When do you think DACs became "transparent"?

[VientoB]

I got into hifi in about 1996, reading UK magazines like What HiFi? and HiFi Choice. They would always assure us that there were clear differences in sound between CD players. What HiFi? magazine loved the Marantz CD63 KI Signature for two or three years. I think it was priced at £500 initially and they reckoned it beat everything up to £1000 Were they fooling themselves back then or were there audible differences between DACs and CD players back in the 90s?

 

[Blumlein 88]

Most were probably transparent from very early on.

 

[kchap]

Most were probably transparent from very early on.

I had a Sony CDP-101, purchased in 1983. Compared to the current generation of DACs, the DAC in the CDP-101 would be considered mediocre, but I thought it was a revelation.

 

[Berwhale]

I got into hifi in about 1996, reading UK magazines like What HiFi? and HiFi Choice. They would always assure us that there were clear differences in sound between CD players. What HiFi? magazine loved the Marantz CD63 KI Signature for two or three years. I think it was priced at £500 initially and they reckoned it beat everything up to £1000 Were they fooling themselves back then or were there audible differences between DACs and CD players back in the 90s?

I owned Marantz CD63 (non KI Signature) which I think retailed for around £300, i'm willing to bet it measured better than the KI Sig .

With respect to What Hi-Fi, a friend of mine was a test engineer for Onix Electronics in the early 90's (I still have an OA21s that he built and fettled for me). He told me that What Hi-Fi refused to review ONIX's equipment unless they could keep it! Onix was small outfit and couldn't afford to be giving away £500 amps, so What Hi-Fi refused to review any of their kit (even though it was compared favourably with Naim and Quad by other reviewers).

 

[sergeauckland]

They were audibly transparent even before CD was released to the public. The Sony PCM F1 was proven transparent when it's presence as an ADC-DAC pair couldn't be detected against a straight-wire bypass. Even the original 14 bit 4x oversampling Philips CD100 (also sold as the Marantz CD63) was transparent.

S

 

[Robin L]

I got into hifi in about 1996, reading UK magazines like What HiFi? and HiFi Choice. They would always assure us that there were clear differences in sound between CD players. What HiFi? magazine loved the Marantz CD63 KI Signature for two or three years. I think it was priced at £500 initially and they reckoned it beat everything up to £1000 Were they fooling themselves back then or were there audible differences between DACs and CD players back in the 90s?

I read a lot of subjective reviews back then and listened via Stax earspeakers. I did notice differences between CD players, though it should be noted that the players I was using were inexpensive. The breakthrough for me was when I used a t.c. Electronics M2000 as a DAC, hooked up to the SPDIF out of a CD player. The sound clarified and opened up compared to what I was using before. Note that the Stax earspeakers do exaggerate treble, so anything going on in the upper octaves would be under a spotlight. In any case, I'm now using an older, low-cost Sony Blu-Ray player (BDP-BX57) hooked up to a Topping E30 DAC and am hearing better resolution than I've ever heard before from any CD player. We may have reached the limit of what can be extracted from Redbook digital, considering that the gear I'm using is among the cheapest digital gear one can buy. I can hear a difference between the analog output of the Blu Ray player and the sound I get by using the optical out into the Topping DAC. The analog out has slightly less treble content. However, that can be ascribed to the low cost of the unit and the fact that different analog outputs can sound different for a variety of reasons. It looks like the BDP BX-57 is at least 11 years old. I've seen prices for used models run as high as $90, bought mine for $8. Spent an additional $10 for a remote.

 

[Blumlein 88]

In terms of distortion, level frequency response and noise the very first DACs were fine. The one thing is low level linearity and I don't really know how audible that would be. There were test tracks that faded slowly into silence and you could hear some differences in this. Can you hear this with music playing? I don't know. Many conjectured this made different DACs sound different in the ambient tails of music recorded in real spaces, but I'm not so sure. Bill Waslo of Diffmaker fame recorded some tracks with a brass heavy marching band 60 db below the average music level. You cannot tell when it is there and when it is not. By say 1990 when everyone was using 16 bit oversampled DACs linearity at least to16 bits was not a big deal with most designs.

 

[Purité Audio]

Skynet became self aware Saturday 5th October 2024.
Keith

 

[Robin L]

In terms of distortion, level frequency response and noise the very first DACs were fine. The one thing is low level linearity and I don't really know how audible that would be. There were test tracks that faded slowly into silence and you could hear some differences in this. Can you hear this with music playing? I don't know. Many conjectured this made different DACs sound different in the ambient tails of music recorded in real spaces, but I'm not so sure. Bill Waslo of Diffmaker fame recorded some tracks with a brass heavy marching band 60 db below the average music level. You cannot tell when it is there and when it is not. By say 1990 when everyone was using 16 bit oversampled DACs linearity for at least 16 bits was not a big deal with most designs.

As regards low-level linearity - most people were listening to LPs when CDs first appeared. I noticed that CDs seemed to have less going on in the ambient tails of the music I was listening to, mostly Classical. But listening via Stax headphones I could clearly hear pre/post echo on LPs, most likely an artifact unique to analog discs. If it seemed like CDs had less reproduction of ambience, that could easily be one of the reasons. One album I listened to a lot back then was Joan Armatrading's eponymous LP. Whenever I listened to that LP via headphones, I could easily hear pre-echo on the opening track, "Down to Zero".

