I don’t agree 100% for S/PDIF and the reason is that every time the gate of the receiving Schmitt trigger opens it backscatters a spike that is reflected multiple times over the cable that might cause interference. There are ongoing discussions whether this matters for audio or not.
Paul McGowan saidYep, this cuts both ways. Case in point,some folks on this thread have had their belief systems challenged by Mark and feel threatened, hence the responses here.lonson said Sometimes I wish I could live in the world of "bits is bits," "all amps sound the same," "high end cables are snake oil" people. Things must be so simple and certain. But why do they come off angry more often than not?They are angry because we challenge their belief system and they feel threatened. Threatened has two basic responses, fight or flight. Those that stay to fight, defend their systems with anger. But they are not alone, and all of us are vulnerable to this on some level. Think about religion and how threatened people get when their belief systems are challenged by the obvious. They have stories and myth to explain that which they observe and cannot explain, but if those stories and myths are challenged, this upsets their entire belief structure and puts into question their entire life and its meaning. Not small stuff! And we all have our belief systems, and they are no less anything to any of us.
For those of you that are saying how good the DirectStream sounds and that he hasn’t heard it, that hasn’t been Mark’s point. Mark’s POV as a recording engineer is that PCM is the superior format - both in terms of using it to make recordings and in terms of better measurements when comparing formats using hi-res files.
Did this lead to his comments about PS Audio not giving people a choice on what format they are listening to on the DirectStream? More than likely, yet I don’t believe he intended to slam the sound of your DAC of choice. He likes his Benchmark DAC2 (as do a lot of people) and you like your DirectStream. Heck, that’s the audio hobby, nothing new.
Ultimately the sound of a particular DAC is the sum of its parts (well, after how well a recording is mastered of course) and that’s probably more important than which lossless file we’re listening to at the moment. Designers have proven that they can make either format sound good and even great.
I suspect many people’s disappointment with the sound of digital audio is largely a function of the cheap chips used today and the Sabre-ization of the audio world. In many cases, these chips are just slapped into a box and sold without much added thought about how to make the sound better. That said, there are exceptions to every rule and companies like Ayre make some very good sounding products using Sabre DACs, so again, it is the sum of the parts and the expertise of the people designing the products that make them sound good.
Obviously the DirectStream takes a different approach as do products from Chord, MSB, & DCS and then there are companies that are using R2R DACs and all with good results with many people preferring the non-Sabre approach.
And, in a few weeks, Schiit’s Yggdrasil will be on the market - yet another blow at Sabre World Domination!
According to people that have heard it, it is supposed to be fantastic (yes, I know, the hype train has left the station on this DAC). But if what they are saying is true, it may prove that PCM fans are correct and even Redbook can sound spectacular if conversion is done correctly.
Unfortunately, some people will not even audition it or give it the time of day since it won’t play DSD…I guess they don’t want their belief systems challenged. Luckily there’s no one like that here
Very thoughtful, Chrisg1.
scotte1 saidExactly, which is why I quoted it. It is a bit amusing, yes?Elk said Well, he writes "there is absolutely no way that there will be any sonic differences when identical data streams are presented to a high-end DAC with proper clocking."Taken in context, is there really any disagreement with the quoted text? This statement strikes me as non-controversial (but perhaps it is beside the point?)
gordon said "CHANGE" is a huge step for many, especially when it concerns "views" that have been cultivated and protected over time.Change is good. As long as others are changing to embrace my clearly superior view.
This argumentation phrase is most often used by those proselytizing for their world view and beliefs. “If only you would abandon your knowledge and conclusions you would see I am right.” A blatant attempt to shift the burden of persuasion to the victim of the proselytizer’s efforts. Very clever rhetoric.
Elk saidYes; but perhaps bemusing is a better adjective for this discussion, in general.Exactly, which is why I quoted it. It is a bit amusing, yes?
