Upsampling PCM or DSD in 2022

I wasn’t being snarky in my post, so I’d appreciate not being condescended to or demeaned in turn, if I may so ask. I’m well aware of PS Audio’s coup in circumventing Sony’s DRM licensing limitations. Perhaps a little explanation of the back story of this stroke of genius is in order so folks won’t continue to mistake it for “innovation”. 

Sony is the original inventor of SACD technology, as you know. And since the inception of the format, Sony has forced all manufacturers of SACD players to follow their own hardware limitations, namely downsampling all digital audio streams to a maximum of 48 kHz and 16 bit. Sony also owned a majority of the masters originally released in the SACD format, and they invoked this restriction to prevent bootleggers from pirating their own digital masters that far exceeded the resolution of standard Red Book CDs. 

You’ll note that PS Audio, the only outfit who has managed to circumvent these restrictions, did not release their DirectStream DAC in isolation—they did so with the simultaneous release of first their PerfectWave SACD player, that was designed to offer this benefit when coupled with one of their proprietary DACs, via McGowan’s beloved IIS protocol. Then they “upgraded” the technology to their DirectStream line, at even higher prices. 

PS Audio could not have achieved this “innovation” without the express permission and cooperation from Sony, without incurring major lawsuits. Even high dollar Marantz SACD players do not have access to the bit perfect DSD layer, because they are just as restricted by Sony’s DRM rights as any other manufacturer is. So PS Audio did not achieve this breakthrough by any strokes of technological brilliance—they merely bought the rights to supersede the licensing limitations from Sony, who would only agree to this if the format was limited to a non-standard (at the time) transmission protocol—namely, IIS. 

So that $6,000 price tag you paid for to gain access to that DSD layer largely went  to Sony for their licensing rights. There’s no magic otherwise in PS Audio’s DAC or SACD player, nor is there anything superior about IIS over standard USB (despite McGowan’s inscrutable claims to the contrary). It’s all a ruse to get you believe that McGowan has mystical gifts as an engineer, and to convince you to part ways with a month’s worth of salary to buy these two units as a pair accordingly.

Lest you misunderstand my motives, I’ve long been tempted to buy into this just so I could access the only way possible to play my SACDs natively through my headphone setup. If you’re happy with these assets, as I’ve said before, I champion and celebrate that for you, and I have aspired to what you have myself for some time. Where I take exception is when folks start implying that the DAC itself offers superior performance over much less expensive offerings, or when folks pass along McGowan’s unsubstantiated scientific claims that he promotes to obfuscate the truth behind DirectStream’s technology, the “benefits” of IIS, and his profit-seeking motives. PS Audio is inarguably savvy, but their ingenuity is in strategy, not so much on the bench. Peace.

I’m relatively new to this forum, and I’m certainly not looking to make any enemies here. I’ve always maintained the view that if someone is happy with the sound of their audio system, and it gives them joy listening to music, that is a beautiful thing—and it would be a self-serving, destructive act to attempt to sully that experience for them by criticizing their choices.
 

However, I see a lot of talk on here about the “sound” of a DAC, particularly in favor of PS Audio’s $6,000 take on this technology, and Paul McGowan’s “proprietary” terms he invokes to describe its ephemeral results. And it is a very different thing when one is suggesting to others that the indefensibly priced DirectStream is “the only way to go” if you want to achieve the pinnacle of sound, from a component that shouldn’t have a “sound” to begin with—especially when their claims are as scientifically baseless as the language used by the marketing mouthpiece of the manufacturer himself. Has anyone ever asked themselves what factors justify that price point, for a device that exists almost exclusively in the digital realm?
 

What exactly should a DAC “sound like”? A DAC is nothing more than a computer, designed to convert a digital sample of an original master back into its original form with the least amount of errors possible—errors that take the form of noise, distortion or “jitter” when our amplifiers transmit the signal to our headphones or speakers. If a DAC is doing its job properly, it shouldn’t have a “sound” other than what was intended in the mastering process. If it sounds “warmer” than other DACs, assuming that all other components are unchanged, then that’s either a product of distortion (errors) or of the cognitive bias introduced by having spent $6,000 on the device itself. Logically (and therefore scientifically), the DAC should be an invisible part of the signal chain—reproducing the original master as faithfully as possible, allowing us to tailor the sound to taste in our choice of amplifiers, DSPs/ASPs and headphones.  
 

