Conversion to DSD: Does It Eliminate Digital Glare?

Digital Glare = CDs masters in the 8o’s

DSD conversion will not eliminate it!

You guys mean aliasing then?

"a nasty high-frequency ringing called Aliasing—a special analog lowpass filter is needed during recording, just prior to sampling—the infamous steep “brickwall” (anti-aliasing) filter, set at half the Sample Rate. In the past, these filters caused audio degradation (unwanted phase shift), since they acted on frequencies very close to the highest perceptible audio frequencies. It plagued the earliest CD recordings"

DSD conversion cannot reduce glare on its own. Nor can any other digital format, process or protocol reduce glare on its own, period - hirez, lowrez or norez. The only thing a digital format, process or protocol can guarantee is the presence of noise - (as in mostly digital noise) and it’s the noise that causes the glare. Get rid of enough of the noise and there’s no more glare at all. The method I use means you would not have to replace or upgrade Any of your current digital gear in order to solve the problem.

I’d say the good news is that once you’ve properly gotten rid of the noise (while doing no harm whatsoever to the signal), you discover that you’ve not only eliminated the glare, but you’ve also improved the system sound quality in all kinds of other unexpected ways and to a larger degree than you might have any reason to suspect. Glare is simply the most obvious sign of overall distortion, but I find it’s actually just the tip of the iceberg. In this pursuit of eliminating glare, improvements are also made to the bass, midrange, sound stage, tone, timbre, color, textures, resolution, harmonics - in short, everything.

The bad news with this approach *can* mean that the cost of treating the gear can, in some cases, exceed the price of the digital gear, but since the improvements are substantial and across the board, this also serves, roughly, as an alternate means of upgrading your system...but, without ever buying any new components. In any case, what I’d say is that this approach eliminates though, is certainly the endless searching for a "glare-free digital sound". But, you apply the treatment with several different devices that are applied in several different locations in both your home and in your system. That’s just necessary to attack the noise at their sources in the home. But, as an example of costs, my $1400 CDP uses 2 active platforms, one above the player and one below. This is said to drop measurable noise inside the CDP somewhere between 150 and 200 db...an extremely nice sonic result, but the price was $2050 (although they’ve come out recently with a new platform that you only need one of to reduce noise to about -200 db for about, I *think*, $1100). And this does not include the AC treatment that gave me terrific improvements on top of that, which cost around $150. And, since we’re talking about improving everything about the sound, that could either be looked at as the endgame or just for openers, depending on what you’e looking to accomplish on your own budget.

I came across this company (Alan Maher Designs, alanmaherdesigns.net) in 2010 and have been steadily acquiring devices from there since then. I started small (first purchase was $25), and took things very slowly until I kinda got my bearings on the performance, but have been extremely and consistently impressed. Over the last 6 years I have spent more than $10k on the stuff and that to me is not chump change. I know I wouldn’t have wound up doing that unless I could come to count on increased performance with every single purchase, every time out...although the elimination of digititis I pretty much accomplished at somewhere between $2-3k-dollar mark, but I kept on going because I fell stone in love with what all of it was doing for everything else. I have no association with Alan other than being a very satisfied customer.

The reason you have not heard much of anything about AMD is that the company has not yet officially launched. There is a facebook group by invitation only that I’ve been a member of since 2010 with typically around 300 or so members worldwide. In exchange for our getting good discounts on the new stuff AMD keeps coming out with, Alan gets feedback from users with real-world installations in a variety of electrical grids all over so he can make adjustments, improvements, come up with new apps or whatever. A launch date hasn’t been announced yet, but I expect some word sometime in 2017 possibly...or maybe later this year even, but right now Alan says his r&d has become such a juggernaut that he is rethinking in terms of how far he wants to be ahead of his competition when he decides to open. His products will run the gamut from over $1k each to likely somewhere well under $50 each. This answer to the problem of digital glare is not available to everyone yet, but the day is coming - it’s just a question of exactly when.

John

I would suggest you consider an outboard DAC and pay particular attention to Johnny Darko's DAC index and comments on CD playback . 16 bit music can be irritating on a poor recording but if well recorded a good DAC will allow you to enjoy it. Some DAC designs accentuate the shortcomings of 16 bit recordings, others are at least neutral. Up-converting to me = equalization... you gain improvement in one area and loose in another

http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/the-darko-dac-index/

In the FWIW column, listen to the Cranberries if you want a test disc for 16 bit shrillness... if your DAC can tame them without loosing detail, you have a keeper