HDtracks question?

[BusinessEvolution]

what's the point of a -130dB noise floor if you're listening to music at 90dB, and the listening environment background noise is about 30dB? I'll let you answer that one.

The main point is its a 'true' 24bit R2R DAC without oversampling that can input 24bit/96khz digital audio and output a 0Hz-45KHz analogue frequency (effective output 16/96khz, for the reason you mentioned) without the problems that most other NAS dacs, especially most that have built around single chip solutions, such as decreased SNR, and loss of treble resolution. Its got all the best of digital without most of the downsides, I think it still murders 2nd order harmonics. .

If you have money to blow and you want to be able capitalised on the full resolution of 24bit/96khz, its rather expensive. Also I noticed looking at the pictures of people that use it, its more for the domain of insane speaker setups than for headphone setups . Using this in a headphone setup might be against the law . I think I saw one picture, $10k speakers, and a pair of AKG Q701s.

Most dacs use low pass filters which introduce ringing artifacts and knock the signal back down to 20-20khz, when the true full analogue output of a (16/24bit)/96khz stream would be 0hz-48khz. Human hearing sensitivity is roughly 20-20KHz but cutting off the upper frequencies cuts out the 2% additional sound quality from harmonics and introduces digital artifacts (the bigger impact on sound quality). Though probably in 10 years time, they will solve those programs and machines like this one will be obsolete.

I think you have to be pretty bloody rich to afford it. However it my research to this point has indicated why most people have difficulty telling the difference between 24/192khz and 16/44.1khz, and most likely it is because of the dac and the rest of the setup and our own ears.

[Drubbing]

$5-10k for a bigger range of freqs I'm not going to hear seems like a piss poor deal.

[BusinessEvolution]

I didn't say its a good deal, its more of a, if you win a million dollars in lotto deal. Though it does bring us back to the point of the thread, if HD digital audio has a point if the hardware and our ears aren't up to standard. If you think it sounds better seems to be the important thing. There is so much marketing distorting what people generally know about dacs, I know that was the case for me. Most dacs are actually 16bit, but accept 24-32bit input, and use filters, oversampling, upsampling and noise shaping to achieve the output. One of the audio archival companies said that excessive eq and dynamic compression produce a similar impact on audio to up-sampling.

Also for the A1/D1 sound quality for the ranges you can hear is stupidly good as well, whether we can actually hear that or not is another story, you would have to be pretty darn rich to afford a system that can output at that resolution. I was reading that it might actually be a bad idea for headphones too, due to impact on human psychology that the high frequency sound can have lol

[Drubbing]

I didn't say its a good deal, its more of a, if you win a million dollars in lotto deal.

You'd hope people who've made that sort of money had more sense. For lotto winners it looks like another money-burning exercise, of which they'll have many.

[BusinessEvolution]

I didn't say its a good deal, its more of a, if you win a million dollars in lotto deal.

You'd hope people who've made that sort of money had more sense. For lotto winners it looks like another money-burning exercise, of which they'll have many.

IF you were going to buy a $5k dac , it would be quite good IF the rest of the sounds system worked with its inputs/outputs and were already high quality lol. Unfortunately psycho-acoustics are used for good and evil in the audiophile world. Most of the rich people I know or am related to don't spend $5k on something like a dac (its not an asset). I've seen quite a few people that had money blow it all, just through a life style without financial restraint.

On that note, I wonder if I should start budgeting for a Beyerdynamic T1 Though my bank account balance is quite slight after my most recent purchases.


EDIT: Most dac's aren't actually truely the bit depth that they quote, they actually quote the bit depth of the digital filters that they use. For example Sabre 32 DAC chip, actually uses a 6 dac. . Some other manufactures only produce chips with 10 bit dacs, and TI has largely stopped producing its 20 bit dacs. Digital filters are getting better so they are approximating the resolution of higher bit depth dacs better.
The power of marketing and eventually the power of digital!

http://www.msbtech.com/support/What_abo ... t_DACs.php

EDIT2: The reason why most 24 bit dac chips were phased out is that to have a highly accurate true 24 bit dac costs thousands of dollars, but the market is demanding chips that cost <$50, and are small and are available in large quantities. Its another case of 80/20 in action. If you can produce 80% of the output for 20% of the cost, thats the optimum thing to do.

