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I have a question. I understand Nyquist and how given two sample points there is only one solution to "draw" a sine wave through them, but how does the DAC actually fit the sine wave to these two points? How do they correctly interpolate?
It is usually done (theoretically) using the sinc interpolation. Please see this thread for details.
 
I experminted with SACD and found that in some informal blind tests, I could not hear any difference between PCM and SACD. It is my feeling that people think SACD sounds better because so much attention is lavished on the mastering of the content, along with careful selection of well-recorded and mixed music. I own quite a few MFSL hybrid SACD discs, and I have found the PCM and SACD layers equally satisfying. I also have the ability to rip SACD to PCM, and again, I have heard no difference.
 
I experminted with SACD and found that in some informal blind tests, I could not hear any difference between PCM and SACD. It is my feeling that people think SACD sounds better because so much attention is lavished on the mastering of the content, along with careful selection of well-recorded and mixed music. I own quite a few MFSL hybrid SACD discs, and I have found the PCM and SACD layers equally satisfying. I also have the ability to rip SACD to PCM, and again, I have heard no difference.

Same here.

The only tiny qualification I'd make is that there are some hybrid SACDs out there where the CD-PCM layer has the same mastering but the levels are such that there is digital clipping. (It is possible to create PCM clipping during SACD-PCM conversion if you don't set the makeup gain properly.) I don't know how many releases this issue applies to, and I don't know how pervasive or audible the clipping is, but it is a potential source of a perceived sonic difference in some cases.

To be clear, my experience is the same as yours, and I agree with what you say here - the same mastering, played at the same volume, will sound indistinguishable in DSD vs PCM in my view.
 
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I experminted with SACD and found that in some informal blind tests, I could not hear any difference between PCM and SACD. It is my feeling that people think SACD sounds better because so much attention is lavished on the mastering of the content, along with careful selection of well-recorded and mixed music. I own quite a few MFSL hybrid SACD discs, and I have found the PCM and SACD layers equally satisfying. I also have the ability to rip SACD to PCM, and again, I have heard no difference.

As has been pointed out to me, apparently you need a dac that can do native dsd, without internal resampling/filtering/converting to pcm.

I see dacs that claim to handle dsd, but convert to pcm first.

If the source goes through the same processing in the dac, unlikely to sound different?
 
As has been pointed out to me, apparently you need a dac that can do native dsd, without internal resampling/filtering/converting to pcm.

I see dacs that claim to handle dsd, but convert to pcm first.

If the source goes through the same processing in the dac, unlikely to sound different?

In my view and experience, the corollary to @Aerius-Aye 's experience of SACD vs PCM also applies: take a device that does pass through pure DSD and compare its DSD output with its DSD-converted-to-PCM output, and if you are using the same SACD and the volume levels are matched, you're not going to hear a difference (at least not in controlled testing).
 
As has been pointed out to me, apparently you need a dac that can do native dsd, without internal resampling/filtering/converting to pcm.

I see dacs that claim to handle dsd, but convert to pcm first.

If the source goes through the same processing in the dac, unlikely to sound different?
Before I got my Benchmark DAC2 (which does not convert DSD to PCM) I had a Sony DVP-S9000ES, which was a great player, with excellent sounding DACs. I could play either layer of a hybrid disc. If it was a well mastered, good recording, my hybrid disc experience mirrored what I get with the DAC2: parity. If the layers were mastered well, and volume-matched, they sounded the same. After that, I tried DSD rips from SACD fed directly to the DAC2 right before or after those same rips which had been losslessly converted to 16/44 PCM via XLD. The tracks sounded the same, which is to say, in many cases, absolutely gorgeous. One reference disc I often used was Willie Nelson's SACD, Stardust, which was all jazz standards, beautifully rendered by an excellent band. That was not a hybrid disc. Still a fave. I listen to the PCM files, as I have standardized on PCM for convenience.

So, I was (am) a guy who adores the sound of SACD, owned about 30 titles, and had a great Sony player to boot. I really wanted to hear DSD sounding better. But it just sounded wonderfully the same. In the end there was nothing lost anyway; a great performance recorded and mastered well sounds killer in ye old 16/44 Red Book standard.
 
