Amateur OB speaker builder and his ARC based digital system

[davewantsmoore]

 

22 hours ago, Ittaku said:

Now this is really weird. The CD version of DSoTM is actually less compressed than the SACD version. Even though the tonality and bass of the SACD version is better, when it's loud, the SACD version is more compressed than the CD.

This is Time from the 2003 Anniversary SACD.

 

[Ittaku]

3 minutes ago, davewantsmoore said:

 

This is Time from the 2003 Anniversary SACD.

 

That's more like it and looks infinitely better than the one I grabbed. Does that one have the extra bass I described as well?

[davewantsmoore]

14 hours ago, Ittaku said:

Does that one have the extra bass I described as well?

Yep, my spectro is different, so not sure if it's quite as loud, probably.

[dcathro]

The best sounding (most analog sounding) CD version of DSOM is the first pressing (made in Japan) CP35-3017. 

[Ittaku]

1 hour ago, dcathro said:

The best sounding (most analog sounding) CD version of DSOM is the first pressing (made in Japan) CP35-3017. 

That's really sad that 30 years of improved technology and remastering has only led to poorer quality sounding releases, but I guess the CD market has rarely been aimed at increasing quality since then. Yep that's the CD I've got.

[Ittaku]

And here is the 2003 DSotM SACD as mentioned by Dave above.

 

 

No compression or clipping at all, but also none of the extra bass, nor that subterranean note 2 minutes in. It also sounds very similar to my 1983 CD; so much so that I'd have trouble telling them apart but I suspect the CD sounded better! I think I was just fooled by that extra bass changing the tonality in that other SACD rip, and only listening to the quiet passages when making a comparison.

Edited June 14, 2020 by Ittaku

[dcathro]

52 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

That's really sad that 30 years of improved technology and remastering has only led to poorer quality sounding releases, but I guess the CD market has rarely been aimed at increasing quality since then. Yep that's the CD I've got.

You were an early CD adopter?

 

I didn't get into digital until the early 90's. By about 2000, I was disillusioned about the mastering and remastering of material, which led me into collecting the very earliest of CD's

[Ittaku]

Just now, dcathro said:

You were an early CD adopter?

 

I didn't get into digital until the early 90's. By about 2000, I was disillusioned about the mastering and remastering of material, which led me into collecting the very earliest of CD's

Yeah it was a tough choice since I started down the audiophile path not long after digital came out, but I could see the writing on the wall and figured that digital could only get better, even though I acknowledged at the time that vinyl sounded much better. The digital scene seemed to go downhill for quite a while before it started going back up again, but there is no sign of that earlier music being resuscitated in a better digital form now. Digital classical recordings now are truly astounding, and part of the reason I virtually only listen to classical. Even the big name brands (Decca, DG, etc.) that were infamous for shocking recordings and digital mastering in the 90s make respectable and often excellent sounding classical recordings now.

[dcathro]

9 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

Yeah it was a tough choice since I started down the audiophile path not long after digital came out, but I could see the writing on the wall and figured that digital could only get better, even though I acknowledged at the time that vinyl sounded much better. The digital scene seemed to go downhill for quite a while before it started going back up again, but there is no sign of that earlier music being resuscitated in a better digital form now. Digital classical recordings now are truly astounding, and part of the reason I virtually only listen to classical. Even the big name brands (Decca, DG, etc.) that were infamous for shocking recordings and digital mastering in the 90s make respectable and often excellent sounding classical recordings now.

Where abouts in Melbourne are you Con?

 

Maybe I'll invite myself over to hear some good classical!

 

Cheers

 

David

[Ittaku]

So to add insult to injury, I've done a dynamic range comparison of my CD rip and the SACD rip I mentioned above:

Quote

 

Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 DR        Peak            RMS           Filename
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 DR11     -7.97 dB       -22.31 dB       01 - Speak to Me _ Breathe in the Air.wav
 DR10     -7.25 dB       -23.16 dB       02 - On the Run.wav
 DR13     -3.08 dB       -19.74 dB       03 - Time.wav
 DR11     -5.16 dB       -21.54 dB       04 - The Great Gig in the Sky.wav
 DR12     -2.81 dB       -19.12 dB       05 - Money.wav
 DR10     -7.02 dB       -22.11 dB       06 - Us and Them.wav
 DR12     -5.36 dB       -19.35 dB       07 - Any Colour You Like.wav
 DR11     -5.24 dB       -22.35 dB       08 - Brain Damage.wav
 DR10     -4.26 dB       -18.48 dB       09 - Eclipse.wav
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Number of files:    9
 Official DR value:  DR11

==============================================================================================

 

 

Versus

Quote

 

Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon [1973^2003][88.2khz-24bit][FLAC][STEREO][SACD-RIP]\
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 DR        Peak            RMS           Filename
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 DR10     -8.61 dB       -21.83 dB       01._Speak_To_Me.wav
 DR10     -0.90 dB       -13.48 dB       02._Breathe.wav
 DR10     -1.11 dB       -14.99 dB       03._On_The_Run.wav
 DR9      -0.70 dB       -12.48 dB       04._Time.wav
 DR8      -0.31 dB       -13.84 dB       05._The_Great_Gig_In_The_Sky.wav
 DR8      -0.26 dB       -10.90 dB       06._Money.wav
 DR9      -1.13 dB       -14.46 dB       07._Us_And_Them.wav
 DR9      -0.70 dB       -11.24 dB       08._Any_Colour_You_Like.wav
 DR9      -0.22 dB       -14.19 dB       09._Brain_Damage.wav
 DR7      -0.56 dB       -10.70 dB       10._Eclipse.wav
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Number of files:    10
 Official DR value:  DR9

==============================================================================================

 

There's an extra file in the SACD, but there's enough information there to show the CD had more dynamic range, at least by the time the SACD is ripped to 88/24. I suspect the whole process of 5.1 downmix to stereo is more detrimental than all the extra data in the SACD. Either way, it still looks like the best stereo digital version is still the original CD. I've listened to vinyl rips and every time I can hear the colour of the original vinyl setup it was ripped from weirdly playing through into my system and it's offputting even if the dynamic range and top end seems better.

[Ittaku]

2 minutes ago, dcathro said:

Where abouts in Melbourne are you Con?

 

Maybe I'll invite myself over to hear some good classical!

Alphington. Always up for a get together. Price of admission is a bottle of wine or a few beers to share

[dcathro]

3 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

Alphington. Always up for a get together. Price of admission is a bottle of wine or a few beers to share

Great, so you are only 15 min away on the eastern - I am in Blackburn.

 

Happy to bring wine!

[Ittaku]

32 minutes ago, dcathro said:

Great, so you are only 15 min away on the eastern - I am in Blackburn.

 

Happy to bring wine!

Awesome, let's take it to private message.

[Ittaku]

The USB -> fibre optic adapter arrived for my DAC. Now I can play to it at samples up to 768/32, and is perfectly isolated from the PC. This allows me to do the insane upscaling in advance and save the files to PC, thereby allowing them play back in real time at the upscaled rates with zero latency, and derive the benefits of a filter that would normally have a 90 minute delay. At this stage I've upscaled all my files with 50 million taps to 352/384 (depending on what the original started at.) In time I'll convert everything with 500 million taps which will obviously take much longer. I need to do some experimenting between 768 and 384 to see if there's any real point in going from 24/384 to 24/768, as flac doesn't support 768, and I'd hate to use 8x more storage space and save things as wav files if there's no advantage. I doubt I'll be going with 768 but only testing will tell for sure. In the end storage is cheap.

 

[pwstereo]

1 hour ago, Ittaku said:

...This allows me to do the insane upscaling in advance and save the files to PC, thereby allowing them play back in real time at the upscaled rates with zero latency, and derive the benefits of a filter that would normally have a 90 minute delay. At this stage I've upscaled all my files with 50 million taps to 352/384 (depending on what the original started at.)

This might not be the ideal place to ask, but I wonder why upsampling is done?

Isn't it just inventing data that wasn't present in the original?

Like resampling a photo file to a larger pixel dimension, it is just inventing data by interpolation.

I wouldn't have though such a process would have any real validity in high fidelity sound storage and playback.

[Ittaku]

13 minutes ago, pwstereo said:

This might not be the ideal place to ask, but I wonder why upsampling is done?

Isn't it just inventing data that wasn't present in the original?

Like resampling a photo file to a larger pixel dimension, it is just inventing data by interpolation.

I wouldn't have though such a process would have any real validity in high fidelity sound storage and playback.

When you play back through a DAC they virtually always oversample themselves to play back at their intrinsic rate anyway. Their oversampling is always a compromise of some sort, and to do that they also need an antialiasing filter. The antialiasing filter is one of the main sources of audible change in sound quality and is always some kind of compromise in terms of dynamic impulse accuracy, aliasing noise above the nyquist frequency, roll-off, phase, and ringing. The most "mathematically correct" way to upsample is an infinitely long sinc filter. However, the longer a filter, the longer it takes to process the incoming data, and the more processing power it requires. Since DACs have to operate in real time it's extremely rare for them to have a long sinc filter of any sort - the most extreme one is used by Chord in their M-Scaler upscaler which is 1 million taps long, and introduces a delay of 0.6 seconds in order to convert 44kHz audio to 705.6kHz for playback at a "native rate" within the DAC upstream itself. Doing it in software beforehand and then saving the data for real time playback means you can make the filter as long as you like within the limits of processing power at the time you store it, and the closer you get to "infinite" the more accurate the upsampling gets. In my ABX testing I was able to discern subtle but demonstrable improvements till over about 5 million taps. After that it was mental masturbation but since I have the processing power it's nice to know that it's "more correct" when I'm converting it.

