

I still need to hear your "rationalization" as to the "you really expect to be able to hear a difference at that level" argument, and how that promotes the DSD side of things rather than the equality side of things.

Ditto the noise thing.

And finally... Quote:

Originally posted by theaudiohobby I can of DVDA, can Dusty Chalk and Joe B say the same of DSD/SACD? I await.

Huh? You trying to pull a "Bugs Bunny" on us? I don't think so.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Of course I say SACD is superior to CD. Have I not said again and again that DVD-A and SACD are equal in quality?

Jitter is a time-domain phenomenon whereas linearity is about how closely the output voltage follows the specified proportions from the signal. I don't see the relationship between them, but if you insist:

It is asinine to compare the linearity of a DAC decoding an SACD signal with that of a DAC decoding a CD signal, since the theoretical maximum dynamic range of CD is 96dB, below which, there is nothing for the DAC to refer to!

There are very few measurements of linearity using 24-bit data, but here's one:

http://www.stereophile.com/fullarchives.cgi?159

Quote:

I usually test D/A linearity by measuring the analog output level with a narrow bandpass filter while a dithered, 16-bit 500Hz tone is swept down from 0dBFS to -120dBFS. The No.30.6 performed almost perfectly on this test, so I raised the bar, driving it with dithered 24-bit data down to -140dBFS. The result is shown in fig.3: the error is less than 1dB down to -130dBFS! Basically, this processor can extract music from the roots of the universe.

This is in comparison with 2.5dB at -130dBFS for your precious dCS Elgar.

 

[Czilla9000]

Ok.............really then, if you guys both agree that both of the formats are equal sound quality wize, from a technical stand point, I really don't have any preference unto which format succeeds.

(I would like to find out, however, how that 8000 Hz thing gor fixed).

Sorry Joe if my asking you annoyed you, it is just I wanted to make absolutley sure.....

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Probably as DSP power increased, they were able to use higher order noise shapers in the ADC. But they seem to have hit the theoretical limit now and the dynamic range figures you see on the graph in the last page is probably as good as SACD is going to get.

And no, theaudiohobby obviously doesn't agree that they sound the same

And remember how hard it is for indie musicians to do DSD.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

From the hydrogenaudio thread:
Quote:

The dCS Elgar plus is a multibit DAC! 5-bits, 64x oversampling, to be precise. http://www.dcsltd.co.uk/Elgar.htm Anyone who uses the (excellent) performance of the DCS Elgar as some kind of justification for the superiority of SACD doesn't know what they are talking about! DVD-A, correctly dithered, in infinitely linear. The dCS Elgar manages linearity down to the equivalent of the 27-th bit level with a DVD-A source. SACD, as a format, is not linear, as proven in the Lip****z and Vanderkooy papers at the start of this (or the other?) thread. I haven't seen results which conclusively show the level of the non linearities of a real SACD disc, played through the elgar Plus. I suspect they'd be worse than DVD-A. The Stereophile result looks like it is (linear down to the equivalent of the ~22nd bit), but it's swamped by noise, so this isn't a fair comparison.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

More info about SACD editing and mixing by 2BDecided

Quote:

It's very difficult to even edit (i.e. cut and paste) DSD signals. Not impossible, but very far from trivial. You can't just cut them, because you'll always get a click (the signal is never at rest). You can't cross fade, because that involves mixing (see below). The workable technique (developed by Sadie, I think) is to re-encode the edit section, with a sigma-delta modulator: The new SDM is synchronised with the bitstream, such that the input, output, and all the internal values of the noise shaping loops (a DSD SDM typically has 7 noise shaping loops!) are approximately matched to the original encoding. This means that re-encoding gives the same result - i.e. no re-quantisation or extra noise shaping. So you can switch from the original signal to the re-encoded signal without a glitch, because they're almost the same. At the edit itself, the new SDM is allowed to drift out of synch, and then it's brought back into synch with the audio after the edit point. Once the input, output, and all feedback loops have stabilised such that they match the states in the original SDM after the edit point, you can just switch back to the original signal. Without a glitch. In reality, you still get a click, because the process isn't perfect. You can't make all the values in all those feedback loops match the original, because you don't know what they were! But the good guess you can make from the DSD signal itself means that the click is at -60dB. (edit: I believe this is what you mean by pure DSD mixing.) You know all that marketing information that says how simple SACD is? It's just that: marketing. If you mix/EQ/process 1-bit DSD, it will become multi-bit. You have to re-quantise and noise-shape to get it back to 1-bit. This was how early SACDs were supposed to be done (though most (all?) were processed in the analogue domain, and only converted to DSD at the very end). If you keep quantising and noise shaping, you end up with even more high frequency noise, and in-band distortion. Hence, 8-bit "DSD". As KikeG said, Sony calls it DSD-wide. I call it PCM with a very high sample rate!

 

[theaudiohobby]

Joe,

what is the point of your last three posts, the thread on hydrogen audio is dead and outdated, these questions were resolved ages ago. You are frankly behind time , Sharp is already sampling @ 5.6MHz in their updated digital amplifier. Read the earlier posts, even the Philips paper discusses all these issues and they have been resolved. The fact that DSD is multibit has been public domain for almost four years. The Elgar Plus approach is perfectly valid


from stereophile
Quote:

As you can read in Barry Willis' report from the 109th AES Convention in this issue's "Industry Update" (p.22), respected audio theoreticians John Vanderkooy and Stanley Lip****z shared David Rich's concerns about DSD. Perhaps not coincidentally, Sony has revealed that, while the DSD data on an SACD are still 1-bit-encoded, the encoding system actually uses a multibit quantizer, presumably within a digital negative feedback loop, as described by Mr. Rich. Mystery solved

from the philips paper

Quote:

Also Sony is following a multi bit approach in their Sonoma system. In this case, the system remains at 64 fs, but with 8 bits. As a consequence, the idea is to use either a 256 times 44.1 kHz single bit signal, which inherently has a high SNR to 90 kHz, or to use a multi-bit (say, 4) recording at high speed (64 times 44.1 kHz, equalling 2.8 MHz). All signal processing is subsequently done in the multi-bit domain, remaining at high sampling rates, and only in a final stage the conversion to 1-bit, 2.8 MHz is made. It is important to realize, that DSD for SACD is the final consumer format;

where is the discrepancy, pray tell, all you are showing here ignorance of the facts. these facts have been in the public domain since winter 2000.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Quote:

Originally posted by theaudiohobby Joe, what is the point of your last three posts

Why the last THREE posts? What's your contention with my 3rd last post? That you actually think SACD and DVD-A are equal in quality? That indie musicians can get DSD equipment for cheap? Or are you trying to say again that there is no theoretical limit to noise shaping and SACD dynamic range?

Quote:

the thread on hydrogen audio is dead and outdated, these questions were resolved ages ago. You are frankly behind time , Sharp is already sampling @ 5.6MHz in their updated digital amplifier.

CD players using sigma-delta DACs have been sampling at 112MHz for years.

Quote:

Read the earlier posts, even the Philips paper discusses all these issues and they have been resolved. The fact that DSD is multibit has been public domain for almost four years.

That makes me fall of my chair laughing.

It's like you think I never knew there's such a thing as 8-bit DSD

And it sounds like you're trying to call SACD multi-bit

Quote:

The Elgar Plus approach is perfectly valid

And it is an approach that yields better results using DVD-A as input, on your own measurement criterion.

Quote:

where is the discrepancy, pray tell, all you are showing here ignorance of the facts. these facts have been in the public domain since winter 2000.

And I applaud your effort at stuffing your nose into every paper you can get hold of since winter 2000; it's a pity that you don't actually understand what you're reading and its significance. What you're telling me here means that DSD editing has fallen back to using PCM techniques, except using a ridiculously high bitrate that drives mixing equipment costs to astronomical heights with no real gain in sound quality.