For me the only thing that matters is that Sony, a company who was dominant in digital audio recording for a long time, stands behind the principle of DSD. I cannot believe a company with such credentials would release something that's inferior to their previous offerings.

It would've been easy to just increase the bit depth and sample rate for SACD and be done with it. Instead they chose an entirely new process which, in their opinion, reproduces the original recording more faithfully than PCM. Although I'm an engineer myself, all this techno-talk doesn't mean much if you haven't compared a DSD recording of an analog master tape to a PCM version. I'm sure Sony has done this.
 
For me the only thing that matters is that Sony, a company who was dominant in digital audio recording for a long time, stands behind the principle of DSD. I cannot believe a company with such credentials would release something that's inferior to their previous offerings.

It would've been easy to just increase the bit depth and sample rate for SACD and be done with it. Instead they chose an entirely new process which, in their opinion, reproduces the original recording more faithfully than PCM. Although I'm an engineer myself, all this techno-talk doesn't mean much if you haven't compared a DSD recording of an analog master tape to a PCM version. I'm sure Sony has done this.
Believe what you want. The reasons behind a certain decision by a large conglomerate like Sony are not always known, we can all speculate. And yes, I've compared DSD to PCM recordings, including multiple original direct-to-DSD recordings to PCM. The results are still the same: DSD is not better in any audible sense, and much more unwieldy as a recording format that wastes a lot of space just to store high frequency quantization noise.
 
For me the only thing that matters is that Sony, a company who was dominant in digital audio recording for a long time, stands behind the principle of DSD. I cannot believe a company with such credentials would release something that's inferior to their previous offerings.
Cassettes. 8-track. Compressed digital masters. Dolby for those cassette decks. Dolby Digital. Not Sony but the audio road is littered with stuff that does not sound better but is somehow more convenient. Audio is very very very very often NOT about better sound at all but about $$$$$. Oh, MiniDisc! That's from Sony! And sounds as good as CD! So how does SACD sound any better than CDs "perfect sound forever"?!? ;):facepalm:

It would've been easy to just increase the bit depth and sample rate for SACD and be done with it. Instead they chose an entirely new process which, in their opinion, reproduces the original recording more faithfully than PCM. Although I'm an engineer myself, all this techno-talk doesn't mean much if you haven't compared a DSD recording of an analog master tape to a PCM version. I'm sure Sony has done this.
Yes it would have been easy. Sony was looking for something else, an easy archival format. So since they were using 1-bit A/D converters, they decided to just archive the one bit, literally. From that point of view in one way you cannot have better sound than the CD since the CD came from that 1-bit A/D in the first place. Then again, there is some conversion which is skipped, which is a good thing.
- Technically, I saw a demo at a surround sound conference where a tiny waveform was faithfully reproduced by high rate PCM, and DSD recreated this wavering kind of thing.
- Telarc's guy said they had compared live microphone feeds from live musicians into monitors, then through a high rate PCM chain, then a DSD chain. They felt the DSD was a bit closer hence they decided to support SACD.
- I asked famed recording engineer John Eargle once what he thought. He said he felt high res PCM captured the sound from the microphones...I don't recall him using the word "perfectly" but maybe "faithfully" or something. Having something that transparent he didn't seem to have felt a need to mess with DSD, which has mixing problems.
- Those are the only two sets of folks I have ever heard of comparing actual DSD versus PCM chains. All other opinions are pretty worthless, since due to unknown chain/provenance you cannot compare say and SACD to a DVD-Audio of the same title. You cannot even compare an SACD's DSD layer to the CD layer since they may not be mixed the same, witness the idiocy of Dark Side Of The Moon's CD layer actually clipping (and not the DSD layer). If SACDs sound better it most likely because more care is taken with the whole process compared to the previous CD.
 
I have found some papers from Philips Technical Review back in the days, discuss Delta modulation and why it is preferred, nothing new I'm sure, but may by able to give us more context without guessing.

