[old tech]

Then I suppose it is a multi week research time. Time to dig up them papers.

I think part of the problem with your thinking is that if PCM or DSD is reproducing an analogue signal how can it be more perfect than the analogue signal?

If you are talking about an analogue signal say from a mic through a short wire to an amp and a short wire to a speaker, then putting in a digital conversion process (AD to DA) between the wire is unlikely to result in a improvement. It won't degrade the analogue signal but it won't improve it either.

The issue is that the analogue signal degrades, particularly when it is recorded, mixed, mastered and distributed, eg making recording production, storing the signal to tape or a record and then playing it back. The idea is to digitise the signal before it is recorded, mastered, distributed and played back to preserve that original source analogue signal before it degrades through processing. That is why when you compare an analogue final product against a digital, the digital always measures better and peer reviewed controlled blind testing demonstrates that all things equal, most listeners subjectively prefer the digital final product.

 

[gregorio]

Then I suppose it is a multi week research time. Time to dig up them papers.

Just be careful about what papers and by whom. There are a very few papers by audiophile manufacturers that are accurate/correct, the vast majority though are very/completely misleading.

Ask if you have doubts/questions.

G

 

[bigshot]

Gregorio can point you to the right stuff. He’s an underappreciated resource here.

 

[Chimmy9278]

I think part of the problem with your thinking is that if PCM or DSD is reproducing an analogue signal how can it be more perfect than the analogue signal?

If you are talking about an analogue signal say from a mic through a short wire to an amp and a short wire to a speaker, then putting in a digital conversion process (AD to DA) between the wire is unlikely to result in a improvement. It won't degrade the analogue signal but it won't improve it either.

The issue is that the analogue signal degrades, particularly when it is recorded, mixed, mastered and distributed, eg making recording production, storing the signal to tape or a record and then playing it back. The idea is to digitise the signal before it is recorded, mastered, distributed and played back to preserve that original source analogue signal before it degrades through processing. That is why when you compare an analogue final product against a digital, the digital always measures better and peer reviewed controlled blind testing demonstrates that all things equal, most listeners subjectively prefer the digital final product.

Ah yes, I was mistaken about what to compare the digital format against.

It should be against the live music, and in that sense digital does have better technical performance than analog without a doubt.

Personally I don’t have a high end analog set up, but I would really like to hear one to see what I really prefer under ideal circumstances.

But interestingly, we humans do sometimes prefer the distorted signal from per say tubes or vinyl. Perhaps it is what those audiophiles grew up with, perhaps it is like you said just their bias. It is too bad that these peer reviewed journals rarely gets referenced here and a lot of people do rely on marketing. Guess the papers should tell the truth soon.

 

[gregorio]

Ah yes, I was mistaken about what to compare the digital format against.
It should be against the live music

Careful here, your assertion would only be true with a recording designed to sound the same as the live music. As that’s almost never the case, you assertion would almost never be true.

But interestingly, we humans do sometimes prefer the distorted signal from per say tubes or vinyl.

You have to be careful here too. Some people, in fact a lot of people, will describe something as “better” because they prefer it. This is often false because it ignores the fact that some/many people simply prefer something that is objectively worse. Were the Spice Girls actually better than the Berlin Philharmonic because a lot of people preferred them?

It is too bad that these peer reviewed journals rarely gets referenced here

We do frequently make reference to them in this subforum although usually not explicitly (as I have done in some of my responses to you) and sometimes they are explicitly referenced. However, that’s virtually never the case in other subforums on Head-fi because it’s effectively banned and even mentioning science or scientific studies/tests will likely get your posts deleted.

G

 

[Chimmy9278]

Careful here, your assertion would only be true with a recording designed to sound the same as the live music. As that’s almost never the case, you assertion would almost never be true.

You have to be careful here too. Some people, in fact a lot of people, will describe something as “better” because they prefer it. This is often false because it ignores the fact that some/many people simply prefer something that is objectively worse. Were the Spice Girls actually better than the Berlin Philharmonic because a lot of people preferred them?

We do frequently make reference to them in this subforum although usually not explicitly (as I have done in some of my responses to you) and sometimes they are explicitly referenced. However, that’s virtually never the case in other subforums on Head-fi because it’s effectively banned and even mentioning science or scientific studies/tests will likely get your posts deleted.

G

My wording is not accurate enough. By live music it should have really meant the degree of imitation of the analog signal of the mic. That should be what we aim for in digital recording?

I do admit that analog does add a lot of distortion to the sound, which makes it objectively worse, but the reality is some people do prefer that for whatever reason. No to mean it is objectively better, at all.

Indeed, this is the first post I have made in this sub forum, anywhere else basically consists of pure marketing talk.