From Dr. AIX’s latest email:
Tomorrow, we’re headed to my sister’s home in Boulder to close out this trip. And Boulder is the home of PS Audio. I wrote to Paul McGowan and have set up a meeting tomorrow morning at their offices. I’m looking forward to touring their facility and playing some of my favorite high-resolution tracks. I have about 30 tracks on a USB stick that I’ll share…if we can play them. He wrote back and said that his PC playback system in transit from then Montreal Show.
I also have a copy of the AIX Records 2013 HD-Audio Sampler so we can play that if we can’t pull the files from the USB stick.
Very gracious of Paul, as I have come to expect. I don’t expect Dr. Aix will change his view on anything, regardless of what he hears.
We can only hope.
Excerpts from the previous days email:
Live Sound Is Not My Goal
Dr. AIX
As a recording engineer and music producer, I’m often confronted with the question, what is the ultimate expression of my craft? Is the goal to capture and recreate the sound experienced at a live concert through a set of headphones, a high-end stereo system, or finely tuned automobile playback system? Or maybe the ideal is to recognize the timbral accuracy of a human voice, piano, or French horn? Many have offered their thoughts on this question and I don’t think one response is more correct than another.
I read Paul McGowan’s thoughts about this in a response this morning on his daily blog site. He answered, “My definition of sound is simple: how real does it sound in the room? How close to what my own memory is of live music, or recorded music sounding live. Human voice is an easy one for me and most people because of our familiarity with it. I use that to judge if it’s better, worse or indifferent.”
Personally, I’m not interested in recreating the sense of a live concert. If you want to experience magic of a live performance…attend a live performance. As far as recordings to, I want to hear wonderful productions that reflect the skill and experience of the producer and engineer and of course, the artist. If it just happens to sound close to live sound…well then OK fine.
Mark Waldrup (Dr. AIX) was just here listening in Music Room One and I think he was pretty blown away. Nice guy, he and I had fun.
He is a very nice guy in person. When I’m talking to him in person sometimes I wonder if he realizes that I’m the Ted Smith associated with the DS or, say, the Ted Smith on the AudioAsylum… 
Actually, he brought many of his discs and I was floored with how good his recordings sounded. They are really, really good.
Yes, his Shostakovich Piano Quintet is one of the best sounding recordings I own.
Wait wait wait… is this an April fool’s joke? 
Seriously though, I’m glad that you two got together and did some mutual listening. The more that guys like you two at the top of your game get together to share ideas the better off those of us on this end of the food chain are.
The question is just what will we see on the good Doctor’s website now that’s he’s had this experience?
Who knows? Any way, yes it’s not April fools and I like Mark. Sometimes you have to simply meet face to face to know someone. Writing can be so off-putting sometimes.
A Visit To PS Audio: Part I
Dr. AIX
I had the great pleasure of spending a couple of hours yesterday morning at PS Audio in Boulder, Colorado. Knowing that I would be in Boulder (my sister lives in Four Mile Canyon), I reached out to Paul McGowan (I’ve met him several times), the head of the company, and let him know that I would be in Boulder and that I would love to come by to chat, listen, and share our experiences in high-end audio. He responded right away and made room in his very busy schedule for a 10 am visit. Paul was very gracious and generous to make time for me, especially as I have written some critical posts about his company’s approach to digital audio and his preference for DSD coding.
My plan was to share some of my recordings with Paul in his new very well equipped music room. I always carry my trusty 32 Gig music loaded USB stick with me, so I wrote to Paul and asked whether this would work in his system. It turned out that the gear needed to play files from my USB stick was in transit from the Montreal Show (I missed it this year) so that ruled out that option. Option B was to locate one of my Blu-ray samplers and find out whether the system in his demo room could handle that format…again, that plan was not feasible. The PS Audio PerfectWave Memory Player that is used to play discs can handle CD-Audio/CD-ROM/DVD-ROM formats but not Blu-ray discs or DVD-Audio/Video discs. Strike two. OK, I thought as I was driving to Boulder that morning, I’d just have to burn some files from my laptop onto a CD-R and play those. I arrived a little early and tried to burn a few of my favorite files as I only had a single CD-R (capacity 700 Megs), I couldn’t get more than a couple tunes on it. We’re talking about high-resolution audio files…and they can be very large.