 

[phoenixdogfan]

Benchmark Dac 1.

 

[DVDdoug]

I bought my 1st CD player in 1985 and I never heard anything wrong with it.

The only time I've ever heard a difference from a "DAC" it was a soundcard that made noises (from the speakers) when the hard drive was accessed. But that was analog noise on the analog-side of the DAC/soundcard so I don't blame the "DAC".

And... I've never tried to hear a difference. I'm not doing reviews so if something sounds good I'm going to enjoy it and I'm not trying to hear defects...

I'm now using an older, low-cost Sony Blu-Ray player (BDP-BX57) hooked up to a Topping E30 DAC and am hearing better resolution than I've ever heard before from any CD player.

But you didn't do a proper blind ABX test.

If you want to know what "resolution" really sounds like, make an 8-bit file in Audacity. You'll hear quantization noise which is like a fuzz behind the audio and most noticeable when the sound is quiet, but unlike analog noise it goes-away completely when there is no signal. (If you do that experiment, turn-off Audacity's dither.)

 

[Berwhale]

Skynet became self aware Saturday 5th October 2024.
Keith

it becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time August 29th 1997!

 

[coonmanx]

My Panasonic portable CD player from 1995 is transparent. I consider most modern DACs to be nothing more than snake oil repackaged. People hearing things because that is what they expect.

 

[oleg87]

Probably depends on how you define "transparent". I haven't seen measurements for many early audio DACs, but you really only need 13-14ish bits of dynamic range to get to the point where I think people would generally not be able to discern it from anything more performant in normal music playback scenarios, and that's never been overly hard to achieve.

 

[AnalogSteph]

Even the original 14 bit 4x oversampling Philips CD100 (also sold as the Marantz CD63) was transparent.

Well... these early digital filters (SAA7030) are a bit of a mixed bag.
On the one hand, they are quite tolerant to intersample-overs and very clever bits of engineering for the time (I mean, they're using dither with noise shaping, this is how they were able to get performance that's arguably even a bit past 16 bits out of 14-bit DACs, at least in a 20 kHz bandwidth).
On the other hand, they have almost ±0.2 dB worth of periodic filter ripple in an FIR filter. Julian Dunn would have a heart attack if he wasn't already dead. I've had issues with "wonky treble" on something with ±0.05 dB, so would have my doubts in this area. I suppose the designers were going off of what was common for analog (IIR) filters at the time. They couldn't have known about any issues associated with pre-echo.

Fundamentally, even the early NOS jobs were not bad to begin with. They needed some crutches like external S&H and deglitching that didn't make distortion performance any better, not to mention the 13th-order integrated Bessel lowpass (possibly ceramic?).

Things got interesting once the Japanese had caught up to 4X oversampling around 1986, and by 1987 we saw the first high-performance digital filters like the Sony CXD1088 (periodic ripple below ±0.001/0.004 dB). Which has little headroom for overs but that wasn't too much of an issue with material available at the time. That one seems to have been combined with the TDA1541(A) a lot (even in Sony's own players!), less often with the PCM56P. I wonder why, I'd think that the trimmable PCM56 would fare better for low-level linearity (but perhaps not untrimmed, accurate trimming also seems to be a bit tricky).

By 1990 we had arguably moved past CD-level performance already... a well-trimmed PCM63P-K does in fact make it to 20-bit linearity, and NPC SM5803 and SM5813 8X oversampling digital filters boasted periodic ripple below ±0.00005 dB and a -110 dB stopband (even though they still limited overs and the digital volume was placed on the output side after the filter).

I wouldn't know what to improve about this one. It's not even bothered by overs. 1992.

Now, the less said about the late-90s to early-2000s fad of putting ASRCs for upsampling into CD players the better. This happened at the exact same time that mastering levels went through the roof and overs became commonplace. D'oh.

 

[VientoB]

Now, the less said about the late-90s to early-2000s fad of putting ASRCs for upsampling into CD players the better. This happened at the exact same time that mastering levels went through the roof and overs became commonplace. D'oh.

What's an ASRC?

 

[jhwalker]

I think it depends on how tightly you define "DAC".

The actual digital-to-analog conversion has been "transparent" for a very long time, as earlier posters have documented. But it's entirely possible for DACs (i.e., an audio device INCLUDING analog output circuitry) to sound "different" as a result of the ANALOG components at the tail end of the process.

 

[Keith_W]

What's an ASRC?

Asynchronous Sample Rate Converter.

Or used pejoratively, ASR C**t, C**k, etc. What the rest of the hi-fi world thinks of us

 

[pablolie]

I am curious how much hearable improvements have truly happened since Red Book.

 

[AnalogSteph]

What's an ASRC?

Asynchronous Sample Rate Converter. Typically used for upsampling with the 96 and 192 kHz capable DACs that became common around the time. Unfortunately the things are known for hard-clipping overs and generating some nasty distortion doing so.

And it is that ugly:

You can probably see now why that's a problem...