I still receive the occasional newsletter from Dr AIX. He implied that with Oppo gone we would have to turn to Tidal or Spotify. So I pointed out that their are many options, and, well read it, my post, his comments.
The guy has lost all credibility in my opinion. You can post there, but he reviews all comments before they get posted.
According to him an Oppo is as good as a DMP/DSD combo.
Here is the link:
http://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=6074
Apparently, they don’t teach grammar and proofreading at MIT—a reference to his excuse for his book having many typos since his son was tasked with copy editing his book. I am far from an expert on these topics but his know-it-all attitude is off-putting.
Here is an old thread that discussed Dr. AIX.
Geez, after reading that last thread provided by st50maint, I am a little sorry about opening that can of worms again.
I only mentioned my PWT to make the point that a dedicated transport and hi-end DAC is superior to the Oppo. And not to slight Oppo, but to make the point that for audiophiles there are many, although usually more expensive, options for playing discs. The funny thing is that to play DSD files, JRiver has to convert it to 24/176, as my main DAC doesn’t do DSD, only PCM.
And I’m not aware of any similar priced, and of similar quality universal players. But when it comes to CD players, transports and DACs, there are many options for the audiophile. I do think it will be the home theater and videophiles who will be most impacted.
It was his reply that got me, although I shouldn’t have been surprised. What did kind of surprise me, was the talk of his book having multiple errors. Was it self published? If not, I thought book publishers had professional proofreaders.
Sounds like his book might be self-published, though I’m not sure. Sadly, many smaller publishers, including university presses, have all but eliminated professional copy editors. I was reading a history book a couple of years ago and detected numerous errors in the opening pages. I was shocked. I contacted the author. They ended up re-printing the book and sent me a new copy. To me, it’s a sign of sloppiness, which does not bode well for the accuracy of the contents.
Funny guy. He’s said stuff before in his blog and in person to me at Axpona that were a bit odd, so to speak, but hey…
The DSD thing is just sort of wierd. For me, my “conversion” to being a believer in DSD happened with an early Sports Walkman CD player (bright yellow and grey plastic, I think it may have come with a band to attach it to a limb for running. It had an optional memory buffer so you could shake it a certain amount without skips. I never used it that way…)
Anyhow, I could not get my head around how something ONE BIT could sound so good. What WAS this mysterious format? I mean, I was just getting into higher PCM rates in recording, what with DAT recorders and ADATs doing 48kHz sampling, etc…ONE BIT? But of course it had an enormously high (at the time) sample rate, if you wanted to look at it in terms of multiplying the BR x the SR.
But it just sounded great. And this was in a sense like the DS DAC - it was converting 16/44 CD to 1 bit. It was just more linear sounding and natural. Less of the cursed digititis-sound of most CDs of the day. I hooked the mini stereo line out up to my stereo with a Y cable. In some ways, it was better than my CD player in my good system (not sure what the system was then…nothing to write home about, but better than average).
So I can think of practical and technical reasons not to like DSD, but it’s always been a superior and more natural-sounding format than PCM to me, from day one. Nowadays, the distinctions are not as marked, but I don’t see any reason to dismiss it the way he does.
As I immediately stated in the old thread, his position is a statement of religious belief. We routinely engage in this behavior: Ford v. Chevy, etc. Logic and real information has nothing to do with it. At its core, it is tribal.
To reject DSD as it fails to produce sound in a theologically acceptable fashion is, of course, ridiculous. What matters is the sound.
The practical disadvantageous to DSD are on the production end (mixing, mastering, editing) none of which matter to the end user.