 

[soundboy]

I remember seeing a report on formats and how many new titles were released in a year on that format. SACD and DVD-A each had less than 30 titles as I remember. BIS may be the only label releasing SACDs any more.

Here are the number of SACD releases worldwide during the last 11 years....

In regards to the number of labels releasing SACDs, that will require some research. However, all major music companies (i.e. Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Bros. Records, etc.) are involved in releases of SACD. There have been more than 15,000 SACD releases worldwide since the debut of SACD....and May 21 will be the format's 23rd birthday. In case you haven't heard, it was announced yesterday that Michael Jackson's "Thriller" will be reissued on SACD by Mobile Fidelity ("Thriller" was previously released on SACD about 20 years ago by Sony Music).

Classical music is still the dominant genre in SACD, and last I checked (in 2020), BIS of Sweden was the most active SACD label for classical music for that year.

 

[gregorio]

By live music it should have really meant the degree of imitation of the analog signal of the mic. That should be what we aim for in digital recording?

In the initial recording/tracking that is what we typically aim for but not always and when it comes to mixing/producing that’s rarely the aim. The aim is to make it subjectively pleasing. A better wording would be; a comparison between an analogue signal entering an ADC with the analogue signal exiting a DAC (assuming no deliberate changes while in the digital domain). There is a huge amount of science and research into this because it doesn’t just affect a group of audiophiles but ALL digital communications and it starts in 1927 with Harry Nyquist’s Theory, then with Claude Shannon’s proof in 1948 that a band-limited analogue signal could be captured perfectly with digital data and then, within 3 years, the development of technology to implement this Nyquist/Shannon Theorem.

I do admit that analog does add a lot of distortion to the sound, which makes it objectively worse, but the reality is some people do prefer that for whatever reason. No to mean it is objectively better, at all.

Some distortions are often perceived as pleasing (and are called “euphonic”), 2nd harmonic distortion for example, other distortions are the opposite but some people still like them. But then some people prefer death metal to Debussy or Nat King Cole. However, there’s nothing to stop us adding any of these distortions to digital recordings (during mixing) and with many genres, this is entirely standard practice.

Indeed, this is the first post I have made in this sub forum, anywhere else basically consists of pure marketing talk.

We’re just about the opposite here and spend most of our time refuting that marketing talk. The difficulty is, that some of the marketing talk has been going on for so long, is so often repeated and is so ingrained in the audiophile community that most don’t even realise it is marketing talk and just accept it as unquestionable fact. So if you do question or refute it, you must be a heretic, nutter or troll. That’s why sound science is banished to just this subforum!

G

 

[bigshot]

That is correct for all releases, I’m sure. The figures I saw were for US releases on SACD that were new for that year. The figures for Blu-ray audio were much higher for new physical high res releases.

 

[castleofargh]

Off topic, don’t tell the modo and don’t read.

Just wanted to say to @Chimmy9278: I like you very much!
Not because you support dsd or draw your conclusions about how it sounds. I happen to hate the very existence of dsd, and all the lies that marketing put into trying to make it a consumer format while at the same time doing everything to make it impossible to use on different devices for legal owners.
No, the reason I say I like you is because you had no trouble contemplating the possibility of being wrong about something. Not just that, you readily and easily admited to being mistaken or wording things poorly anytime you noticed instead of entering battle mode(like almost everybody else does on the web for the sake of escaping the slight discomfort of cognitive dissonance).

It can seem strange for me to go off topic for such a ”simple” thing, but it might just be the most scientific behavior I’ve seen in a while here. We all lie several times a day, we are all biased by preconceptions so we are all wrong many times a day. Anytime we manage to notice and change our mind, we grow and stop trying to spread a falsehood. How simple and nice this forum would be if more people could second guess themselves at least on occasion, once in a while.


That you all can read: objectively pcm and dsd can arrive to the similar resolution and nether has final theoretical limit. It’s a different way to skin a cat, but not matter the variable, and as mentioned, we tend to reach some hard limitations at analogue levels before we record digitally. Meaning we end up with digital trying to have more fidelity for signals that can’t dream of matching it. And of course playback and hearing are also easily outmatched by digital encoding.
Reading the thread, my rational was that @Chimmy9278 had a few options.
He could of course be wrong about hearing a difference.
He could be right but the cause could be all the stuff already hypothesized, plus the player and dac that may not sound the same because of how they treat the formats(meaning they probably mess one up if it’s easily noticed the 2 formats sound different).
It could be something about the converter that makes one into the other format.
But the very first idea that came to my mind was mastering. Maybe @Chimmy9278 just likes as little mastering as possible on music. Making true dsd more likely to fit the bill, it being such a nightmare to master natively.
IDK the correct answer, those are only ideas.

 

[Chimmy9278]

Off topic, don’t tell the modo and don’t read.

