2. digital
  3. 153998-20253

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
david_ten
5,480 posts
 
It's marching onwards and upwards... : )

If that is true, then the bonus value of high resolution must have [diminished] no?

mahler123
3,305 posts
 
Erick

What if someone came up with a killer MP3 player that extracted every single iota of audio information from an mp3 stream.  Would the value of 16/44 then be diminished?
erik_squires OP
16,040 posts
 
@mahler123

That’s a different situation. MP3 as we know is lossy, but put it another way, what if some one had a lossy compression algorithm which sounded 90% as good as a high rez download, for 1/10th the cost?

Would that not alter the market and depress the value of the high rez recording?

Going back to my original post though, let's say CD playback until the 2000's was half as good as it is today, but high resolution music stayed the same. Can High Resolution still command the premium it used to?
erik_squires OP
16,040 posts
 
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.
biffkitty02
9 posts
 
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.
More to discover