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<!-- #thumb --> <p><b>Chinese Fortune Cookie</b> (<i>Chinese, because I’m unaware of any other kind</i>):</p>
<p><b>Question:</b> What is the hardest thing to do?</p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> To think.</p>
<p><b>Merriam-Webster:</b> <i>Soliloquy</i> – an act of talking to oneself; a dramatic monologue that represents a series of unspoken reflections.</p>
<p>So I began talking to myself in a dramatic monologue in a series of unspoken reflections going back to observations I believe in – not because they are arguable, but because they happen to be so. Most of these I had experienced during unfortunate unintended thinking moments…but lately these moments creep up on me frequently. This<i> enlightenment</i> mostly happens when I drop in at my favorite sushi restaurants where I had, in fact, discovered philosophy: <i>“I eat sushi therefore I am.”</i> Sushi, you see, can make you a better person, a better lover, and even a better listener. I discovered too, that…</p>
<p>No matter how a component measures, our ears continue to be the final arbiters.</p>
<p>No matter how much technical genius one possesses, no matter what one asserts to be so, it may just not be so…and the ears still remain the final arbiters.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.pstracks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Stack.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-12584" alt="Stack SOLILOQUY" src="http://www.pstracks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Stack.jpg" width="379" height="294" title="SOLILOQUY" /></a></p>
<p>PHOTO: Michael Lavorgna/Jason Victor – getting Serinus about digital?</p>
<p>I had discovered these principles as they apply to life in general when I quit school and found a little success flying by the seat of my pants, a result of the facts I had uncovered myself: one of which is that I quit school because I was no longer interested in taking tests. I had never understood the mentality or those giving tests to others from textbooks no intelligent man would give a flying $%^& about, the answers to which they themselves don’t really comprehend – but only manage to parrot like the proverbial idiot savant just because they like to hear themselves bloviate. Accordingly, the significant answers come not from those giving the tests, but from those who refuse to take them.</p>
<p>With respect to the latest technologies coming down the pike concerning changing DSD and PCM solutions, or what one might hear from DSD v. PCM, I took the words of one of the discoverers who had focused on the issue, Andreas Koch, these from Michael Lavorgna’s site with respect to the now-universally-adopted <i>DoP</i> protocol that is shortly to be incorporated into some of the latest converters alleged to be able to process the conversion of PCM to DSD data – meaning we hope it will, but then I’m not technically up to unpacking their thoughts. However his words are important to help us understand earlier conversations at these PS threads about what is happening in the field and what we may be hearing:</p>
<p><i>“</i><i>Most DSD DAC chips, if not all, lowpass filter the DSD signal to get rid of the high frequency noise (see Fig.2) before the signal gets converted to analog. The resulting signal behind this lowpass filter (and before the actual analog conversion) may still have the same sample rate as the original DSD signal, but it is no longer 1 bit. So can this still be considered DSD? </i></p>
<p><i>It is all a matter of definition: DSD, or Delta-Sigma Modulation, can be encoded with more than just 1 bit, and PCM can have a very high sample rate. When looking at the criteria of word length and sample rates only, the boundary between DSD and PCM can become fuzzy. Sometimes it is more useful to distinguish DSD from PCM in the frequency domain and look for the characteristic behavior in the higher frequency bands…</i></p>
<p><i>Since I believe that the source of the sonic difference between DSD and PCM lies in the difference between how these signals compare in their behavior for higher frequencies, I also believe that filtering a DSD signal with an aggressive filter to flatten the upper frequencies will make it behave and sound more again like a PCM signal. </i></p>
<p><i>The reason why chip manufacturers like to add an aggressive lowpass filter at the input to their DACs is simple: the analog output measures better. <b>Whether it sounds better with real music signals instead of measurement tones is an entirely different question</b></i><b>.</b> <i>Similarly, most audio manufacturers and even end users who do not understand DSD are mostly concerned with Signal-to-Noise performance even at high frequencies and would not choose a chip with a frequency response that is not completely flat and optimally low all the way up to Nyquist. </i></p>
