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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
erik_squires OP
16,040 posts
 
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
erik_squires OP
16,040 posts
 
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?

david_ten
5,480 posts
 
Be wrong in the moment OR be wrong all along. Your choice, Erik.

I mean that it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference and this is having an influence in the market.



lalitk's avatar
lalitk
5,425 posts
 
“Remember how much money Wadia commanded for their upsampling DACs?.”

Wadia is long gone and so is the need for oversampling DAC’s. Today’s high resolution files (above 16bit/44.1kHz) are so darn good that you no longer feel the need of oversampling. IMHO, oversampling adds distortion that’s not only unpleasant but sounds pretty unnatural.  Oversampling is nothing but a cheap gimmick!
erik_squires OP
16,040 posts
 
Wadia is long gone and so is the need for oversampling DAC’s.

@lalitk

Right, but the specific point I was trying to make here was that Wadia was the first company I knew of that did advanced upsampling, and quantization errors would go along with why Wadia sounded good at all.

Wadia didn’t oversample, they upsampled. They famously advertised they used a French curve fitting algorithm to extrapolate intra-sample data.This required a lot more compute power than either oversampling (zero compute power) or linear interpolation (draw a line between two points).

But in the end, the results are how you describe them. Wadia is gone and so is the need for their tech. 

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