DCS Verdi Elgar Purcell VS. Audio Aero Capitole

You say, "Forget about 96 or 192 and pick the best sounding component." Yet your post dismiss the dCS units because of "theory" rather than listening.

Moreover, you reduce the dCS to just upsampling (and dismiss it for that alone) while excusing the Audio Aero for having the same feature, choosing to look to its other features besides the upsampling. I take it that any dCS system lacks a quality transport, digital filtering, conversion, analogue stage, etc? At least with the dCS, if upsampling is so useless, one can run the dCS completely bypassing any upsampling. So now in theory the Audio Aero is at a disadvantage?

This thread shows many different opinions on high-end DACs. Some have compared components, some have not but really like what they already have, and some have a self-interest in promoting certain components. Where does the truth lie? At this level I think that the differences are more of personal taste than an objective better or worse.

hi germanboxers, you write:

"If you "turn off" a digital filter ... then you certainly will change the sound and if it was designed to be used with both sets of filters, it'll likely sound worse."

(as clarification, the dcs system is made up of three separate units, a dac, an upsampler and a transport, which came out in that order and years apart.)

stereophile wrote about upsampling some years back when the dcs purcell (the upsampler unit) was new and on their "hot" list. they didn't have definitive answers about how or why upsampling seemed to improve sound, but they hypothesized that it wasn't upsampling per se but that upsampling allows the use of certain filters that cannot be applied to red book 16/44.1.

if that is the case, then this suggests that upsampling by itself isn't the secret sauce: the quality of the digital filters and other other factors in the component still matter ... just that some of those factors might only be possible with upsampling in the mix. but we certainly don't need that stereophile article to know the importance of factors like the quality of the analogue outs, the transport, and so on.

here, one could make an analogy to someone thinking that a $200 sacd player will always beat a $5000 red book player because dsd itself is the secret sauce (and especially if that someone makes the mistake of comparing an sacd of an originally poor recording against a cd of a state-of-the-art recording).

what these dicussions and disagreements on upsampling show, i think, is that no one has the definitive answer. at least, it seems that no one's come up with that one explanation which most audiphiles and manufacturers can agree on. however, just because someone can't explain X doesn't mean that Not X is true, especially when X can be heard, if not broken down in words. absent a clear answer of X or Not X, blame must cut both ways, to people preaching upsampling as gospel and to people preaching upsampling as useless.

while there might be people who buy into a component solely because the manufacturer sells up the upsampling angle, i think that people are smart enough to realize that two upsampling dacs differing in price by 10x aren't exactly cut from the same cloth in the many, many factors that make for good sound.

unfortunately, i can imagine people dismissing upsampling all together because a cheap upsampling unit they tried out didn't sound so hot. seems like the same mistake as buying into a component just because it upsamples. here, one could make an analogy to someone dismissing sacd because that $200 sacd player didn't sound better than the very well built red book player (and again, the materials used for comparison matter too).

advertising "hype" aside, i can agree with you on this: i should hope that an audiophile buying dcs or any other high priced gear take some time to listen and make their buying decision based on that, rather than just upsampling "hype".