Thanks for a lot of comments. I do not discourage listening to music, I just think that having expensive, high-quality equipment, it is not worth saving on music and choosing it in the highest technical quality. Among my 300 SACDs, about 60 are music that I previously had on CD.
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My two cents, you can go down a very analytical road with DAC and PCM hi-res, that my may not be satisfying to you, or meaningful to your hearing. But for me, if it is high quality DSD at the output, whether that is upsampled PCM of any kind, or better: DSD files, or SACD, it is fundamentally more enjoyable to listen to in a way that isnât just more detail, but a rightness of the musical presentation that you can feel. The DSS isnât the only DAC that does this, but I really think that going from a PCM presentation to DSD gives you a lot more than just higher resolution.
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Thanks for these kind words. It is truly a remarkable achievement on the part of Ted Smith.
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Thanks Veneet. Yes, we can always work with folks on pricing. Specially when trade-ins are involved.
So is Ted going to be Mr. October again this year and give us something better than Snowmass or Windom? We are all hoping for another World Series winner firmware that knocks it out of the park.
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Hi Michael,
Great point. There is a wealth of great performances on LPs and CDs by labels like EMI (Warner Classics), RCA, Decca, Philips, Mercury, DG, Verve, Blue Note, MCA, Capitol, etc. etc. that were captured right and still sound amazing in analogue or 16/44.1 CD format. A good music system is expected to help one enjoy what they like! The Stellar Phono Pre and the DS DAC are helping me achieve this goal!
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Thatâs the philosophical question regarding hifi. Are we aiming for most enjoyment, or greatest accuracy? Itâs tempting to say enjoyment, but any hifi dealer I raised that question with all said accuracy.
After all we are all trying to avoid colouration, which the definition is distortion that we find enjoyable, but is still distortion never the less.
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I want both enjoyment and accuracy. Why are we putting the two at opposite ends of a comparison as if they cannot be had together in one system?
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There are a good number of people who do not enjoy accurate reproduction of what is on the recording.
Consider how many posts we have seen where the poster states âI had a highly accurate system, but I then could only listen to a handful of recordings. Most sounded so bad I could not listen to them.â
Translation: I do not want to hear what is on the recording, I want my system to sugarcoat.
There is nothing wrong with this if you know what you want. I do wonder however whether the âhighly accurate systemâ was actually too bright or otherwise unbalanced.
I, on the other hand, want as accurate as possible. I want to hear exactly what is on the recording.
I have yet to hear the recording so bad it is unlistenable. There are plenty of less than stellar recordings, but none so bad I cannot handle it if I want to listen to the music.
On the other hand, there are plenty of recordings of musical dreck I will not listen to, regardless of the fidelity.
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I suspect truly accurate sounds are not particularly enjoyable, but a bit mundane and average, because the brain hears accurate sounds all the time in the real world. I suspect enjoyable sounds are slightly different, not accurate, as the brain is hearing something new, or slightly different. However, I am not saying that all different sounds are enjoyable.
So true. Far more just want everything to sound good all the time.
I must admit that I am more of a gear lover than that of music. But for the music that I truly like, I really donât care how crappy or good the sound quality is.
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An interesting premise; audio should bring you something more than just real, but an experience.
I need to ruminate on this a bit.
Thanks!
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But IMO you donât want each piece in the audio chain âsweeteningâ the signal in their own idiosyncratic manner. Personally I want to hear what the masterer heard, but I certainly understand folks that want to tweak each track independently. Sill Iâd do that with a separate unit (eq, tubesâŚ) and have the rest of the pieces in the system as faithful to its input as possible.
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I have been at this game a long time. I realized long ago I was a gear lover so I stopped myself and became a music lover. Now I am a bit of both. The DSD Sr. and Jr. are the right pick for me.
You do realize that many albums were mastered with tube gear and while listening with tube gear. So why would using tube gear to reproduce the sound be the equivalent of using EQ? I find it humorous that you equate tubes with EQâŚthey are not even close to the same thing.
To the original question, I recently had an opportunity to try a transport/Dac combination that originally sold for four times the price of the DMP/DSD. A friend was selling and gave me a couple weeks to think about buying them for a fraction of the orig list.
They felt jewel-like in their operation but the sound was just not right for me and not nearly as good as my DMP/DSD in my opinion. DSD is a great DAC.
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You misunderstood what I was trying to say. I was using tubes and eqs as a few examples of things people like to use to manipulate their sound.
I donât think this is necessarily true, but that there are a number of techniques in an âaccurateâ recording or playback chain, that are actually destructive. For example PCM AD/DA conversion, particularly steep digital filters, as well as high amounts of negative feedback, all measure well and are presumed to be true to the source, but actually mess the sound up.
Working in professional studios I found that analog to digital conversion, and digital to analog conversion, always lost quite a bit from the original microphone or line inputs. In fact, if I wasnât listening carefully, I was more likely to mistake the sound of a signal coming off of a tape machine with the original signal, than with one coming off a digital system. If you know about tape, there is much more distortion and noise than digital, but unless I was paying close attention I didnât always notice the difference, meaning that the more accurate digital system was doing was actually coloring the sound in a way that was more audible to my ears.
I also found that a lot of uncolored pieces of equipment, actually robbed the sound of some color and vibrance when inserted into a signal chain. They may not have added character, but they changed the sound by taking away some character. Often times I found that in a recording or mixing signal chain it was better to use devices that added some degree of color rather than âtransparentâ designs, because it was better to have some cumulative gain, than a cumulative loss.
The point is, a lot of supposedly transparent components just sound bad, and are colored in their own way, albeit one that isnât generally recognized. Often times a true recording source, like from a microphone into a console and directly to the speakers, sounds fantastic but loses quality when converted to digital, and even more vibrance and realism is lost when certain types of supposedly transparent electronics or speakers are added.
As Iâve said before, I think DSD really makes this point. It sounds both more realistic and better to the ear than comparable PCM digital. (at least at 128x and above)
Ok.
Also, people forget that the systems mastering engineers use vary greatly based on personal preference and studio. So, the only way people are going to hear what the mastering engineer heard is to use the same exact playback equipment (amps, speakers, etc.) and have the same room characteristics.
In other words, this idea of hearing what the mastering engineer heard is basically unachievable. All you can hope to achieve is a setup that is made up of high quality components that work well together AND sound good to you.
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