<p><i>With that, the answer is yes<b>, most if not all DSD DAC chips convert to PCM before converting to analog.</b> </i></p>
<p><i>That opens the door for discretely built DACs that don’t have to follow the criteria of measurements with sine waves, but rather the listening experience with real music signals.” </i>(Emphases by AGB<i>)</i></p>
<p>DSD, even more than PCM, produces high frequency noise (above the normal hearing range) that can affect equipment down the chain, even causing oscillation in amplifiers – and there’s the need for sharp filtering. More in detail about this matter in John Darko’s review of the NuWave phono converter I received today:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2013/11/ps-audio-nuwave-phono-converter-part-1-no-pre-amplifier/">http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2013/11/ps-audio-nuwave-phono-converter-part-1-no-pre-amplifier/</a></p>
<p>The chief of <b>DIGITAL AUDIO REVIEW</b> has this to say:</p>
<p><i>“The question barked loud: was the NPC’s digitised take on an LP indistinguishable from the original?</i></p>
<p><i>I ran a real-time digital vs. vinyl stand-off using Vinnie Rossi’s Red Wine Audio Signature 57: the analogue output of the PS Audio NPC fed into one input of the integrated, the analogue output of the INVICTA Mirus into another. The Mirus was carrying a 24bit/96kHz real-time encode of vinyl playback that showed no time lag.</i></p>
<p><i>If there were sonic differences, I couldn’t pick ‘em.”</i></p>
<p>What we have just read are the words of the competent and successful engineer-inventor Andreas and the digital technology reviewer telling the world in technical <i>and </i>practical terms that your ears are the final arbiters, and that the industry had successfully advanced digital technology to levels unimaginable just a few years ago over analog and earlier digital systems (<i>24/384kHz PCM and 6.1MHz DSD through USB off of either a PC or MAC provides 32 times the resolution of playback with 192kHz high resolution files</i>), this reality has frog-leaped us into the future. And the fact that one cannot, in practical terms, surpass 96/24 with analog technology.</p>
<p>It matters not how many meaningless technical terms and ideas one can rattle off from a textbook. What matters is what one can DO with one’s ideas and what one can hear with one’s ears. It appears that Paul’s ears are intact, all three of them. Moreover: All ideas do not have the same weight. Most questions are meaningless. All solutions are not equally productive. All assertions do not carry the same weight. All ears cannot hear well. There are…indeed…Golden Ears. And tin ones. The tin ones tend to rattle off numbers and textbook excerptions. Finally…</p>
<p>What matters are the people who CAN and DO. And those who have done, will continue to DO and they will advance the science of sound reproduction simply because they understand it better. And those who have not, will not. They will rather continue the same circular shuffling of feet, possibly for decades. Two left feet dancing poorly, one stepping on the other. That can represent, among others, your older technologies, LP and CD. Or thinking, or being. Spinning in circles.</p>
<p>One cannot “trick” the ears they say. Or perhaps one can?</p>
<p>I say this: digital CAN. It can DO.</p>
<p>The digital world is not only upon us, but with the slow but surely to arrive wholesale release of the SONY catalogues in DSD (and others forthcoming) – it is WHOLLY upon us audiophiles; it is hitting us in the head with a hammer! Mark my words: for the high fi world the ground has just shifted.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s time for another soliloquy?</p>
<p>Andrew G. Benjamin</p>
<p>© All Rights Reserved</p>
<center><a href="http://www.pstracks.com/opinions/soliloquy/12583/emailpopup/" onclick="email_popup(this.href); return false;" title="Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers" rel="nofollow"><img class="WP-EmailIcon" src="http://www.pstracks.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-email/images/email.gif" alt="email SOLILOQUY" title="SOLILOQUY" /></a>*<a href="http://www.pstracks.com/opinions/soliloquy/12583/emailpopup/" onclick="email_popup(this.href); return false;" title="Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers" rel="nofollow">Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers</a></center><br /><!-- // MAILCHIMP SUBSCRIBE CODE --><center><a href="http://eepurl.com/eSzBY">Get new and fresh stories like this each morning by joining the folks reading Paul's Posts. Click here </a></center>
