[dtp1981]

  Wow. I have literally never heard one of my favorite recordings (Rimsky-Korsakav Scherezade, Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Fritz Reiner) sound as good as it does right now through the Mimby->WA7tp->HD800. Unbelievable imaging, soundstage, detail, and resolution. Everything sounds so much more realistic!

 
 

 
This is exactly the sort of recording which shows up the improvement of multibit and the Burrito Filter.  It is an outstanding recording that has all of the hall sound, as well as displaying all of the instruments in their specific positions.
 
I use that recording every time I do a sound test.

 
Anywhere I can find a good lossless recording of this?

 

[jnak00]

   
 
 
Anywhere I can find a good lossless recording of this?

 
I am not sure if this is the recording they are referring to, but there is a match on Tidal:
 
tidal.com/album/14082197

 

[kstuart]

 

Does that mean 24-bit music files are overkill for 16-bit Momby?

Because of the bragging rights often without substance common in digital audio specmanship, I only have a few comments to offer; one would be that twenty bits done with bad math math could be inferior to 16 bit done with good.  Another is that 32 bit resolution is unobtainium in the arena of digital audio.  As important as mathematical precision is, uniquely possible with multibit converters - the mastering is more important.  The mileage varies in all of the above recording by recording.  You are far better off not concerning yourself by higher bit number teases and judging for yourself which recordings you like.

I entirely agree, in the context of buying recordings of music for listening.  The Burrito filter corrects significant problems with previous 16-bit playback in DACs, making the mastering a far bigger factor.
 
For many pre-1980 recordings, the first CD release is the best mastering due to subsequent wear and loss of magnetism in the master tapes.  Later high resolution masterings start with lesser quality tapes, and with the Burrito filter, the original CD will give you better sound quality.
 
Unfortunately, there is no "rule" that can be applied without actually listening to the various available masterings.  In some cases, remasterings are done by discovering previously unused tapes, thereby avoiding wear and oxidation issues.  "Kind of Blue" is a good example of this (and in fact, comparing the unused tapes with the original ones led them to the discovery that the original LPs and CDs were done at the wrong pitch).
 
Having said all that, recent recordings and recent masterings will have a slight sound quality improvement in the 24/192 release version over the 16/44.1 release version.  Since the actual recording was done at 24/192, there is no advantage to converting that to 16/44.1 and then back to 24/192 within the DAC, rather than just keeping it at 24/192 (other than disk space usage, of course).

 

[kstuart]

 

   
 
 
Anywhere I can find a good lossless recording of this?

 
I am not sure if this is the recording they are referring to, but there is a match on Tidal:
 
tidal.com/album/14082197

That is not visible to those who are not tidal members, so it is impossible for us to verify (that would require cut-and-paste of conductor, orchestra, label, etc).
 
However, you can get a good used copy for $3 or a new one for $6 from Amazon at:
 
https://www.amazon.com/Rimsky-Korsakov-Scheherazade-Fritz-Reiner/dp/B001BKGPNY
 
For that release, they went back to the 3-channel master tape.
 
If you find any of the XRCD releases of the Reiner Scheherazade, they are all done by Alan Yoshida, perhaps the best CD mastering engineer ever.  It's a tossup between the XRCD versions or the above-linked 2005 SACD release from the 3-channel tape.

 

[fjrabon]

That is not visible to those who are not tidal members, so it is impossible for us to verify (that would require cut-and-paste of conductor, orchestra, label, etc).

However, you can get a good used copy for $3 or a new one for $6 from Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.com/Rimsky-Korsakov-Scheherazade-Fritz-Reiner/dp/B001BKGPNY

For that release, they went back to the 3-channel master tape.

If you find any of the XRCD releases of the Reiner Scheherazade, they are all done by Alan Yoshida, perhaps the best CD mastering engineer ever.  It's a tossup between the XRCD versions or the above-linked 2005 SACD release from the 3-channel tape.

It's also on HDTracks.com

 

[dtp1981]

Thanks guys.

 

[duncan4791]

Hi All, first post after being a member for years. I'd like to vent a little Schiit woes.
 
Last Tuesday I finally ordered with enthusiastically and expectantly ordered, for the first time, a Schiit Modi Mulitbit and the Magni Uber. I should have known something might go wrong when the order confirmation email and the shipping email was only 30 minutes apart. Today the box arrives, on time from FedEx, only to contain a MODI UBER and the expected Magni Uber. The kind Laura Z at Schiit has RMAed an return/exchange and the Modi Uber goes back tomorrow.
Has anyone else been sent or heard of this shipping mix up before?

 

[RickB]

  Hi All, first post after being a member for years. I'd like to vent a little Schiit woes.
 
Last Tuesday I finally ordered with enthusiastically and expectantly ordered, for the first time, a Schiit Modi Mulitbit and the Magni Uber. I should have known something might go wrong when the order confirmation email and the shipping email was only 30 minutes apart. Today the box arrives, on time from FedEx, only to contain a MODI UBER and the expected Magni Uber. The kind Laura Z at Schiit has RMAed an return/exchange and the Modi Uber goes back tomorrow.
Has anyone else been sent or heard of this shipping mix up before?

Mistakes happen. Sucks that this happened to you. I hope you get the correct gear as quickly as possible. 

 

[Psalmanazar]

DACs need to oversample to effectively filter; feeding them higher bit rates like 192 khz will negate the positive effects of oversampling and make the DAC sound worse, alike to your typical grainy and warmed over non-oversampling R2R DAC or some bad old CD player.