Quantizationa and coding of analog signals

D/A conversion in playing a Compact Disc

Digitization of speech

A digital 'decimating' filter for A/D conversion of hi-fi audio signals


feel free to read more, index included, I hope someone can put this collection onto archive.org
 
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For me the only thing that matters is that Sony, a company who was dominant in digital audio recording for a long time, stands behind the principle of DSD. I cannot believe a company with such credentials would release something that's inferior to their previous offerings.

It's not going to sound sonically/audibly inferior. It's just pointless, since good old PCM sounds the same.

(EDIT : I'm referring to commercial release of product in DSD format, i.e., SACDs and downloadable DSD files.)
 
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For me the only thing that matters is that Sony, a company who was dominant in digital audio recording for a long time, stands behind the principle of DSD. I cannot believe a company with such credentials would release something that's inferior to their previous offerings.

It would've been easy to just increase the bit depth and sample rate for SACD and be done with it. Instead they chose an entirely new process which, in their opinion, reproduces the original recording more faithfully than PCM. Although I'm an engineer myself, all this techno-talk doesn't mean much if you haven't compared a DSD recording of an analog master tape to a PCM version. I'm sure Sony has done this.
It is my understanding that Sony went down the path of SACD/DSD because their patent on the CD was set to expire (which produced patent royalty fees ***) so they needed a new thing (SACD) to keep the money flowing...and increase hardware sales.

My memory is failing but I think that at least in the beginning that any SACD needed to have a CD compatible layer (a hybrid disc) as Sony recognised that the new disc needed to be backwards compatible to speed up end user acceptance (i.e. dont need to buy a SACD player if you dont want to) but obviously touted stuff like increased resolution/multi-channel features to help sell new DSD layer capable players to those that felt these things were important.

So there was nothing altruistic from Sony... SACD was a play to keep the money rolling in. And by developing this exclusively (no Phillips involved) they could get all the patent royalty fees plus charge for the decoder chips.

Peter

*** Philips got 60 percent of the 3 cent per CD fee under the patents. The rest went to Japan's Sony.
 
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For me the only thing that matters is that Sony, a company who was dominant in digital audio recording for a long time, stands behind the principle of DSD. I cannot believe a company with such credentials would release something that's inferior to their previous offerings.

It would've been easy to just increase the bit depth and sample rate for SACD and be done with it. Instead they chose an entirely new process which, in their opinion, reproduces the original recording more faithfully than PCM. Although I'm an engineer myself, all this techno-talk doesn't mean much if you haven't compared a DSD recording of an analog master tape to a PCM version. I'm sure Sony has done this.

Like many audio designs and formats, there is a logic and a principle behind SACD/DSD: as has been noted above, delta-sigma DACs became mainstream at the beginning of the 1990s, and the way they work is very similar to DSD. So technologically speaking, DSD was appealing as a way to conceptually better align the sampling system of the medium with the sampling system used internally in what soon became 99% of the DACs in all the disc players and other DAC-containing devices out there.

So in terms of its ability to store and reproduce sound, DSD is not inferior to PCM - both are capable of fidelity in excess of the limits of human hearing. But it's not superior either, despite Sony's claims to the contrary at the time.

When it comes to the specific PCM parameters of the redbook CD format, 16 bit and 44.1kHz sample rate, one can argue that the format must be implemented "perfectly" in order for that format to exceed the limits of human hearing. For example to achieve a practical noise floor of -115dB, CD audio must use noise-shaped dither, because the "native" non-dithered noise floor of 16-bit PCM is just over 96dB. And to achieve ruler-flat frequency response out to 20kHz while preventing audible aliasing of out of band signals into the audible band, the DAC's reconstruction filter must be pretty steep with a lot of attenuation.

That level of performance might have been difficult to achieve 35 years ago, but it was pretty easy to achieve in 2000 when SACDs first came out, and it's trivially easy to achieve now. And competing PCM formats of the 1990s like DVD-A, and even regular old DVD-video discs that happened to have 24-bit PCM audio on them, exceeded the noise floor capabilities (not to mention the noise-free ultrasonic frequency capabilities, even though that didn't really matter) of SACD/DSD.

And all of this is without even considering the more mercenary or market/IP-based considerations for Sony's move to DSD that others have mentioned above.
 