For those in the market for a DAC, or an audio system in general, please do your research before spending your hard-earned cash on your choice of components, and please be very wary of the advice you receive from others, particularly when they are suggesting to you that you would be a pinhead if you didn’t buy into the marketing claptrap from “premium” brands. A very wise audio engineer once told me to spend my hard-earned cash in the following order of cost, from least to most—and it has always served me well: Cables—>Streamer—>DAC—>Amplifer—>Headphones. The latter component is the most personal one, the one that has the most significant impact on the resulting sound. Find a DAC that has the best measurements (lowest noise, distortion and error rate)—if you do your homework you’ll find that recent advances in technology have brought us options that require a minimum of expense to do the job exceptionally well. Peace.

As a friendly aside, factors such as soundstage, presence and imaging (I have to set aside “realism” because I think that term is undefinable) are all primarily a matter of the headphones used to play back audio streams. There is no way for any of these factors to be packaged into a digital audio stream, and again, if you think logically about the function and purpose of the digital to analog conversion process, there is no way these attributes could exist at this stage of audio processing. A DAC’s purpose is to recreate in an analog format what existed in the original master when it was sampled into a digital format. If you can explain to me how “soundstage” could be carried forward in this format, I’m anxious to hear it. 
 

There’s a great deal of misappropriating analog terms into the digital realm in these rooms. These nebulous claims are exactly what manufacturers want us to do to convince ourselves that they actually mean something when they claim that their DAC “takes our listening experience to another level”. I think it’s at great risk to our wallets that we fall for these unsubstantiated concepts that defy the logic of how digital audio works. There is no “sound” in a digital audio stream until it reaches our amplifiers—there’s only an encoding of the original master, full stop.

Of course filters influence the sound of oversampling DACs. But filter algorithms in all DACs are all built around common standards with a finite list of variables they can play around with, and there’s nothing particularly innovative or earth-shattering between one DAC manufacturer’s vs another’s. In the case of brands that share the same DAC chipset (such as an ES9039pro), they’re all defined by the options hard coded into the chip, and are just given different names.

Regardless, there’s certainly nothing about PS Audio’s filters that are any different from those offered in other DACs, and there’s definitely nothing magical about them that warrants a $6,000 price tag. Anyway, the discussion of filter options is not germane to my point about the myths of IIS being an allegedly superior digital audio transport or about the outrageous price points given to these “boutique” DACs that don’t measure any differently than a cheap delta sigma SMSL 400ES or a Topping d90se. In fact the affordable DS DACs of the past few years measure demonstrably better than the offerings from the likes of PS Audio and Chord, and they absolutely trounce the measurements of archaic, pricey R2R ladder options.

This phenomenon isn’t something that leads to any subjective differences in sound quality that would convince the acolytes away from the high dollar boutique brands, because we reached the limits of the human ear years ago with digital to analog conversion. An eight year old Chord DAVE sounds every bit as good as a Topping d90se because the Topping’s superior distortion scores and noise floors are not audible (to this point, even though I somewhat hypocritically demand DACs capable of PCM 768 and DSD 512 personally, anything above a SINAD of 96 or a shade above 16 bit is completely inaudible, and the human ear has been proven to be incapable of discerning resolutions much higher than Red Book CDs).

So in spite of the fact that we’ve scientifically proven that advances in digital technology have now allowed mass production of DACs that provide the highest possible audio reproduction that can be achieved, outfits like PS Audio are going to keep writing ever more inscrutable and technologically advanced-sounding one sheets that will keep convincing their customers to shell out wads of cash for the “latest” in DAC technology, despite the fact that the technology reached its finite limits in the last decade and there’s no place left to go.

The future of the audiophile industry, when it comes to DACs, is wholly dependent on cognitive bias and the reliable consumer base that is psychologically held captive to the myth that high cost correlates with quality. Given that DACs are nothing more than computers, why else would otherwise sensible folks still shell out $14,000 for a Chord DAVE in 2023, when the the device’s tech is almost nine years old? Think about other digital devices with nine year old tech—2014’s cell phones, computers, televisions, etc, and ask yourself whether you’d pay ultra premium prices for one of THOSE. 2023 prices for the iPhone 6–take a moment and just think about the motives of ritzy audio manufacturers vs common sense, for the sake of your wallet if nothing else!