Most DACs do an 'ok' job of this, but a truly perfect Nyquist reconstruction filter (instant and infinite attenuation at the Nyquist frequency) would require infinite computing power, which we don't have.
That’s a fallacious argument (the Perfect-Solution Fallacy to be precise). We do not need a “truly perfect” filter as we do not have “truly perfect”: Ears, listening abilities, amps or speakers/HPs.
Furthermore, we don’t need a filter to be “instant” (and that would be impossible anyway), a latency of say 200ms is literally the blink of an eye, actually a particularly fast one (most eye blinks take 300ms). And, filter attenuation to about -90dB is perfectly acceptable/inaudible under any reasonable listening conditions and most DACs, even relatively cheap ones, achieve attenuation lower than that.
The MScaler puts a lot more compute power toward the issue to achieve better reconstruction than what could be achieved internally in a DAC.
The MScaler doesn’t do any reconstruction, it just upscales/upsamples and outputs a digital signal. So how does no reconstruction at all “
achieve better reconstruction”?
Furthermore, by requiring a “
lot more compute power” to implement millions of taps it has particularly poor latency. And if that’s not enough, it’s upsampling filter while very abrupt, doesn’t even attenuate to -80dB (still inaudible in the vast majority of reasonable listening scenarios). It also seems to have particularly poor jitter performance (although again at inaudible levels). -
Measurement source ASR.
Not according to my blind ABX testing
I don’t see the point of that? Of course some filters will be audibly different, especially ones designed to be audibly different, say NOS emulation filters or any other filter with a roll-off easily within the audible band. If you take a decent filter though, say the typical filters used for the last 25+ years or so, a linear phase filter with a roll-off starting around 18kHz-19kHz and a transition band of around 2kHz, good luck ABX’ing these.
There's unfortunately only a handful of devices or tools that actually use very high performance filters.
No there’s not, there’s numerous devices and there has been for years. Of course, that depends on exactly what you mean by “
very high performance filters”. I take it to mean any filter that does it’s job without audible artefacts.
G
My main preference is over the ear headphones, and have a collection since they all inherently sound different (everyone excepts headphones/earphones have different tunings from driver design, baffles, cup distance, etc). I do have a wireless IEM for exercise (Sennheiser Momentum 3). I don't know how good the drivers would be if it were just straight wired setup. The thing with BT headphones is that they're also controlled by driver and app. Even without trying to adjust EQ in its app, I like the Senns sound more than Sony WH-1000XM3 over ear BT headphones I have.