Frustrated, I packed up my briefcase and headed to the door at exactly 10 am. Just inside the door are shelves of PS Audio products past and present. I recognized the Ultralink DAC that powered my mastering business back in 1989. Pretty cool. As I walked in, the entire company staff was assembled in the lobby. Paul was close by, turned around and immediately welcomed me in. He introduced me to the group just prior to a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday”. I’m not sure whose birthday is was but I knew I was in the midst of a friendly group.
Paul gave me the royal tour of the entire facility. I met his son Scott, who handles marketing and promotion and I learned about Paul’s other son who has a company in Denver that designs and fabricates exquisite furniture. There were several exquisite pieces around the office…it resurrected memories of my years as a woodworker and furniture geek. I’d be hard pressed to recall the names of all of the people that I met, but everyone was more than happy to chat briefly. I spent more than a few moments with one of the operations/financial guys. It turns out he’s a fellow marathoner…although a serious and good one…and is in the midst of running a different marathon in every state of the union. He’s got a map on his wall that’s tracking his progress. I’m always impressed with individuals that include running a marathon on their bucket list but this guy accepted a challenge way beyond that. And what’s his plan after the 50 marathons? He plans on climbing Mt. Everest. Wow.
PS Audio builds very high-end equipment…and they build it in Boulder, Colorado. Kudos to them for keeping their manufacturing in the U.S. They have other specialized companies build the circuit boards, mill the metal housings, and supply other parts but the final assembly and testing is done right there in their shop. The hardware and software is done right there, too. I met most of the team of die-hard audio geeks and am completely convinced that the employees of Paul’s company are there because they love music and sound.
As we toured and talked, I mentioned the format dilemma that I was confronting regarding my AIX Records tracks. I asked Paul if he had any DVD-Rs. Maybe I could burn some tracks onto a DVD-R disc as WAV files that would be compatible with the PerfectWave Memory Player. The solution presented itself. I pulled out my aging Mac Laptop and began to copy about 10 tracks from hard disc to DVD-R. As the progress bar traversed the screen of my computer, Paul and I chatted.
To be continued…
Thanks! I am eager to read part 2.
His recordings are superb.
I expect he will judge the sound of Paul’s room with open ears.
Did you guys plays any DSD tracks? That seems to be where Dr. Aix tends to go off the deep end. (Although he also criticizes the DS approach of converting everything to DSD so maybe it doesn’t matter so much here.)
A Visit To PS Audio: Part II
Dr. AIX
Thanks to my very gracious host Paul McGowan carving out a couple of hours from his very busy day, I was treated to a tour of the PS Audio facilities in Boulder, Colorado on Wednesday of this week. I wrote part I about my experience yesterday. You can read it by clicking here. Today’s post focuses on the time that Paul and I sat in his very high-end demo room playing a variety of my tracks and some of the tracks from the PS Audio collaborative record project. After I finished burning a DVD-R of about a dozen real HD-Audio stereo WAV files in Paul’s office, we returned to the PS Audio demo room to do some careful listening. The room is about 20 feet long by 18 wide and maybe 10 feet high…the size of a reasonable home theater, except this room doesn’t cater to video or surround sound. It’s strictly an ultra high-end 2-channel playback environment. The first things you notice are the two gigantic Infinity IRSV electrostatic speakers. As you can see in the picture below, they are very large. The towers include 76 EMIT tweeters, 24 EMIM midrange drivers, and twelve 12-inch polypropylene woofers in four towers. Originally selling for $65,000, according to Paul there were only 56 pairs ever made. He snagged a pair for considerably less the original price and squeezed them through the door of his demo space. They are huge.
