Thuchan said, "I understand why most analogue friends don't believe in the quality of digital reproduction. Nevertheless if you ever get deep into it the dCS stack it is an overwhelming alternative, or not?"
You're opening a can of worms with me Thuchan but since you asked for it here it is;
The problem isn't as much the quality of digital playback but rather the digital's qualities, see the link in above thread. You can massage it as much as want to but you're not going to change its nature. From day 1 the CD was designed with inherent limitations by the engineers and copyright paranoid media companies like Sony. The production chain is highly flawed and loose so the best that you accomplish is more tweaking and that wont change anything meaningful. CD is a truncated facsimile a much larger file. Upsample it, reclock it digital lens it, green bands, demagnetize, shark oil, snake oil or any other band-aid you want to attach it, it still remains the down sampled, i.e. reduced quality commercial product and DIGITAL. This blog article is tweaker's porn. What are you hearing? The clock? The up sampling? The power cord? the digital cables? Was the CD a direct transfer from analog master or was it an oversampled 24 bit remaster which is another tweak? and the list goes on. So your analysis of this clock is really analysis of whole lot of different variables that have nothing to do with the source. I'm sure that you realize that once you introduce your first "AUDIOPHILE" tweak to your system you have altered the parameters. Audiophile power cords all have overt characteristics and coloration, after you put one in, your system takes on a new character and that character gets stronger with everything additional cord from this point on every modification or tweak that you make is predicated on the power cord's overwhelming character and not your components. You're basically chasing your tail at this point on. Every cable and every tweak introduces another character that you end up offsetting with further tweaks.Its a never ending money pit.
Maybe this is where you and I differ in our final approach. For me, specially at these price points, if the equipment doesn't perform as advertised I'd get rid of it and replace it with one that works right. My philosophy is understanding the basics and nature of the subject to get the fundamentals right and only then one might make some adjustments to taste, like glass platter vs felt. In your shoes if I had spent years building a listening space and then have an expensive custom tailored speaker system installed, I'd never compromise it with resonators and traps. I'd spend that resource figuring out what went fundamentally wrong and fix that before applying patches that will ultimately lead to more aids. This is how I see the digital clock, another patch but not a cure.
You're opening a can of worms with me Thuchan but since you asked for it here it is;
The problem isn't as much the quality of digital playback but rather the digital's qualities, see the link in above thread. You can massage it as much as want to but you're not going to change its nature. From day 1 the CD was designed with inherent limitations by the engineers and copyright paranoid media companies like Sony. The production chain is highly flawed and loose so the best that you accomplish is more tweaking and that wont change anything meaningful. CD is a truncated facsimile a much larger file. Upsample it, reclock it digital lens it, green bands, demagnetize, shark oil, snake oil or any other band-aid you want to attach it, it still remains the down sampled, i.e. reduced quality commercial product and DIGITAL. This blog article is tweaker's porn. What are you hearing? The clock? The up sampling? The power cord? the digital cables? Was the CD a direct transfer from analog master or was it an oversampled 24 bit remaster which is another tweak? and the list goes on. So your analysis of this clock is really analysis of whole lot of different variables that have nothing to do with the source. I'm sure that you realize that once you introduce your first "AUDIOPHILE" tweak to your system you have altered the parameters. Audiophile power cords all have overt characteristics and coloration, after you put one in, your system takes on a new character and that character gets stronger with everything additional cord from this point on every modification or tweak that you make is predicated on the power cord's overwhelming character and not your components. You're basically chasing your tail at this point on. Every cable and every tweak introduces another character that you end up offsetting with further tweaks.Its a never ending money pit.
Maybe this is where you and I differ in our final approach. For me, specially at these price points, if the equipment doesn't perform as advertised I'd get rid of it and replace it with one that works right. My philosophy is understanding the basics and nature of the subject to get the fundamentals right and only then one might make some adjustments to taste, like glass platter vs felt. In your shoes if I had spent years building a listening space and then have an expensive custom tailored speaker system installed, I'd never compromise it with resonators and traps. I'd spend that resource figuring out what went fundamentally wrong and fix that before applying patches that will ultimately lead to more aids. This is how I see the digital clock, another patch but not a cure.