Oversampling overcame the challenge of filtering Redbook sample rates, which cover the audible band but gave only a few khz of room to construct filters. Recording in 24-bit and with frequency rates that twice 44.1/48 khz (88.2 and 96khz) makes stuff easier to record and mix but there's little to no benefit for actually listening and you'll have to downsample those 192khz files anyway with a program like SoX to get the best performance from DACs and you wouldn't have to do that if you bought the commercially mastered CD that sounds the same. The whole "high resolution" audio consumer format thing is a lie. The recording industry bigwigs are using language from video formats but screen resolutions aren't the same as frequency rates. Super Audio CDs were actually lower fidelity than normal redbook CDs due to being converted from PCM and having to go through much more noise filtering than even your typical delta-sigma PCM DAC does! Old CD booklets used to say that 16-bit, 44.1khz Redbook audio was a high-fidelity format that exposed the limits of the original analog recording tapes and they were right! You can hear differing tape noise floors for the different recording tracks mixed together on many analog-recorded CDs.

@kstuart Yeah the highest fidelity mastering is totally up in the air with a lot of stuff. Some recordings have lost the original master tapes but the professionally done needle drop from a pristine LP is going to be sound much better than the typical used record you can dig up in a store or Discogs. You sometime have to hope it's a needle drop instead of the CD made from far off tape copy like the original mid 80s King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King and Led Zeppeelin CDs were but thankfully Robert Fripp found the original master tape this millennium and Jimmy Page supervised ADC conversion twice (in 1990 and again a couple of years ago as he wasn't happy with some of the screwups and premature cutoffs of hte original time) and those sound great. Old CDs are usually just the best versions unless they were bad with random clipping and they dumped the tapes again into better modern ADCs and didn't mess them too much like The Beatles, Zeppelin, King Crimson, and all the Earache "Full Dynamic Range" reissues made from the mix tapes which showed a lot of the random noise on the early CDs was just from poor or lazy mastering decisions and inter-generational tape issues.
 
The problem is you get Steve Hoffman types who don't like how the recording actually sounds (they prefer the original Zeppelin LPs and early CDs despite the R2R version from the 70s sounding much closer to the new CDs than those) and want to warm it over to no end where Hoffman will take a record that sounds like an old heavy metal record (tinny, quiet, but everything instrument is fully audible and sounds sort of like how the band probably actually sounded) or 80s rock record that's all sparkly with no bass and EQ it into some muddy, thick, warmed over mess and people actually like it despite that you can't tell what's going on anymore. I remember Hoffman proclaiming "I MADE DIO SOUND 3D!" a few years back and the actual CD he supervised the mastering of sounded hilariously wrong. You get this a lot with 70s rock LPs printed onto recycled, almost flexi-disc oil crisis vinyl and people proclaiming they sound better than the CDs when even LP reissues direct metal mastered from the CDs sound better than the original LPs.

 

[duncan4791]

Thank you RickB, being an old guy and having done the first adopter thing, with varied results, years ago I'm not that blown out, just a bit sad. I'll have to wait a WHOLE week before the new multibit arrives.   Looking forward to hearing what everyone else has experienced.

 

[zilch0md]

  [snip]
 
If you find any of the XRCD releases of the Reiner Scheherazade, they are all done by Alan Yoshida, perhaps the best CD mastering engineer ever.  It's a tossup between the XRCD versions or the above-linked 2005 SACD release from the 3-channel tape.

 
https://www.discogs.com/artist/412827-Alan-Yoshida

 

[slex]

Thank you RickB, being an old guy and having done the first adopter thing, with varied results, years ago I'm not that blown out, just a bit sad. I'll have to wait a WHOLE week before the new multibit arrives.   Looking forward to hearing what everyone else has experienced.

It will be worth the wait, im surprised it haven been sold out.

 

[kstuart]

@Psalmanazar -
 
DACs need to oversample IF they are starting with a 44.1khz source.  This is because the analog post-conversion filtering is much less audible if it is done at 192khz than at 44.1khz.
 
If the source is already at 192khz, then there is no reason for oversampling or digital filtering.  The analog filtering is then safely at a frequency beyond hearing.
 
The above is how it is done in Schiit DACs, anyway.

 

[kstuart]

 

That is not visible to those who are not tidal members, so it is impossible for us to verify (that would require cut-and-paste of conductor, orchestra, label, etc).

However, you can get a good used copy for $3 or a new one for $6 from Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.com/Rimsky-Korsakov-Scheherazade-Fritz-Reiner/dp/B001BKGPNY

For that release, they went back to the 3-channel master tape.

If you find any of the XRCD releases of the Reiner Scheherazade, they are all done by Alan Yoshida, perhaps the best CD mastering engineer ever.  It's a tossup between the XRCD versions or the above-linked 2005 SACD release from the 3-channel tape.

It's also on HDTracks.com

Yes indeed at:
 
http://www.hdtracks.com/rimsky-korsakov-scheherazade-314675
 
  The 88.2khz and 176.4khz sample rates indicate that it is from the same 2005 SACD, and they use the same cover image, which has the SACD logo.

 

[SilverTrumpet999]

It will be worth the wait, im surprised it haven been sold out.

I agree.  Suspect they anticipated high demand/interest and prepared accordingly. I'm late to the party by a few weeks and was pleasantly surprised I could pick one right up (shipped and delivered early, too).