MoFi controversy

This may help people understand how an LP is made.

Much to do about nothing.

@theaudioamp i agree with you. There are many digital recording methods. 24/96 will capture everything that is on an analog tape. Sony invented DSD to be an archive format

@theaudioamp I didn't say "perfect" I said  or meant "better".  PCM is great. We've been loving it since the 1980s.  But DSD allows for far higher sampling rates such that interpolation is kept to a minimum.  Yes, Paul is very persuasive in his talks. And I have bought and played DSD64 and up files from him and Blue Coast and thought they were nice. Indeed though, the care taken in recording and using the proper mics and set up can go a long ways to making something sound good - or bad - no matter what the native recording format is. 

As computers get better and faster, why not use DSD? Maybe not today for most studios, but 20 years from now, I don't see why not. No one can argue that a more detailed representation file of a sound shouldn't (in theory) sound better than a lower representation file.  Can your human ears hear the difference on your system I guess is the real question.  

Many audiophiles have bought into wanting high resolution PCM and some say that yes, they can hear a difference between CD quality and 24-bit/96Khz or higher.  Qobuz and Tidal are proof of that.

I enjoy CD quality for the most part just fine. I can buy into the idea of recording analog master tapes to DSD256 for "backup" isn't a bad idea though. 

@moonwatcher it is probably best to learn from people who understand how this technology works and people who think they do. There are too many philes that fall into the latter camp.

DSD samples more often, but its sample size is much larger. It needs to apply sophisticated noise shaping to move the noise out of the audio band to higher frequencies. Guess what, virtually every PCM ADC and most PCM DACs do exactly the same thing as their interior structure is a sigma-delta converter. Most PCM converters on playback upsample to a higher frequency as well. This allows simpler analog filter. Interpolation happens in the digital domain but it is a mathematical process and effectively perfect. In the analog domain there is no interpolation. It is simply a low pass filter. That low pass filter makes sure all the steps connect into as perfect an analog waveform as possible. Feeding in a DSD signal does not result in any better analog waveform on the output.

Here is the crazy thing about the phile world. They will believe many things are are inherently at conflict. For instance they talk about the superiority of DSD, while shunning sigma-delta ADCs. Sigma delta DACs are PCM mathematically converted to something that is effectively like DSD but using multiple bits to improve performance. They could do single bit, but the results would be worse.

Why not use DSD in computers? Because speed or not, it is a poor mathematical description of a signal to work with. 24/96 already represents everything perfectly up to past 40KHz. 24/192 already represents everything perfectly past 80KHz. It is already very hard, some argue well impossible, to tell the difference between 16\44.1 and 24\96 if you do the testing properly. Using TIDAL/ Qoboz as a comparison would not be considered an adequate test. Under no conditions will anyone be able to tell the difference between 24/96 and 24/192 data (note use of the word data). We aren't bats.  So absolutely it can be argued that a higher resolution file cannot sound better. We are simply not equipped to hear the difference.

There is a whole lot of phile beliefs that were perhaps one time true as well, but no longer are if they ever were. Whole product categories have rised out of these misconceptions. DSD is in many ways no different.

@aberyclark , neither Philips nor SONY invented DSD. Philips was the first to work on applying it to modern audio. Sony jumped on and they created the SACD standard.