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[Source: http://www.pstracks.com/opinions/soliloquy/12583/]
<p><b>Question:</b> What is the hardest thing to do?</p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> To think.</p>
<p><b>Merriam-Webster:</b> <i>Soliloquy</i> – an act of talking to oneself; a dramatic monologue that represents a series of unspoken reflections.</p>
<p>So I began talking to myself in a dramatic monologue in a series of unspoken reflections going back to observations I believe in – not because they are arguable, but because they happen to be so. Most of these I had experienced during unfortunate unintended thinking moments…but lately these moments creep up on me frequently. This<i> enlightenment</i> mostly happens when I drop in at my favorite sushi restaurants where I had, in fact, discovered philosophy: <i>“I eat sushi therefore I am.”</i> Sushi, you see, can make you a better person, a better lover, and even a better listener. I discovered too, that…</p>
<p>No matter how a component measures, our ears continue to be the final arbiters.</p>
<p>No matter how much technical genius one possesses, no matter what one asserts to be so, it may just not be so…and the ears still remain the final arbiters.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.pstracks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Stack.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-12584" alt="Stack SOLILOQUY" src="http://www.pstracks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Stack.jpg" width="379" height="294" title="SOLILOQUY" /></a></p>
<p>PHOTO: Michael Lavorgna/Jason Victor – getting Serinus about digital?</p>
<p>I had discovered these principles as they apply to life in general when I quit school and found a little success flying by the seat of my pants, a result of the facts I had uncovered myself: one of which is that I quit school because I was no longer interested in taking tests. I had never understood the mentality or those giving tests to others from textbooks no intelligent man would give a flying $%^& about, the answers to which they themselves don’t really comprehend – but only manage to parrot like the proverbial idiot savant just because they like to hear themselves bloviate. Accordingly, the significant answers come not from those giving the tests, but from those who refuse to take them.</p>
<p>With respect to the latest technologies coming down the pike concerning changing DSD and PCM solutions, or what one might hear from DSD v. PCM, I took the words of one of the discoverers who had focused on the issue, Andreas Koch, these from Michael Lavorgna’s site with respect to the now-universally-adopted <i>DoP</i> protocol that is shortly to be incorporated into some of the latest converters alleged to be able to process the conversion of PCM to DSD data – meaning we hope it will, but then I’m not technically up to unpacking their thoughts. However his words are important to help us understand earlier conversations at these PS threads about what is happening in the field and what we may be hearing:</p>
<p><i>“</i><i>Most DSD DAC chips, if not all, lowpass filter the DSD signal to get rid of the high frequency noise (see Fig.2) before the signal gets converted to analog. The resulting signal behind this lowpass filter (and before the actual analog conversion) may still have the same sample rate as the original DSD signal, but it is no longer 1 bit. So can this still be considered DSD? </i></p>
<p><i>It is all a matter of definition: DSD, or Delta-Sigma Modulation, can be encoded with more than just 1 bit, and PCM can have a very high sample rate. When looking at the criteria of word length and sample rates only, the boundary between DSD and PCM can become fuzzy. Sometimes it is more useful to distinguish DSD from PCM in the frequency domain and look for the characteristic behavior in the higher frequency bands…</i></p>
<p><i>Since I believe that the source of the sonic difference between DSD and PCM lies in the difference between how these signals compare in their behavior for higher frequencies, I also believe that filtering a DSD signal with an aggressive filter to flatten the upper frequencies will make it behave and sound more again like a PCM signal. </i></p>
<p><i>The reason why chip manufacturers like to add an aggressive lowpass filter at the input to their DACs is simple: the analog output measures better. <b>Whether it sounds better with real music signals instead of measurement tones is an entirely different question</b></i><b>.</b> <i>Similarly, most audio manufacturers and even end users who do not understand DSD are mostly concerned with Signal-to-Noise performance even at high frequencies and would not choose a chip with a frequency response that is not completely flat and optimally low all the way up to Nyquist. </i></p>