 

Interestingly virtually all delta sigma DACs turn off their antialiasing filters when they're fed audio above 192kHz because processing power required to filter that much data and play it back is beyond them, and aliasing noise is happening at super ultrasonic frequencies over 150kHz which are (probably) irrelevant. So that may be the main source of sound quality improvement (disabling the DAC's antialiasing filter.) Mine isn't a delta sigma DAC though, it's a ladder DAC, and that introduces interesting other questions about the advantages or not of upsampling at all, and it's debatable so best left to auditioning and deciding. In my case I found it advantageous, and have just finished a round of testing upsampling from 96 to 384 versus 768 and found audible improvements going to 384, but no further improvements going to 768.

Edited June 15, 2020 by Ittaku

[Ittaku]

By the way, I made this offer in my separate upsampling thread, but since the topic has come up again, if you want to experience the upscaling I do in software, and have a way of getting me a reference flac or wav file of your choice (upload somewhere, google shared files, email, dropbox or whatever), I can upsample it in extreme quality to the maximum sample rate your DAC supports and get it back to you for you to do a comparison. Just private message me.

Edited June 15, 2020 by Ittaku

[Ittaku]

New room layout! In addition to adding extra acoustic absorption at the first rear points of (out of phase) reflection, I've brought the speakers closer together and moved the subwoofer off to the right. Thanks to Roon's extensive DSP convolution capabilities, I've tweaked the room now to have separate profiles for left and right speakers and of course have a separate convolution filter for every sample rate I use at playback. For a long time I kept the speakers where they were in order to keep the subwoofer in the middle, and to have the soundstage as wide as possible, and the left speaker always had a fair amount of energy being lost into the wall you can see that pokes is not that far ahead of it. It also meant that sitting off to the left of the sweet spot enough you would be blocking sound completely from the tweeter and midranges on the left.  It turns out that there were a few extra peaks on the right channels (or relative dips on the left) which would unbalance the setup and lose focus in the soundstage at higher frequencies, and tend to shift them to the right. The new layout and separate DSP profiles has fixed that now with a rock solid central image when appropriate, and much more focussed soundstage overall. Additionally it now means people can sit in the left most position in the room and still have unobstructed access to the left speaker. The soundstage is definitely a little narrower but so much more focussed that it's by far a win.

 

[aussievintage]

I wish I could do something like this, but my "room" is a hopeless case.  Well done on all the work fine tuning your system like this.

[Ittaku]

New toy's arrived! Now to tweak my selection of valves (for the preamp and headphone amplifier) and throw a few duds out.

 

[:) Go Away (:]

On 15/06/2020 at 2:03 PM, Ittaku said:

The USB -> fibre optic adapter arrived for my DAC. Now I can play to it at samples up to 768/32, and is perfectly isolated from the PC. This allows me to do the insane upscaling in advance and save the files to PC, thereby allowing them play back in real time at the upscaled rates with zero latency, and derive the benefits of a filter that would normally have a 90 minute delay. At this stage I've upscaled all my files with 50 million taps to 352/384 (depending on what the original started at.) In time I'll convert everything with 500 million taps which will obviously take much longer. I need to do some experimenting between 768 and 384 to see if there's any real point in going from 24/384 to 24/768, as flac doesn't support 768, and I'd hate to use 8x more storage space and save things as wav files if there's no advantage. I doubt I'll be going with 768 but only testing will tell for sure. In the end storage is cheap.

 

What exactly are you doing with the single mode fibre cable?

[Ittaku]

1 minute ago, :) Go Away (: said:

What exactly are you doing with the single mode fibre cable?

It talks to the custom Pro ISL interface input on the DAC:

https://www.msbtechnology.com/accessories/prousb/

[:) Go Away (:]

Just now, Ittaku said:

It talks to the custom Pro ISL interface input on the DAC:

https://www.msbtechnology.com/accessories/prousb/

Oh I see, so in simple terms. To send audio from your PC to DAC which is at a good distance away, right?

That is neat. I wish more audio equipments utilised the fibre optics to reduce the cable clutter and to make things simpler.

[Ittaku]

5 minutes ago, :) Go Away (: said:

Oh I see, so in simple terms. To send audio from your PC to DAC which is at a good distance away, right?

That is neat. I wish more audio equipments utilised the fibre optics to reduce the cable clutter and to make things simpler.

Yep, pretty much, and also to afford total electrical isolation from the PC.

[aussievintage]

32 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

New toy's arrived! Now to tweak my selection of valves (for the preamp and headphone amplifier) and throw a few duds out.

 

 

Lovely looking machine.  Has me intrigued with that "section listen" knob at the top left.  Must have a read up on it.