[BusinessEvolution]

I was reading about one dac, that used so many quality soviet parts that it sounded like it was produced with parts stripped from a soviet nuclear submarine. Other that uses aeronautical technology XD. High quality 24bit dacs are quite extreme.

[Drubbing]

I dunno mate, you might be making it all to hard. But I just can't get interested in numbers. I've heard Marcus' $2k CDP (a lot), a cheaper CDP and got the DACmagic for a couple of weeks to try out before I bought it. They all pissed on my onboard and cheapo ebay DAC, but I liked the DM best. Wouldn't have a clue what it's SNR is cos I can't hear any noise.

[BusinessEvolution]

The digital audio standard was designed with 16bit (R2R) Ladder DACs in mind. However production limitations and difficulty of implementation lead audio manufacturers to drop them for single bit delta sigma dacs, then they started using hybrid, multibit delta sigma dacs, then using dual hybrid delta sigma dacs, then some ultra high end dacs started using the original Ladder dac chips in parallel, and currently the best has gone back and started using new production technologies to produce high accuracy ladder DACs. The problem is that ladder dacs can't complete for value (quality/price) of dual multibit hybrid delta sigma dac designs, such as the Dacmagic plus and Cambridge: Azur 840C which beat previous generation $5-7k dac offerings.

>.> simple.

The current leading multibit hybrid delta sigma dac cost between $700-4000 such as Cambridge: Azur 840C
vs the current leading ladder dacs $5,000-20,000

The technology costs at least 5-6x more at the moment. Its probably going to be ages before its worthwhile, or quite frankly maybe it will never be worthwhile to buy it. They would need to be produced by Intel/Samsung in 12/22nm to be worthwhile, but there isn't a big enough market to justify that kind of production (you need at least between 1-30 million sales). The difference it technology is aiming for true precision (ladder dac) vs average precision (sigma delta dacs).

[BusinessEvolution]

On second thoughts probably you are correct that its too complicated.

[daystrom_matthew]

Read this: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/ ... e-test.ars

I've bought a reasonable amount of stuff including Hotel California and Symphonie No. 9 (which is awesome btw).
I have been blind tested and I can tell the difference between the Hotel California on HDTracks and my 'Eagles Ultimate Collection #4592', the HDTracks one is a lot better, particularly in the bass. Now, the 96kHz IS NOT what makes HDTracks stuff sound good, you can't hear it. The 24bit IS NOT what makes HDTracks stuff sound good, unless you're playing the music at a concert and need it loud enough to fill a stadium. HDTracks stuff sounds better (most of the time), because of the master that the recording came off. Listen to the previews, that should be enough to tell you if they are using a different one what's on your CD. The other good thing about HDTracks is it usually avoids (or has been less impacted by) the loudness war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war.

There are only three things I don't like about HDTracks:
1. You 'need' a US postal address (yay licensing)
2. The downloader is awful
3. The have a lot of adverts for the snake-oil side of the audiophile crowd

That being said, the lack of DRM and that the music is usually superior means that I buy a lot of stuff from there. Oh and if you're after classical, Deutsche Grammophon (the label that recorded that Symphonie No. 9), have a lot of their catalogue available for purchase as FLAC on their website (just make sure you pick Australia in the country selector or you won't see any purchase options).

Matt.

