upstateguy
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2004
- Posts
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- 182
Quote:
Yes, exactly. I waited for your response before further comment.
It was the "low jitter" thing that had me thrown off a bit. I think that it is upsampling alone that bothers people, and is considered to be inferior to native/bypassed/non upsampled data. I would tend to think this way because the SRC chip is literally calculating all of the interpolation needed to "fill in the blanks" necessary to make a new/higher sample rate, and doing it on-the-fly so to speak. I can easily see now this may be tolerable going from say 44 to 88, but when going from 44 to 96 there is some work to be done.
I think there may be some confusion here, and it may be thought that when the SRC upsamples, that what comes out is something better than before, something totally new and independently retimed. Seems like a lot of listeners have to say that this is not the case. What goes in affects what comes out. PS Audio says that their customers claim that upsampling does not help a good source, but makes it into something inferior to the original native sampled data. I think the Gamma2 sounds pretty good, but I'm not done playing around yet.
I think most of the newer modern DACs upsample, in fact the only DAC that comes to mind that doesn't is the Havana.
If that were not the case, DACs like North Star, Benchmark, Lavry 11, etc., wouldn't use it....
It's not PSAudio's customers but PSAudio themselves that make the claim that running the data through the SRC is sonically inferior to bypassing the SRC when dealing with a high quality low jitter source.
Quote:
After a couple weeks with the modded HiFace, I failed to hear a difference. I decided to mentioned this to the modded hiface designer, just out of curiosity, to see what his response would be. He said that the DAC's upsampling was making all my sources sound the same. Since I can't disable my DAC's upsampling, I haven't been able to verify this. Using another DAC wouldn't help either since if I do hear a difference, I'd be always wondering if it's down to the other DAC's characteristics as opposed to the one I currently have.
Anyway, it's this information given to me that made me say that I was of the impression that upsampling DAC's interfere with or even nullify the benefits of the HiFace.
However, I have my suspicions about this, especially when I read another post here by JKenny who said that each time he investigated the system for those who aren't hearing a difference with his HiFace, he usually finds a problem and listed one as the user burning CD's with iTunes, as well as, of course, using an upsampling DAC. It's sounding as though one should always be able to hear a difference???
Anyway, here we are now, reading testimonials of differences heard while using upsampling DAC's.
I'd love to get to the bottom of this myself.
Is the 24/96Kbits/sec Optical Output from an iMac the same as USB out from a NetBook PC? I'd love to see whether or not this is the case. I'm suspecting not.
It still is unclear what differences you didn't hear.
Did you notice that the HF plays about 3dbs louder or
that it has brighter or treble tilted sound signature, or,
did it sound exactly like the optical output from your macbook and you were not able to distinguish between the two?
USG