High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.

I'll weigh in as someone who designs this stuff, that redbook is in fact very very good.  In fact i have been blogging on digital formats, compression, etc and trying to undo some myths.
(Sonogyresearch.com/blog if you care)

Audiophiles' suspicion of redbook has been fueled by what can be either mis-steps or arrogant errors in the industry. Perfect sound forever (this in 1985). Bits are bits on digital interfaces a9whcih have a large analog component in timing), rotten early digital mastering and reconstruction filter.
Yet, as noted, we are figuring it out.  But some in fact were pretty good > decade ago. One stand out at its time was the Theta DS-Pro. I still have one and switch to it occasionally - and it can make great music with great recordings. Of course, like any clear lens, it can also make awful sounds with awful recordings. But that's the two-edge sword of reproduction, as opposed to production.
G

I'll just weigh in that having read many of the posts, there are lots of things being confused here.
1. Confusing Upsampling vs magically creating more bit depth2. Confusing why one upsamples (its not to get more info)3. A vague notion that digital is suddenly good. Some of it has been good for ages, much still is awful, and most of that from the studio, and in Rock/pop4. Confusing chips with implementation. Differences are in the latter.  Gimme some of the old 18/20 bit R2R DACs any day. Hell, don't give them to me, but please sell them to me. :-)
5. And just to make my point, it still doesnt matter because i can make both PDM and R2R sound good or sound bad. (note: PDM = 1 bit = sigma delta, it works like your fuel injection)
But yes, overall things are improving, will continue, and red book is good enough But it does make all our engineering lives very difficult due to the proximity of the sampling rate to the nyquist limit.  Give us some filter slop room, please!  Why does auto-correct want ot make "Nyquist" = NyQuil?
G
ps: i have info on some of this on my blog at sonogyresearch.com

Sadly, Mark went from making absolutely killer $500 DACs to making even better $25000 DACs. I guess the market spoke, and being smart, he listened :-(
Its also amazing how much better i made the gold full nelson LinkDAC sound by building a custom (dual), custom regulated box. Many, many hours and about $125.00 in parts on ebay.
I cannot hear one whit of difference between 96 and 132k upsampling

G

this ought to be great, thanks Malcolm!  Downloaded - would not play in browser. I plan to continue my blog @ sonogyresearch.com with some interesting anecdotes from when i liaised to MPEG while working on both contribution quality digital compressed NTSC and HDTV back around 1989-91.  The findings (which can be informally confirmed with any JPEG compression utility and your phone) are very interesting in a world where compression is a dirty word....spoiler alert - compressed HD > uncompressed SD. No surprise if one considers the degree of redundancy in any HD representation.

G

eric_squires asked:

The modern DAC, the best of them, no longer do this. The Redbook playback is so good high resolution is almost not needed. Anyone else notice this?

Not really. I totally agree that as we solve problems in DACs and in the timing of the signal they are fed, and as recording engineers operate with the systems margins, and as studio formats allow for better filtering, and... (key here - lots of "ands"), we are finding that red book reality is approaching red book theory.

But are today’s DACs, on their own, that much better?  Well, Maybe. I will say that when fed a low-jitter signal, my 20-odd year old Theta DS-Pro (Mike Moffit’s original baby) sounds very, very good. Is it state of the art? No. Is it damn good and better than most modern DACs (which admittedly often cost less?) yes.

FYI, i had occasion to speak to the guys at Theta about the Casanova recently. I was not terrible familiar.  According to them the DSPro is significantly better.  Casanova is a cool concept withe the all-digital backplane. I considered something like that back in the 1980s. Never took it anywhere for lots of practical and life reasons... mostly i had another company and another job that each demanded my time.
So our experiences may not in fact conflict.

No, is not that simple.The cassanova card (at least the one i was holding) is also R2R. And all the DSPro's from Gen 1 were R2R. In fact, in 1994 i don't think there were sigma-delta chips yet. One of the big changes to the V and 8 was re-clocking (jitter, here we go again)

I was going to avoid the technical details, but it had to do mostly with the DSP power to execute the digital pre-filtering.
G

George:
02-15-2019 3:23pm

And all the DSPro’s from Gen 1 were R2R

Sorry, but the Pro prime was only one of the Pro series to be Delta Sigma it used the DS chip SAA7350GP. The Pro Prime II was not DS it had 2 x PCM67P-K R2R chips

read what i wrote, DSPro, not Prime, not Basic, DSPro. regardless, you seem to agree that the DSPros  were R2R, so what's your point?  Maybe I'm missing it...

And the card i was holding had a PCM17XX (i forget) R2R chip on it. Or a BB series that I thought to be R2R (e.g. 17XX, PCMXX) but that was some time back.

Now, as to when PDM/sigma-delta was in wide use (not in labs -- bear in mind that the Theta DSPro G2 is from 1993-4), i recall in 1987-1988 i was looking at the BB PCM54 predecessor to the PCM55 and 64 and it -- and the whole series to come -- was *very new*. BB was  in its R2R days.  Phillips was selling lots of what 1741s or something like that (ancient history!). But R2R was not special - it was simply how most things were done then.
I don't know what gen Cassanova i was holding or what variant - it was a card brought to me bare, with a project in mind. We scuttled that idea after speaking with Theta.
But regardless, my point was that the Theta DSPro was a significantly better performer to the Casanova i was holding, and according to the engineer i spoke with a Theta, the big differences was horsepower to perform the DSPs.  Maybe it was more - i didn't have the time or interest to play twenty questions with someone helping me.... So maybe it was PDM.