Not wasting my time on new Digital

Muralman1, you wrote:

"Get a non oversampler player...any make will do...I am using the cheap Consonance 120...it played the most realistic piano in the room on my Scinnies so far...I have listened to a wide sample of oversampling CDPs and DACs...none do service to the material imbedded on the CD...Even the cheapest AN or Consonance sound far more natural to me"

Informed that the Consonance actually was an oversampling player (I'll take Drubin's word on that, I know nothing about it), you then wrote:

"Some material sounds first rate...piano to a lesser degree...The highs have that same edginess that all oversampling players have...the mids are cardboardy as well."

Can you explain how "cardboardy" mids and "edgy" highs yield the "most realistic" piano? Or how this machine can sound "far more natural" than any oversampling player you've heard, yet suddenly suffer from the same flawed highs "that all oversampling players have" once you learn that it *is* an oversampling player? An inordinate fondness for making sweeping catagorical generalizations without basis, perhaps? Or maybe you're agenda-driven?

Rapogee: I too use an older Theta (DSPro Basic IIIa, with a Pearl transport). A few years ago, under the onslaught of propoganda concerning "upsampling", I decided to give a try with something newer to hear what all the fuss was about, but the popular and well-reviewed DAC I got fell well short of the Theta IMO. I didn't assume this meant that all "upsampling" machines sucked of course, but I haven't bothered again since, though like you I occasionally wonder if I'm missing anything, especially since CDs still don't sound as good in many respects as my rather humble vinyl rig.

But I'm not the sort of hardcore audiophile who listens to a lot of different gear, and anyway a bypass test I constructed to help objectively evaluate the two different-sounding DACs showed that in fact, the Theta is essentially getting most things right or very nearly so. My gut feeling is it's probably more the transport than the DAC which could stand some improvement, and that getting the units modded instead may be a more satisfying way to go, although before springing for that I'll probably want to hear at least one well-regarded, newer all-in-one player in the hope of saving rack space (it would need to have digital inputs though).

However, this rising chorus in support of non-oversampling strikes me much as the one for "upsampling" did. Same type of rhetoric, replete with catagorical pronouncements -- another "magic bullet" as it were, to use Sam Tellig's regrettable (that's a polite way of saying stupid) phrase. I don't know if there's anything to it -- I tend to think this would introduce problems as much as avoid them -- but I don't believe in magic in the form of bullets or anything else, and Muralman1 you're not telling us anything to help convince me otherwise.

D_edwards, what your argument boils down to is that, absent analog -- specifically vinyl -- distortions or limitations, stereo material should be played back in multichannel. Whether that's true or not, the alleged perfection of digital is beside the point.

Viridian: I am loathe to insert myself into the middle of this one, but I can't make sense of your statements

"...analog, both tape and LP, has greater dynamic range than redbook CD. Sounds can be heard between ten and twenty db beneath the noise floor on analog. Digital media simply throw away all information below the least significant bit"

"in analog, not digital, replay, sounds can be heard 10db to 20db into the noise floor and this leads to analog replay having a greater dynamic range than redbook CD"

Taking for granted, for the sake of argument, the assertion about audibility below the noise floor with analog, I can't see any connection between that supposed fact, and drawing the conclusion that therefore digital must have less dynamic range. Even if the stipulation about audibility is true, it seems to me the comparison would be wholly dependent on where the analog noise floor actually falls in relation to the bit-depth of a particular digital format. If, for instance, an analog format has a noise floor 20dB higher than the LSB of a digital format, then they should have equal dynamic range by your argument. But even so, taking the noise floor of the analog into account, the digital should have superior low-level resolution.

Personally, I'm not sure that any of this stuff actually has much to do with the perception of 'dynamic' sound (or whether dynamics has anything to do with D_Edwards contention about digital and multichannel, for that matter). But regardless, your inference does seem like a non-sequitor to me.