<p><i>With that, the answer is yes<b>, most if not all DSD DAC chips convert to PCM before converting to analog.</b> </i></p>
<p><i>That opens the door for discretely built DACs that don’t have to follow the criteria of measurements with sine waves, but rather the listening experience with real music signals.” </i>(Emphases by AGB<i>)</i></p>
<p>DSD, even more than PCM, produces high frequency noise (above the normal hearing range) that can affect equipment down the chain, even causing oscillation in amplifiers – and there’s the need for sharp filtering. More in detail about this matter in John Darko’s review of the NuWave phono converter I received today:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2013/11/ps-audio-nuwave-phono-converter-part-1-no-pre-amplifier/">http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2013/11/ps-audio-nuwave-phono-converter-part-1-no-pre-amplifier/</a></p>
<p>The chief of <b>DIGITAL AUDIO REVIEW</b> has this to say:</p>
<p><i>“The question barked loud: was the NPC’s digitised take on an LP indistinguishable from the original?</i></p>
<p><i>I ran a real-time digital vs. vinyl stand-off using Vinnie Rossi’s Red Wine Audio Signature 57: the analogue output of the PS Audio NPC fed into one input of the integrated, the analogue output of the INVICTA Mirus into another. The Mirus was carrying a 24bit/96kHz real-time encode of vinyl playback that showed no time lag.</i></p>
<p><i>If there were sonic differences, I couldn’t pick ‘em.”</i></p>
<p>What we have just read are the words of the competent and successful engineer-inventor Andreas and the digital technology reviewer telling the world in technical <i>and </i>practical terms that your ears are the final arbiters, and that the industry had successfully advanced digital technology to levels unimaginable just a few years ago over analog and earlier digital systems (<i>24/384kHz PCM and 6.1MHz DSD through USB off of either a PC or MAC provides 32 times the resolution of playback with 192kHz high resolution files</i>), this reality has frog-leaped us into the future. And the fact that one cannot, in practical terms, surpass 96/24 with analog technology.</p>
<p>It matters not how many meaningless technical terms and ideas one can rattle off from a textbook. What matters is what one can DO with one’s ideas and what one can hear with one’s ears. It appears that Paul’s ears are intact, all three of them. Moreover: All ideas do not have the same weight. Most questions are meaningless. All solutions are not equally productive. All assertions do not carry the same weight. All ears cannot hear well. There are…indeed…Golden Ears. And tin ones. The tin ones tend to rattle off numbers and textbook excerptions. Finally…</p>
<p>What matters are the people who CAN and DO. And those who have done, will continue to DO and they will advance the science of sound reproduction simply because they understand it better. And those who have not, will not. They will rather continue the same circular shuffling of feet, possibly for decades. Two left feet dancing poorly, one stepping on the other. That can represent, among others, your older technologies, LP and CD. Or thinking, or being. Spinning in circles.</p>
<p>One cannot “trick” the ears they say. Or perhaps one can?</p>
<p>I say this: digital CAN. It can DO.</p>
<p>The digital world is not only upon us, but with the slow but surely to arrive wholesale release of the SONY catalogues in DSD (and others forthcoming) – it is WHOLLY upon us audiophiles; it is hitting us in the head with a hammer! Mark my words: for the high fi world the ground has just shifted.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s time for another soliloquy?</p>
<p>Andrew G. Benjamin</p>
<p>© All Rights Reserved</p>
<center><a href="http://www.pstracks.com/opinions/soliloquy/12583/emailpopup/" onclick="email_popup(this.href); return false;" title="Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers" rel="nofollow"><img class="WP-EmailIcon" src="http://www.pstracks.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-email/images/email.gif" alt="email SOLILOQUY" title="SOLILOQUY" /></a>*<a href="http://www.pstracks.com/opinions/soliloquy/12583/emailpopup/" onclick="email_popup(this.href); return false;" title="Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers" rel="nofollow">Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers</a></center><br /><!-- // MAILCHIMP SUBSCRIBE CODE --><center><a href="http://eepurl.com/eSzBY">Get new and fresh stories like this each morning by joining the folks reading Paul's Posts. Click here </a></center>
<!-- MAILCHIMP SUBSCRIBE CODE // -->
[Source: http://www.pstracks.com/opinions/soliloquy/12583/]