High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.


Something that came as a surprise to me is how good DAC's have gotten over the past 5-10 years.

Before then, there was a consistent, marked improvement going from Redbook (44.1/16) to 96/24 or higher.

The modern DAC, the best of them, no longer do this. The Redbook playback is so good high resolution is almost not needed. Anyone else notice this?
erik_squires
the point is that the older R2R dacs have less issues and less fundamental flaws than modern delta sigma dacs.

You seem to have taken the statement and meaning, and put it on backwards.....

Up sampling was marketing spin It might work and it does (a bit, anyway).... but it was mostly thrown out there as a marketing thing.

People buy numbers, as that’s all they know about things, for the most part.

Eg, on black Friday I was in the stores (Eg best buy) and predominately people watching, and only vestigially shopping.

What I noticed is that they would always always always..buy a given 58" model of flat screen TV over any given 55" TV.

As the number 58" is bigger than 55".....

Bigger is better, right? Right?

Essentially, people bought dacs by the numbers, and quality was so far down on the list that it barely made any impact in any associated thinking.

Audio fanatics got served what was sold to the masses ----- The End.


Now, we can finally do discrete dacs well enough and economically enough...so R2R comes back with a vengeance, in the high end area of digital. Same for the FPGA versions of similar design and thinking as discrete R2R dacs.

The dual pathway now exists for digital. One high end and the other - pap for the masses. FYI, delta sigma dacs and upsampling is the pap for the masses part.

No big company is going to be making discrete R2R dacs any time soon. The volume required for good sales returns is not there.

Thus, small companies with their board modules and some efforts of internal designs of the same at the larger audiophile companies-- will be the norm for the foreseeable future.

I think hi resolution music 96/24 file for same remaster will sound better than red book 44.1/16 on the same delta-sigma DAC. Of couse, 44.1/16 will sound very natural from R2R compare to 96/24 on delta-sigma.
Hear, hear. 😄
No real need to upsample to dizzying heights. 16bit is good enough. Always has been. It's just taken technology time to catch up with the science behind it. Although, a recording engineer told me that 96 is the better way to go than 44.1 but it's not a deal breaker.

All the best,
Nonoise
If Tidal offers same album: 44.1/16 and 96/24 (MQA). I will stream MQA. Of course, all through delta-sigma DAC. If I had a very good R2R dAC (16 or 20 bit), then I would try native R2R. I don't know if there is an affordable 24bit R2R DAC yet.