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The Modern DAC killed High Resolution Music - has Stereophile proven it?

Hi Everyone,
One thing I've mentioned a lot is that over the past 10 years or so DAC's really closed the delta in how well they play CD (i.e. Redbook) vs. high resolution (96/24 or higher). I've stated for a long time that the delta closed so much that high resolution music no longer seemed to be as important.

Stereophile just released an interesting set of measurements regarding jitter performance of older players vs. today. It's not absolute proof of my thesis, but it certainly is correlated.


https://www.stereophile.com/content/2020-jitter-measurements

One thing, as I commented, you don't have to compare old DACs to the $15,000 Bartok. The Mytek Brooklyn and others in the $2,000 price range also demonstrate this, and in fact has a very similar jitter rejection profile to the Bartok. The point to me is, almost all decent DAC's have jumped leaps and bounds in jitter performance. That's for sure.  Perhaps this explains the disappearing gap in performance as well between Redbook and Hi Rez?

https://www.stereophile.com/content/mytek-hifi-brooklyn-da-processor%C2%96headphone-amplifier-measur... 

erik_squires
wrenth
26 posts
 
I own Chord Dave and Blu and... in spite of Blu outstanding scaler DSD files sound better then CD not mention Tidal Masters. So no matter who says such crap it is not true. I suppose that these people do not have proper equipment to hear the difference.
Thx,
stibi
51 posts
 
Hi @millercarbon, although I usually appreciate your posts as very informative, in this particular one you are not correct. Delta means difference, so @erik_squires statement makes perfect sense. Let’s just enjoy or hobby :)
tastyfreeze's avatar
tastyfreeze
135 posts
 
Yep.  To enjoy life in the modern times you need to enjoy both sides.  
erik_squires OP
15,816 posts
 
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

Ag insider logo xs@2x
mayoradamwest
429 posts
 
How do you know the DACs you’ve heard just aren’t very good at high resolution? I owned the Brooklyn DAC+ for quite a while and I heard the difference. Also, I’ll reiterate, that your system just might not be resolving enough or your room is not allowing maximum acoustics. 
I can see the difference between 4K and HD but not everyone can. Does that mean that maybe HD is just as good and we just haven’t seen the best upscaler yet? No, because that’s ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as your point. 
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