Cassettes. 8-track. Compressed digital masters. Dolby for those cassette decks. Dolby Digital. Not Sony but the audio road is littered with stuff that does not sound better but is somehow more convenient. Audio is very very very very often NOT about better sound at all but about $$$$$. Oh, MiniDisc! That's from Sony! And sounds as good as CD! So how does SACD sound any better than CDs "perfect sound forever"?!? ;):facepalm:


Yes it would have been easy. Sony was looking for something else, an easy archival format. So since they were using 1-bit A/D converters, they decided to just archive the one bit, literally. From that point of view in one way you cannot have better sound than the CD since the CD came from that 1-bit A/D in the first place. Then again, there is some conversion which is skipped, which is a good thing.
- Technically, I saw a demo at a surround sound conference where a tiny waveform was faithfully reproduced by high rate PCM, and DSD recreated this wavering kind of thing.
- Telarc's guy said they had compared live microphone feeds from live musicians into monitors, then through a high rate PCM chain, then a DSD chain. They felt the DSD was a bit closer hence they decided to support SACD.
- I asked famed recording engineer John Eargle once what he thought. He said he felt high res PCM captured the sound from the microphones...I don't recall him using the word "perfectly" but maybe "faithfully" or something. Having something that transparent he didn't seem to have felt a need to mess with DSD, which has mixing problems.
- Those are the only two sets of folks I have ever heard of comparing actual DSD versus PCM chains. All other opinions are pretty worthless, since due to unknown chain/provenance you cannot compare say and SACD to a DVD-Audio of the same title. You cannot even compare an SACD's DSD layer to the CD layer since they may not be mixed the same, witness the idiocy of Dark Side Of The Moon's CD layer actually clipping (and not the DSD layer). If SACDs sound better it most likely because more care is taken with the whole process compared to the previous CD.
MiniDisc was state-of-the-art when it was introduced. It may sound quaint today (where you can just copy your ripped FLAC files to a solid-state audio player) but back then people wanted to "record" their CD's. The sound quality wasn't bad, but it was obviously imperfect because it had to be compressed.

The SACD's I own (or DSF files really since I don't own a SACD player) all sound better than their CD counterparts. Much better even. To my ears there's a clear difference. I consider myself to have "golden ears" in that sense. It could be down to mastering but I don't buy that since decades or remasters on CD sound worse than a single SACD version of the same album (Dire Straits eponymous album). Same with Boston's eponymous album. It too sounds (much) better than all the CD versions I own.
 
Believe what you want. The reasons behind a certain decision by a large conglomerate like Sony are not always known, we can all speculate. And yes, I've compared DSD to PCM recordings, including multiple original direct-to-DSD recordings to PCM. The results are still the same: DSD is not better in any audible sense, and much more unwieldy as a recording format that wastes a lot of space just to store high frequency quantization noise.
Well obviously they wanted a new and improved format to replace CD. And they also wanted bullet-proof DRM since they became a music conglomerate in the 1990's.

Like I said, they could've simply increased the bit-depth and sampling frequency, but they didn't. They were convinced that DSD sounded better. They claim that it elliminates a "decimation filter" but IMHO we're still dealing with "quanta" of voltage samples. But listening to SACD's I do believe they were right.
 
It's not going to sound sonically/audibly inferior. It's just pointless, since good old PCM sounds the same.

(EDIT : I'm referring to commercial release of product in DSD format, i.e., SACDs and downloadable DSD files.)
Have you actually listened to SACD's of albums you already own on CD? I have, and I can certainly tell the difference. There's a huge improvement in sound quality, even considering the fact that most Mofi CD's I own already sound "perfect" to me (and I could've spent the rest of my days being perfectly happy with them).

But I'm very curious what the DSD versions sound like now that I know there's an audible difference.
 
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I have, and I can certainly tell the difference. There's a huge improvement in sound quality, even considering the fact that most Mofi CD's I own already sound "perfect" to me (and I could've spent the rest of my days being perfectly happy with them).
If you are really hearing a large difference from the same masters, it is 99.9999% likely because you don’t have DSD and PCM levels properly matched.
 
