Upsampling. Truth vs Marketing

This is the one and only experience I have had in listening to a player where you could choose to upsample or not, so take it with a grain of salt...

After we went to a Friday Night Cruise Night in Sommerville, NJ in Bill LeGall's Packard this past autumn, we sat down and listened to his Music Hall Maverick. I asked him if he preferred the upsampling or not, and he told me he didn't know, as he never tried it. So, he asked if we could do some A/B testing, and keep our opinions to ourselves until it was over. Then, we'd see where we both stood. We listened to a few cuts, with and without the upsampling. The other components in the system were his incredibly modded Infinity IRS V speakers (with internal 1500 watt amps for the bass modules), Mesa Baron running 6L6 tubes 2/3 triode - 1/3 pentode power, Audio Research preamp, and his own cabling.

Without the upsampling, the music was clearly more dynamic, open, upfront, and to both of our ears, much more honest. Upsampling REALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLY smoothed out the sound, and gave an extreme LP kind of feel to the music. I don't want to say that detail dropped down, but because of such a loss of jump factor in the music, it gave it that kind of vibe. The differences were night and day. We both preferred no upsampling by a mile, but I could clearly see where a lot of audiophiles would feel the opposite, and in many a system, it would probably be a better way to go.

I will say that after this experiment, the Zanden ads that tout its great sound, partly they feel due to the fact that it does not upsample made a lot of sense to me.

Treja, I would have loved to have been there. I have only compared the non-upsampling Audio Note to other upsampling rigs. My preference has always laid with the Audio Note. There is an unfettered feel about the honest read.

Upsampling may or may not sound better depends on overall design and implementation.

Companies use upsampling because it can allow digital filtering designs that do least amount of harm to music signal.

Don't get hung up on the numbers game, listen to the end result - the music.

I own an Ah! 4000 CD Player with the optional upsampler board. It's a neat comparison because you can remove the board and replace with the stock chips. Anyway....

The improvement is DRAMATIC...It's smoother, has better resolution and basically does everything better with the Upsambler installed.

If an when you got an upsamiling player do you know what the actual upsampled rate is? Is it 192khz or 176, none of you listed it. I know of one product that has upsampling and it goes to 192 and it does sound different, but not better. Just looking at the difference in the recorded waveforms (44.1 and 192) clearly shows interpolation errors. If anyone has means to record WAVE files of the output, I would be happy to analyze. All and all I would have to beleive that if your player sounds better upsampled they must be doing 172. Or could it be that their clock is crap and when you use higher sample rate, jitter is less of an issue?..hum..

A<.