The Modern DAC killed High Resolution Music - has Stereophile proven it?


Hi Everyone,
One thing I've mentioned a lot is that over the past 10 years or so DAC's really closed the delta in how well they play CD (i.e. Redbook) vs. high resolution (96/24 or higher). I've stated for a long time that the delta closed so much that high resolution music no longer seemed to be as important.

Stereophile just released an interesting set of measurements regarding jitter performance of older players vs. today. It's not absolute proof of my thesis, but it certainly is correlated.


https://www.stereophile.com/content/2020-jitter-measurements

One thing, as I commented, you don't have to compare old DACs to the $15,000 Bartok. The Mytek Brooklyn and others in the $2,000 price range also demonstrate this, and in fact has a very similar jitter rejection profile to the Bartok. The point to me is, almost all decent DAC's have jumped leaps and bounds in jitter performance. That's for sure.  Perhaps this explains the disappearing gap in performance as well between Redbook and Hi Rez?

https://www.stereophile.com/content/mytek-hifi-brooklyn-da-processor%C2%96headphone-amplifier-measur... 

erik_squires
To defend my thesis a little more, even if we personally like High Rez music above all others, it always faced an uphill battle. Even lossless music has barely gone mainstream.

MQA 20 years ago would have seemed like a godsend, but now, with better DACs and cheaper Internet it seems like much less important.

The argument of "can I hear a difference with High Resolution Files?" is different than mine. I'm arguing that as DACs have improved, the reasons for the average audiophile to buy high resolution music has diminshed.

Tidal, Quboz and Amazon seem to have demonstrated that non-MP3 based services can survive, but it's getting harder to sell 96/24.
How about considering the cost of Hi Rez files?  One download can cost more than one month of Tidal (Hi-Fi/Masters sub for $20).  Recent purchase of a Mytek Brooklyn+ leaves me as satisfied via Tidal as my CD rips upsampled via JRiver to 24/192 or DSD.  The Brooklyn also does surprisingly well with Redbook.  I do only have several Hi-Rez files so my experience is limited, but to me the cost is prohibitive and I have discovered so much new music through Tidal.
Erik,

I think you are "spot on".

Someone in my audio club who knows more about the "nuts and bolts" of DAC design than I'll ever know once said that the reason why hi-res files sounded better several years ago was that the DACs of the day had "quantization errors" and by processing a hi-res file, those errors were typically way beyond the upper limit of our hearing, so filtering them on the back end didn't have much of a negative side effect.  He said that today's DACs have pretty much "solved" the "quantization error" problem.

I must say that, when I'm streaming music (from Qobuz), I usually select the hi-res file, not because it's hi-res, but I do suspect that they are newer masters and sometimes do sound more "musical" compared to the 44.1/16 files, but not always.

Your point is well taken, that the newer generation of DACs are so much better than one's from several years ago, that "regular" CD quality does successfully rival the sound quality of those hi-res files.
Mr. Frugal

Put that on my tombstone.


seems to be stuck inside a box....he has been trying for so long to convince us that high resolution music no longer seemed to be as important.

@lalitk 

The last two words are key to my point. Not "as important." that doesn't mean you don't like them or won't buy them. I mean that it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference and this is having an influence in the market.

Best,
E
once said that the reason why hi-res files sounded better several years ago was that the DACs of the day had "quantization errors" and by processing a hi-res file, those errors were typically way beyond the upper limit of our hearing,

@ejr1953 
This seems perfectly plausible hypothesis to me. Remember how much money Wadia commanded for their upsampling DACs?