I believe he’s adjusted his post to have a picture of the firmware showing on the display now.
The first picture is unchanged from the very first moment the post was published, I knew because it was the first thing I noticed when I read the review (it was a new fresh, unedited post). I guess he added a zoomed-in pic of the display afterwards.
Thanks, bunkbail. And welcome!
I tried to be neutral. If his measurements are flawed, does PS has their own graph to demonstrate? Or these measurements are totally waste of times? Thanks.
Check the measurements in Stereophile (https://www.stereophile.com/content/new-firmware-measurements and the older https://www.stereophile.com/content/ps-audio-perfectwave-directstream-da-processor-measurements) Also “hifi & records” jan 2015 and “HiFi News” August 2014 and May 2018.
I’m not going to take the time to match all of ASR’s graphs, people can see what ASR has to say about a few DACs they know well and see if they agree with those. Most of my complaint are about his choice of things to measure, their relevance to what we hear and his snarky delivery. Please read the article (and say his reviews of some of the other equipment mentioned in higher posts) to get a flavor of his impartialness (or the lack thereof.) There are plenty of manufacturers who have pointed out many of his measurement problems (some mentioned in previous posts here) but the conclusions he draws from the flawed measurements are even less relevant to the real world.
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I guess I should say we have some measurements on hand, if you have a specific request or two I might be able to find them or point you to them from reliable source. I just reject on principle reproducing a lot of measurements because someone picks random things to measure. His history is clear to anyone who cares to look.
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So this level of harmonic distortion as reported by Stereophile is acceptable and intended in the design of the DSD Sr? Not meant to be inflammatory, this is a legitimate question. When I moved from the Benchmark 3 to DSD Sr, I preferred the sound of the Sr much better even though it did not measure as well.
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Do you understand you have posted a graph of the older firmware? The new firmware tested in the same article does much better.
It’s not ideal, but who listens to full scale 50Hz? With either higher frequencies or lower volume levels the distortion goes down rapidly.
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Thank’s Elk
I’m on my phone so I don’t know how this will look:
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FWIW, I went from a Benchmark 3 (ASR darling) to the DSD and to my ears there’s no comparison - love the DSD. Benchmark is still a nice unit but the DSD is a different class to me.
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I used the suggested measurements in the article that Ted referred to since Amir’s were deemed not credible.
It sounds like you had the same experience I did.
The article I pointed you to was a set of comparisons between two software versions. You posted the old version, I posted the newer one up a few posts.
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Ahh, I understand now. My mistake.
And note the newer firmware performed at least twice as well on the test you referenced.
I am confused. Stereophile tested multiple firmware, and noise went down, sure. However, Amir was on LATEST firmware, and the chart posted is from latest firmware. Question is, the noise produced, is it OK, by design? or would be neutralized when full frequency is applied?
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Ted, could you please provide audio precision graphs that demonstrate the distortion and noise for lower volume low frequency signals? I’m curious if they show that the DS is able to reach CD quality of 96dB of dynamic range or not.
My concern is that while PS Audio says the DS “has hand written, discrete, perfection based conversion that uncovers all the missing information hiding in your digital audio media,” it is fundamentally incapable of the performance required to make this statement true of even 16bit/44.1kHz content, let alone higher bitrate content.
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Do you have charts showing them at a lower volume? I am just curious if we appreciate the sound of the DSD Sr. because of the harmonics or if it would sound even better if they were engineered away?