You know that the DSD DAC converts everything to DSD, right? I would just trust the FPGA in it rather than some random algorithm that upconverts. Just my take.
Software converting PCM to DSD using DoP
The big debate of analog vs digital, has becomes quieter and quieter. Digital has just gotten that good. While I have a turntable and several hundred albums is sits collecting dust as it I can’t say it sounds better than my digital rig at best it just sounds different and on top of that a lot less convenient to actually play music. I’ve recently discovered an open source playback software called Album Player . I realize it is not anywhere as feature rich as most of the other offerings out there but I will say it’s still a lot more convenient than records. The reason I’m posting about it is the way it sounds. I use an inexpensive fanless PC a USB powerblocker dongle and a simple powered USB hub to drive the PSAudio DirectStream DAC via USB. While not a lot of playback features Album Player has the option to convert all playback output to DSD. There are a lot of options in the config and a lot of them either crashed the software or just didn’t work. I believe I have finally found a configuration for my hardware but I don’t really understand all the settings. One of the setting to enable resampling has three choices regarding phase. " minimum phase, intermediate phase and linear phase". I’ve tried all three but can’t hear any difference. Does anybody know what the heck they are referring too? There are also selections for "steep filter 99%" and "Ultra High Quality". Again can’t hear a difference but that’’s may because it’s using the PSAudio PerfectWabe Asio driver for output.
If you do try it, for me the PC volume control had to be 97% or greater for it to work using DSD but without it but the digital volume control did work.
I’m posting this because there has been a lot of posts about streamers lately and for my system it is a step up over my PI2AES streamer I2S and AES /EBU outputs.
Cheers
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Yeah you would think but it's not the case. I spend a lot of time listening, researching and comparing. It seems to me to be similar to HQPlayer in how it outputs data and DoP is a much blacker background and provides better separation. Trying to research with my limited experience I did find this so I can't be to far off. Set to DXDx2 dCS Bartók now inserts a DSDx2 upsampling stage towards the end of the PCM oversampling sequence, before conversion to analogue |
Two different streamers. One is the Raspberry PI with the PI2AES hat that can output SPIDF, I2S and AES/EBU using Volumio Software. It converts everything even DSD files to PCM. Before installing the Album Player software it was the preferred source. The other is a Windows PC using USB. I ran Foobar for the longest time and DSD would play DSD but flac files were processed as PCM. The Album Player software allows a choice in the configuration to convert all files to DSD. Like said above the DAC works by converting everything to DSD. For some reason though outputting DoP (DSD) the sound improves noticeably. |
@erik_squires PS Audio DSD MkI doesn’t support native DSD |