We need some discussion of which is better or what are the pros and cons of each.
@drbarney1 I am not the administrator of Audiogon, my friend. If you want to have that discussion you can start your own thread on the topic and I’m sure many will participate. I have only dabbled with DSD. Getting the Mytek supported by my operating system took quite a while. Now that I'm using Roon which is very DSD friendly I may return. Best, Erik |
Here is the experience I had comparing redbook and high resolution music and what got me thinking of this. I had an ARC DAC 8 and Mytek at the same time, so I got to hear how they played each. - ARC DAC 8 Redbook: 80%
- ARC DAC 8 High Resolution: 95%
- Mytek Redbook: 95%
- Mytek High Resolution: 97%
What was also interesting is that while the ARC benefited from a Wyred4Sound resampler, the Mytek did not. It played the same. Of course, buy the music you like, but if what I heard was true and a trend, this reduces the value gap. Best, E |
I don’t really understand this statement . The recording that I was
referring to, the Shostakovich Tenth Symphony with Nelsons and the
Boston SO, is a recent recording, issued as a CD and then a few weeks
later as a download in 3 resolutions. I would presume that it was only
“mastered” once, and never “remastered”,
Hi mahler123 Unfortunately, I know this is an unreliable inference. It has been shown over time that releases on different formats are mastered differently. Even different releases of the same recording on the same medium may have a different profile, including changes in: - Compression
- Spectral balance (i.e. EQ)
- Channel separation.
It is possible to take a high resolution recording and down sample it, and put that on a CD, but without actually talking to the engineers responsible, I have no idea what happened.
Again, I don’t understand the point here. The original focus of the
thread was on modern DACs , the thesis being that current DACs enhance
Redbook so much that High Rez is irrelevant.
I think "irrelevant" is too strong a term, and if I said that I should correct it. My apologies. I meant, "a lot less desirable" . Saying modern DACs killed High rez was hyperbolic, which is kind of my brand. :) Modern DACs bring out the best in everything, all resolutions. IMO they
do a better job of showing the distance between High Rez and Redbook.
Ok, but what if this isn't that High rez is better, but Redbook playback is bad? I mean, we have this bias that poor CD playback prooves high resolution is better data. What if it just poor CD performance? |
Also, downsampling 24/96 downloaded flacs to Redbook and burning them to cd gives again a readily apparent difference when compared to the commercially bought Redbook version, again on the same system etc. And this to me tells me that the 24/96 is mastered differently. That’s’ been happening since CD’s, and it is a maddening confound!! :) First gen CD’s were often more compressed and with less channel separation than LPs, then SACDs came out, and they had clearly different spectrum profiles, showing that the mastering engineers had made significant changes. The only way to really tell today whether or not your DAC is performing better or differently with High Rez is to do exactly what you did. Take a high rez source, down sample it and compare the two. |
I refer to one recording that I own as both a Redbook CD and a High Rez download. It is Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony in Shostakovich Symphony #10. Love specific, personal experiences, @mahler123, thank you. Not only can I tell the difference, but when I demonstrated a passage for comparison to my wife, who could care less about SQ, admitted there was an obvious difference, as have many reviewers. It is always hard to tell if this is due to technology or the re-mastering process, but do you think that with a 15 year old DAC you’d feel the difference in sound quality between the CD and Hi Rez recording would have been the same?? |
Wadia is long gone and so is the need for oversampling DAC’s. @lalitk Right, but the specific point I was trying to make here was that Wadia was the first company I knew of that did advanced upsampling, and quantization errors would go along with why Wadia sounded good at all. Wadia didn’t oversample, they upsampled. They famously advertised they used a French curve fitting algorithm to extrapolate intra-sample data.This required a lot more compute power than either oversampling (zero compute power) or linear interpolation (draw a line between two points). But in the end, the results are how you describe them. Wadia is gone and so is the need for their tech. |
once said that the reason why hi-res files sounded better several years
ago was that the DACs of the day had "quantization errors" and by
processing a hi-res file, those errors were typically way beyond the
upper limit of our hearing, @ejr1953 This seems perfectly plausible hypothesis to me. Remember how much money Wadia commanded for their upsampling DACs? |
Mr. Frugal
Put that on my tombstone.
seems to be stuck inside a box....he has been trying for so long to
convince us that high resolution music no longer seemed to be as
important.
@lalitk The last two words are key to my point. Not "as important." that doesn't mean you don't like them or won't buy them. I mean that it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference and this is having an influence in the market. Best, E |
To defend my thesis a little more, even if we personally like High Rez music above all others, it always faced an uphill battle. Even lossless music has barely gone mainstream.
MQA 20 years ago would have seemed like a godsend, but now, with better DACs and cheaper Internet it seems like much less important.
The argument of "can I hear a difference with High Resolution Files?" is different than mine. I'm arguing that as DACs have improved, the reasons for the average audiophile to buy high resolution music has diminshed.
Tidal, Quboz and Amazon seem to have demonstrated that non-MP3 based services can survive, but it's getting harder to sell 96/24.
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@mahler123
That’s a different situation. MP3 as we know is lossy, but put it another way, what if some one had a lossy compression algorithm which sounded 90% as good as a high rez download, for 1/10th the cost?
Would that not alter the market and depress the value of the high rez recording?
Going back to my original post though, let's say CD playback until the 2000's was half as good as it is today, but high resolution music stayed the same. Can High Resolution still command the premium it used to?
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R U suggesting that a DAC is selective (so to speak) in what it will play well? Not selective. I don't think that DAC's choose to perform better, but what if jitter was worse with Redbook? What if the side-effect of better clocks and better DAC chips has been that Redbook is finally as good as the scientists and mathematicians have been telling us? @mahler
Yes, both DACs got more out of Redbook CD than I had ever thought
possible, That's pretty much all I am saying. If that is true, then the bonus value of high resolution must have diminshed no? |
How do you know the DACs you’ve heard just aren’t very good at high resolution? That would be a lot of DACs. . |
outstanding scaler DSD files sound better then CD not mention Tidal Masters. But why do we assume this has to do with the resolution of the files instead of the performance of the DAC? For decades audiophiles were told that high resolution data sounded better just because. What if they just didn't play CD's very well to begin with, and now a lot of DACs play CDs much much better than they used to? I was lucky enough to have DACs that bridged this temporal divide. The ARC DAC 8 and a Mytek Brooklyn. With 96k/24 music they both sounded very good, but with Redbook (44.1kHz/24) the Mytek was still outstanding. This made me stop and consider that maybe the issue was not the resolution of the music, but rather that the DAC 8 just didn't perform very well at low resolutions. Best, E |
Hey @millercarbon,
You still super angry I gave you free advice you didn't take? Because you are cozying up to me more than my cats.
Best,
Erik
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