[Drubbing]

Read this: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/ ... e-test.ars

I've bought a reasonable amount of stuff including Hotel California and Symphonie No. 9 (which is awesome btw).
I have been blind tested and I can tell the difference between the Hotel California on HDTracks and my 'Eagles Ultimate Collection #4592', the HDTracks one is a lot better, particularly in the bass. Now, the 96kHz IS NOT what makes HDTracks stuff sound good, you can't hear it. The 24bit IS NOT what makes HDTracks stuff sound good, unless you're playing the music at a concert and need it loud enough to fill a stadium. HDTracks stuff sounds better (most of the time), because of the master that the recording came off.
Matt.

If that's the case, then HD sound of itself is bogus. Just provide decent mastering and you get better sound. iTunes and others simply want a point of difference in order to be able to price something higher.

Mastering does make a difference and I've posted on this before. I have 3 differing masters of Led Zep's first few albums. The original CDs, the Remasters CD, and Mothership. I rip them all to 320. The latter is clearly superior to other two. I realise were talking sampling not bit rate here, but even if I ripped the poorer masters to lossless, they wouldn't sound any better. The original is muted and details are missing, the Remasters is cleaner, but not really any better. People have accused Mothership of being a victim of loudness wars because it is louder, but the clarity and range is improved, the dynamic range hasn't been compressed.

I haven't been able to hear a HD version to compare, I doubt any exists, as Page's healthy superannuation is in remastering LZ catalogue.

[daystrom_matthew]

If that's the case, then HD sound of itself is bogus. Just provide decent mastering and you get better sound. iTunes and others simply want a point of difference in order to be able to price something higher.

Pretty much. Though given Apple's track record with iTunes I expect it would start off as a premium feature, and later become mainstream. The only reason I've been buying the 'HD' stuff is because they usually bother to master them correctly. The reason I care about having a good 96/24 DAC to go with it isn't so I can hear stuff I hear, it's that just-in-time resampling is mostly good, but I don't want to put up with the odd sound artifact. So I'm after something that will just deal with the files natively...that or just bite the bullet and resample my whole library once.

People have accused Mothership of being a victim of loudness wars because it is louder, but the clarity and range is improved, the dynamic range hasn't been compressed.

As with all things it's unfortunately about compromise. There are a few albums where I listen to a version that noticeably distorts because over-all it's better than the other releases.

[BusinessEvolution]

As I said the big advantages are as both of you have said, that you potentially avoid the bad mastering that came out of studio's increasingly. Excessive EQing and dynamic range compression as part of the loudness war. The problem is with older studio recordings that they even had excessive EQing and increased loudness before even being sent to be mastered or to the record house for vinyl. So pre-90s, its hit or miss with some studios that also produced poor recordings, remastering can't fix that. Late 80s and early 90s most CD mastering was terrible, so there are advantages of getting HD audio then or just remasters. If your dac is good quality and better at filtering than the studio was a mastering than 96khz can sound better.

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Misses one important point about the reconstruction of the wave, and that is that the theory to reconstruct a perfect signal needs a true 16bit high accuracy dac. Philips had production problems at the start, with the assumption as adoption and production scale increased they could improve quality. During the 90s they decided moving towards that ideal was too expensive and the industry adopted lower bit dacs that then use digital filters to reproduce a closer approximation of the wave form than was possible with the low accuracy 16bit dacs of the time. Early 16bit dacs were based on resisters for the bit registers with 97% accuracy where 99.6% was the minimum required.
Marketing then confused the bejesus out of everyone, because they say hey look at this jaggy wave from digital sources , when it actually outputs that way before filtering because a lower bit dac is used. Most dac chips these days are 'true' 8-12 bit high accuracy dacs with a variety of digital filters that do calculations with 24-32bit data to then approximate the true form of the output.

Not too much that can be done to resolve the problem other than spending far too much on a high accuracy (not perfect accuracy) 16-24bit dac (they cost between $3-28k LOL ). Then the question remains if we can even hear it, if our systems resolution isn't up to the same level or our hearing isn't up to the same level. In a super hifi system, that can perfectly (or nearly) reproduce the range 1-48khz, then with a 16/96khz HD track you could also get between 0.01-2% extra sound quality.