No I never let JRiver MC convert to DSD (or do any other sample rate conversion for that matter.) I can hear a difference and I suspect most people can. How big that difference might be depends on the system and whether that difference is good or bad depends on the listener.
As you say people are welcome to configure their systems and customize the frequency response, etc. as they choose. Many people feel that, for example, converting DSD to PCM so they can run room correction, gives better sound in their situation that passing the DSD directly to a DAC. Many of us feel the opposite. What matters is that people enjoy their systems.
To get DSD thru JRiver (or any player) it’s important that the system is configured in a way that it passes the bit perfect test, otherwise the DSD will get mangled and (probably) sound like crap if you can hear it at all.
Getting the bit perfect test to run helps debug other things than the playback software: for example both OSs and audio card drivers often do sample rate conversion, frequency response tailoring, room correction, automatic volume leveling by default. This is all fine if it’s what you want to do, but it will keep DSD from getting to the DAC uncorrupted.
My pet peeve is people complaining that the DS doesn’t sound right only to find out that they are processing the audio in multiple ways before it gets to the DS.
Apologies, in another post you said you leave DoP on all the time, but now I see that was in the DSD playback discussion and wasn’t meant to include any other file formats.
So I see there are numerous ways to convert PCM to DSD. Are the different firmwares using the same algorithm?
For arguments sake, how does the DS algorithm sound vs Weiss Saracon conversion or a similar engine?
Ah, leaving the DoP option all of the time just tells the program that you want any DSD material that happens to come along wrapped in DoP for your DAC, it doesn’t cause any differences in non-DSD material. There are separate options if you want to convert some or all PCM to DSD…
Tho converting DSD to PCM is just applying an appropriate low pass filter, converting PCM to DSD isn’t trivial. There are some toolkits of code around that let you develop and try different sigma-delta modulators, but it’s safe to say that most all of the results from canned code are not really “audiophile” quality. Many are designed for various data gathering, bandwidth reduction or for simple transmission protocols, not for audio. And even amongst the ones designed for audio, many have noticeable noise modulation problems.
Just like the fact that almost every different DAC has different reconstruction filters and different upsampling filters (often multiple versions), it’s pretty safe to say that all of the different DACs out there probably have different proprietary algorithms for converting to DSD.
I don’t know how the Weiss Saracon conversion sounds
I’d like to think the clarity of the DS comes, in part, from the work I did to develop my particular sigma delta modulator - I do know for certain that no one else does it like I do.
I don’t think he has a Pyramix, Sonoma or Sony’s SBM I can believe Audiogate would be better that Protools, and random conversions in foobar2000, JRiver, etc.
Ahh very interesting, thanks Ted! Nice to see that there is still a lot of artisanship in digital audio, it’s easy to assume that it is mostly a mathematical excercise.
I can believe Audiogate would be better that Protools, and random conversions in foobar2000, JRiver, etc.