Have you actually listened to SACD's of albums you already own on CD?

Yes, plenty.

When the mastering is different, they will sound different. And the mastering of an SACD and a previously released CD (or one released after) are almost ALWAYS different.

If the mastering is the same (e.g. the CD layer of a hybrid SASCD -- though it's not always the same) then you've got level or processing differences in ouput.

It has sweet fa to do with DSD/SACD's intrinsic 'sound'. A fair blind comparison would tell you that.
 
It is my understanding that Sony went down the path of SACD/DSD because their patent on the CD was set to expire (which produced patent royalty fees ***) so they needed a new thing (SACD) to keep the money flowing...and increase hardware sales.

My memory is failing but I think that at least in the beginning that any SACD needed to have a CD compatible layer (a hybrid disc) as Sony recognised that the new disc needed to be backwards compatible to speed up end user acceptance (i.e. dont need to buy a SACD player if you dont want to) but obviously touted stuff like increased resolution/multi-channel features to help sell new DSD layer capable players to those that felt these things were important.

So there was nothing altruistic from Sony... SACD was a play to keep the money rolling in. And by developing this exclusively (no Phillips involved) they could get all the patent royalty fees plus charge for the decoder chips.

Peter

*** Philips got 60 percent of the 3 cent per CD fee under the patents. The rest went to Japan's Sony.
Both SONY and PHILIPS are top manufacturers in the Audio/Video field and they do make their own standards because they rule this branch and they can afford this, it's like that since ages. I love SACD because of the multichannel technology and I don't think there's a competitor on this field. Even the Vienna concerts are recorded via SONY and I have quite a few of their Blu-Ray records and I totally love the sound quality, especially in multi channel.

Looking back to '70s until now, I don't think other company would have done it better and cheaper than SONY or than PHILIPS, but this is just my opinion, of course.

Getting back to DSD now, my first DAC able to decode DSD tracks was having a rather poor DSD decoding that was introducing lot of audible noise, so it was kind of a fail. The second DSD-compatible DAC was also introducing some noise, that makes me think that how implementing is done on PCM or DSD decoding in an audio device worth more than the actual format of the track.

I've done some A/B tests myself between DSD and PCM and wasn't able to hear any differences, so I refuse to believe that one track might sound better or worse in DSD or in PCM. However, I think that investing time and money in developing new audio formats is a good decision. After all, this is what R&D is all about.
 
s, thIt is my understanding that Sony went down the path of SACD/DSD because their patent on the CD was set to expire (which produced patent royalty fees ***) so they needed a new thing (SACD) to keep the money flowing...and increase hardware sales.

My memory is failing but I think that at least in the beginning that any SACD needed to have a CD compatible layer (a hybrid disc) as Sony recognised that the new disc needed to be backwards compatible to speed up end user acceptance (i.e. dont need to buy a SACD player if you dont want to) but obviously touted stuff like increased resolution/multi-channel features to help sell new DSD layer capable players to those that felt these things were important.
Never forget Philips which co-developed DSD and SA-CD with Sony the same way as they have both done for creating CD, Philips itself also being a champion of 1 bit digital to analogue conversion that have been previously marketed under the brand name "Bitstream" by the Dutch company.

For some reasons, when discussing SA-CD and DSD, Philips is always forgotten, which is a shame considering the importance of the contribution of this company to this project.

I just want to add that hybrid SA-CD disc was and remains a key feature which, at the time, was developed not on the sole initiative of Sony. In the 90s, the major disc companies of all over the world, not only Sony music division, regrouped in an International Steering Committee (ISC) in order to set the specifications of an eventual successor to the CD Audio based upon the then new DVD disc technology. One of the key requirement of the ISC was that the new disc-type has to be practicaly backward compatible with any CD players in existence. Sony and Philips managed to fullfill that requirement gracefully with hybrid disc technology, something the competing DVD-A format never achieved. DVD-A wasn't even backward compatible with existing DVD-V players at the time, and still isn't, for Heaven's sake ! I have cited some links about the ISC in message #133 in another thread.
 
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