I wrote to Paul and asked about the rest of the signal path. Here’s what he told me about the system:
“The transport is our Memory Player, the PerfectWave Transport (everything is read from a DVD ROM drive, stripped of its timing info and placed into a 64mB RAM buffer, then output with a fixed low jitter clock). Then into DirectStream, up samples 10X and converted to 2X DSD. The output of DirectStream is right off the FPGA DSD output into a simple analog filter and into the preamplifier. The preamp is a Aesthetix Calypso tube and that into the new BHK Signature Power Amplifier with its own vacuum tube input, MOSFET outputs.”
There are shelves full of demo CDs and DVDs on one wall of the room and I noticed a copy of my High-Resolution Experience Sampler among the collection. Having learned that the PerfectWave Memory player was limited to CD/DVDs and couldn’t handle my Blu-ray sampler, I thought that perhaps the Hi-Res Experience DVD could be the source for our listening session. Paul inserted the disc into the disc drive of the unit and nothing happened. The AIX sampler has two sides…one side is formatted as a DVD-Video disc and the other is a DVD-Audio disc. Unfortunately, the PerfectWave Memory Player isn’t compatible with those formats. It can read and play CD-Audio, CD-ROM, and DVD-ROM discs. But if you have any Pure Audio Blu-ray discs or DVD-Audio/Video discs, it rejects them. We were back to the DVD-R that I burned in Paul’s office.
If you’ve been a reader of this blog for a while, you’ll know that I’ve written critically about Paul’s fixation on DSD and what I perceive as illogical design decisions in some of their recent products. Paul is well aware that I sit on the other side of the 1-bit DSD divide. For all of the reasons that I’ve discussed over two years of posts AND because I’m a recording engineer/studio owner, I’m one of those that categorically dismisses the whole 1-bit nonsense. My comments about PS Audio products and Paul’s endorsement of DSD have nothing to do with him personally. I have tremendous respect for Paul as an advocate for better sound. He runs a very successful business, employs a bunch of people, and advocates for his position and products, as you would expect. It was very encouraging that he and I had a very positive experience on Wednesday. It is possible for two people with different opinions on high-end audio to find common ground and I look forward to the beginning of a real friendship. I felt his commitment to better sound and look forward to exploring mutual opportunities.
But the first component in his playback system comes up short when it comes to the popular formats for delivering high-resolution audio. I couldn’t use a USB stick to pass HD-Audio to his system and the PerfectWave MEMORY player isn’t compatible with DVD-Audio/Video or Blu-ray discs. The design decisions made by PS Audio seem unnecessarily limited. I can certainly agree with the offloading of the digital stream into a large data buffer and clocking the output with a very low jitter clock but to restrict the inputs to DVD-ROM and CDs is far too limiting in this file based world.
Here’s the sales promo from the PS Audio website:
“The Memory Player plays both standard and high resolution audio on CDs and DVDs sending perfect digital audio data from its solid state memory directly to your DAC and then onto your loudspeakers, eliminating jitter. All music extracted from your CD or DVD disc plays from the PWT’s internal solid state memory, not the disc itself. The performance is remarkable.”
OK, I like the concept except that it presents a real challenge compared to other players. From the FEATURES page describing the PWT:
“High resolution downloads from sites like HD Tracks can easily be converted from FLAC or ALAC to WAV files on your computer, transferred to a DVD and played in all their high resolution glory on the PWD.”
What the above statement says is that you have go through a series of not-so-trivial steps before you can hear a high-resolution downloaded file. First, you download a FLAC file from HDtracks. Then you have to convert it using a piece of audio software to a WAV file (which strips off all of the metadata) and burn a DVD-R disc to insert into the PWT. This strikes me as a couple of too many hoops to jump through to hear a downloaded HD track. Shouldn’t a high-end player handle audio files directly?
I don’t follow the sales trends for front-end media players, but I think the Oppo line of players offer more flexibility and value than the PerfectWave Memory player…and they sound pretty amazing. I’m planning on using on as the front end in my AXPONA high-end demo room.
To be continued…