Just wanted to say to @Chimmy9278: I like you very much!
Not because you support dsd or draw your conclusions about how it sounds. I happen to hate the very existence of dsd, and all the lies that marketing put into trying to make it a consumer format while at the same time doing everything to make it impossible to use on different devices for legal owners.
No, the reason I say I like you is because you had no trouble contemplating the possibility of being wrong about something. Not just that, you readily and easily admited to being mistaken or wording things poorly anytime you noticed instead of entering battle mode(like almost everybody else does on the web for the sake of escaping the slight discomfort of cognitive dissonance).

It can seem strange for me to go off topic for such a ”simple” thing, but it might just be the most scientific behavior I’ve seen in a while here. We all lie several times a day, we are all biased by preconceptions so we are all wrong many times a day. Anytime we manage to notice and change our mind, we grow and stop trying to spread a falsehood. How simple and nice this forum would be if more people could second guess themselves at least on occasion, once in a while.


That you all can read: objectively pcm and dsd can arrive to the similar resolution and nether has final theoretical limit. It’s a different way to skin a cat, but not matter the variable, and as mentioned, we tend to reach some hard limitations at analogue levels before we record digitally. Meaning we end up with digital trying to have more fidelity for signals that can’t dream of matching it. And of course playback and hearing are also easily outmatched by digital encoding.
Reading the thread, my rational was that @Chimmy9278 had a few options.
He could of course be wrong about hearing a difference.
He could be right but the cause could be all the stuff already hypothesized, plus the player and dac that may not sound the same because of how they treat the formats(meaning they probably mess one up if it’s easily noticed the 2 formats sound different).
It could be something about the converter that makes one into the other format.
But the very first idea that came to my mind was mastering. Maybe @Chimmy9278 just likes as little mastering as possible on music. Making true dsd more likely to fit the bill, it being such a nightmare to master natively.
IDK the correct answer, those are only ideas.

Love your feedback, and all the points buried in the response. Done very skillfully.

Back to the main topic, so far I have seen this statement: “Then there are the differences in the ways DAC chips work. Most modern DAC chips are Delta-Sigma which decode native DSD. R-2R DAC chips decode native PCM. In order for you to play PCM files on a Delta-Sigma DAC or DSD files on an R-2R DAC the files have to be converted in real time.”
- https://www.mojo-audio.com/blog/dsd-vs-pcm-myth-vs-truth/

So maybe it is that my Dap, with an ESS chip, which I believe is a Delta Sigma (please correct me if I am incorrect here), have a worse time converting PCM to DSD during play back than playing native DSD stream.

That said, I have not done enough blind tests personally to say for sure there is a noticeable difference. Sad thing being I don’t have the ability to do more runs, but I am trying, to use my tone2 with speakers to do them, that will take a while to prepare because of some technical difficulties. Will also be looking up papers on controlled blind tests in the mean while.

In terms of the claims about reproduction and its perfection, I am looking at videos by https://youtube.com/channel/UCb_NEjjKOXV9pilaSOjlkZA to understand how PCM works. Right now trying to figure out how the nynquistic theorem makes sense. I found it to be really interesting when it says 2x and a bit more sometimes of a sampling rate and perfectly capture and reproduce an analog signal. Just can’t seem to get over the two sampling points can construct the sound wave completely part.

About mastering, I like classical music. Which I believe is light on mixing and very focused on mastering considering the remastered releases there are. This is just an inference, I have not got to the stage of understanding mastering yet in my research. Please do shed some light on this subject if you guys don’t mind!

Listen to music,
J

 

[sander99]

So maybe it is that my Dap, with an ESS chip, which I believe is a Delta Sigma (please correct me if I am incorrect here), have a worse time converting PCM to DSD during play back than playing native DSD stream.

To eliminate this potential cause of a "false positive" you can do the following:
Say your original DSD recording is A.
Convert A to 44.1 kHz 16 bits PCM, say the result is file B.
Convert B to DSD (same rate as the original) again, say the result of this is file C.
Now compare A to C.

 

[Chimmy9278]

To eliminate this potential cause of a "false positive" you can do the following:
Say your original DSD recording is A.
Convert A to 44.1 kHz 16 bits PCM, say the result is file B.
Convert B to DSD (same rate as the original) again, say the result of this is file C.
Now compare A to C.

I think it would be better if I convert it to DXD and then back. DXD is the PCM designed for DSD.

 

[sander99]

I think it would be better if I convert it to DXD and then back. DXD is the PCM designed for DSD.

If you can not distinguish it with 44.1/16 then for sure not with DXD, you can also do both of course.

 

[Chimmy9278]

If you can not distinguish it with 44.1/16 then for sure not with DXD, you can also do both of course.

Now I see where you are coming from. Confident in my ears not being able to hear the difference even under the worse circumstances! Sure I will see what is the best way to do this conversion.