Does DSD sound better than PCM?

[andreasmaaan]

I already said it is not representative of full work flow of creating modern commercial recording.

I agree with that. But I'm not trying to win a debate with you. I'm trying to draw on your expertise to help design a test that would give us an indication of the magnitude of the noise and distortion that a presumably decent DAW creates as a result of processing errors.

That's why I asked you:

Also please tell me if the test I proposed in post #704 would be of interest in your view, and if not, what changes you would propose to try to reveal the worst outcomes of any errors, and how one might measure these.

 

[andreasmaaan]

Perhaps this tangent should be moved to a new thread? Not even sure how that's done these days, since @Thomas savage threw down the gloves

 

[mansr]

Yeah, I worked 7 years for Nokia

Why are ex-Nokia people always so arrogant?

 

[March Audio]

I don't measure consoles, but I know math problems 32-bit floating point creates, that's why I replied.



I already said it is not representative of full work flow of creating modern commercial recording.



Oh, that is easy, pretty much 90% of pop music released in past 20 years.



Original assertion (not mine) which I replied to was a blanket statement:


But of course that doesn't need to have any basis.


This forum is like going to an extremist church in attempt to have meaningful objective discussion about different religions. Ridiculous.

Nebulous waffle.

 

[March Audio]

.
This forum is like going to an extremist church in attempt to have meaningful objective discussion about different religions. Ridiculous.

Oh the irony. You have yet to come up with a single objective fact or example to support your assertions.

It's clear you have zero data on how a typical analogue chain might perform and zero data on how the equivalent digital chain might perform. As such you have no basis to make any comment.

You need to step out of your theoretical world and into the real one.

So above I showed the most fundamental task of mixing channels was performed with distortion and noise way below that of an analogue system. I will try some filtering/EQ later today.

 

[March Audio]

So, same file as yesterday this time with some hefty EQ (filtering)

Analysed in Musicscope. No harmonic distortion or other spuria. Noise floor comes up at 800Hz as expected but otherwise around -175dBFS with a 65k FFT (about 45dB FFT process gain).

Way ahead of analogue performance.

 

[andreasmaaan]

Using Ableton Live, I applied EQ to 30 seconds of white noise output at 44.1kHz/32-bit floating point.

I applied EQ at low frequencies with high Q, as errors are likely to be most extreme at lowest frequencies and highest Q.

Here is the EQ curve I implemented using the stock EQ in Ableton Live:

I then recorded the output via loopback through my internal laptop soundcard using Audacity and analysed the spectrum of the recorded waveform using a Blackman-Harris window and FFT length of 65,536 samples.

Here is the spectrum of the recorded waveform:

 

[solderdude]

You could perhaps better see any changes by recording the noise first and then apply the EQ to that recording and then compare the 2 signals, maybe even null using @pkane software. Now any added distortion would be masked by the noise.

 

[andreasmaaan]

You could perhaps better see any changes by recording the noise first and then apply the EQ to that recording and then compare the 2 signals, maybe even null using @pkane software. Now any added distortion would be masked by the noise.

That's a good point. I was not looking for nonlinear distortion actually, but rather attempting to check the accuracy of the EQ, since it is this that should be worst at low freq / high Q.

But comparing the input spectrum to output spectrum would also do this with greater precision since it would negate any inaccuracies attributable to the noise sample being finite in length.

 

[Thomas savage]

Perhaps this tangent should be moved to a new thread? Not even sure how that's done these days, since @Thomas savage threw down the gloves

I can do this, iv locked the thread temporarily. Send me
1. New thread title
2. Numbers of posts to be moved
And 3. Be cordial and respectful so it's worth the effort lol .