DSJR
Major Contributor
This was the track of the moment when I heard the M-Scaler in and bypassed.
Being called "best DAC" at an audio show is sort of like being called best dressed at the local hoedown. Nothing says I am full of crap like claiming you can extract the sound of only a DAC from unfamiliar speakers, with unfamiliar amplification in an unfamiliar and awful room. Audio reviewers claim that all the time. It's meaningless.
You will excuse me if I doubt the engineering chops of anyone who would post those two paragraphs or who spends more on a DAC then their car.
Fine fine. Noted.You shouldn't talk here in their speak. They should not even be quoted or mentioned here.
You will be punished immediately
edit: as usual mansr beat me to it.
I spend money on full custom designs, with fantastic build quality and western manufactured, that perform extremely well (prob still the best measuring DAC on the APx555 out there), because you know why? I like it.
This was the track of the moment when I heard the M-Scaler in and bypassed.
No one is questioning the quality of Chord DACs. However I do question an engineer bringing up "best in show" on an engineering oriented forum given the meaningless of the accolade. Most of what you have written has been pretty much marketing speak. You have yet to justify from an engineering standpoint how this is "audible". Parroting the company/designer does not make for a justification.
But in the end of the day, the M-Scaler is the closest implementation of Whittaker–Shannon interpolation there is, a perfect audio-band brick wall filter.
There is nothing marketing about the on-paper performance of increasingly complex digital filters.
As for the psychoacoustic component of it, I am not in a position to comment further. I've already talked about my own experience with both Mscaler and HQPlayer, maybe other proper ABx testing results can be posted here by others, but there are none so far. But by continually arguing about this is like arguing with someone why I bought a DAC which measures better than 115dB SINAD, which is already apparently pushing it to the absolute limit from a psychoacoustic perspective and ABx testing is not going to show a difference, or trying to get a justification from a DAC designer as to why they bothered with such performance.
That would be a first...in the world.
The problem here is that I have no idea what is meant by 'time smear'.
Then Robert W will say something like, you've now compromised the transients to achieve better stop-band rejection.
Then (as per one of his slides) a piano may sound like a trumpet...
That image LOL
Of course, >44.1kHz native format in the context of NOS (no filtering) would be much better, and the higher the better.
So then any filter with a massive number of taps (like MScaler or HQPlayer) would end up with a correspondingly huge amount of “time smear”. MQA (and “NOS” DACs) go in the opposite direction and use extremely short filters with very few taps (or none) and end up leaking loads of ultrasonic junk. It’s certainly better to err on the side of having more taps, but when designing the filter you just need to decide what levels of passband ripple and stopband rejection you want and then provide the corresponding number of taps.It's the response to a Dirac impulse. Dirac in - how wide is what comes out. MQA tries to keep it under 20us. I have even heard them claim to be able with modern recording techniques (beats me how even though I know how MQA in principle works) keep it under 3us. Trouble is they, of course, never occur in practice. Shannon's sampling theorem guarantees perfect reconstruction with a sinc filter with a lot of ripples when fed a Dirac impulse. This is Rob Watts view. But then, time smear is a non-issue. One could call the whole thing BS. Except I think Rob means less than perfect sinc filters colour the signal in ways measurements show is very low. But he believes it is still audible. Rob holds funny views like that. Are they true? Well, I do like the M-Scaler, but that may not be the reason why - it may simply be lower jitter or something else.
Thanks
Bill
In most cases, the THD+N is maximized not at the maximum input sample rate at all but at lower sample rates.
It sounds like you're talking about IMD. A filter with poor stopband rejection will leak aliased images that can then intermodulate with the signal and produce products in the audible range. But I'd have thought the 19/20k CCIF IMD test would show this up very well.This is true for many DAC chips (per their datasheets) however if you ask @Miska (developer of HQPlayer) THD+N is not everything and going to highest sample rates improves other measurements, even if one (THD+N) drops a little bit.
Presence of digital images on the DACs analogue output is one.
There was some analysis done on this forum that did a test on how digital images affects distortion inside the audible band
Yep, would be great if @Miska could show 19/20k CCIF IMD measurement with RME ADI-2.It sounds like you're talking about IMD. A filter with poor stopband rejection will leak aliased images that can then intermodulate with the signal and produce products in the audible range. But I'd have thought the 19/20k CCIF IMD test would show this up very well.
In a carefully-designed box made of commercial self-interest, I suspect.Rob holds funny views like that.