DSD and hi-res music in general

Hello and welcome to a question beamed-in from 2010 - but at least I remembered why I came here - DSD and other supposed hi-res formats - WTF? I mean does anyone pursue these formats to any extent? Do they offer any kind of worthwhile improvement over 16/44.1 CD quality files? Even after a fair few years of availability there seems to be nothing much out there beyond third rate classical, jazz and hifi-show grade MOR acoustic waffle.

I finally pulled my finger out and got Foobar up to date to feed my DAC with a dozen or so assorted free DSD samples, and have actually been pretty impressed - pretty smooth, and the dynamic range thing certainly holds true when appropriately mastered (albeit at risk of trashing your drive units if careless with the volume control).

But does this stuff have any real future? I thought I’d ask “The Forum That Hates Hifi” first, for shits’n’giggles… :wink:

Personally think they are all the Emperor’s New Clothes.

There’s a load of obsessives on the Roon forums who are all mad on DSD, MQA, upsampling and all that shit. They also think Entreq is a thing. Draw your all conclusions.

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Mastering > File format. End of.

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Yeah, I cheerfully ignored them for years simply cos lack of worthwhile content, and wish I hadn’t tried them as they can clearly be very good, but just as with any other format it’s down to mastering and production, which is where almost every musical genre that isn’t Jap/Germanic in origin is where it all goes horribly wrong…

[and to save errrryone telling me vinyl is better - I’m already pretty heavly invested in, and happy with, it, as well.]

What, even if the format is 5 bit 10kHz?

Shut it mono-horn!

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harsh but fair

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At the risk of feeding the troll… (Actually I had to correct the swypo from “tool”, maybe I should have left it)

I don’t think I’ve heard any high res stuff that proves to me, conclusively, that it’s better than 16/44.1.

You mention dynamic range, but we have 96dB of dynamic range with 16 bits; that’s half as much again as is ever likely to be needed. If you’re room is dead quiet, 30dB, are you really going to play louder than 94dB? That’s loud. Similarly with frequency response, I can’t hear above about 15kHz, what’s the point of having a source that goes up to 96kHz?

It is now possible to test this: JRiver has the facility to reduce the fidelity, such as downsample on the fly. I imagine you can get a plugin for foobar that does this. Or you could resample it offline and do your own test. Every time I write a post like this I tell myself that I should do it, although there’s no chance of that whatsoever.

My ultimate test is that I’ve heard CD quality sound simply astonishing. The fidelity that I have in my system now is quite breathtaking, and it doesn’t matter whether I play CD or hi-res. What does matter is that it is a great recording.

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How’dya mean?

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I have nothing to offer this thread.

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I once heard a studio Technics 24 bit digital reel to reel and that was betterer than any other digital I have ever heard, you need to get one and the master tapes.

The true audiophile: “listen to the amazing fidelity on all three of these small scale jazz recordings I own”

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:scream:

It’s all just hype, believe me.

A week or two ago I was approached by a Nigerian Software Engineer who offered to write a firmware upgrade for me, that would enable my Micromega MyDac to support DSD, 48/384 and Dolby ATMOS and he only charged me ÂŁ 50.

He even downloaded the upgrade “Over The Air”, so that I didn’t have to wait in for the postman.

To cut a long story short, I put a CD in my CD Player as usual, pressed Play and there was NO difference. I couldn’t hear any difference whatsoever !

So, you have been warned. I was lucky; it only cost me ÂŁ 50 to find out that these Hi-Res formats are just marketing hype. You might not be so fortunate.

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Would you like to buy shares in London Bridge? I can also offer guaranteed riches via partial ownership of the biggest experienced forum on the WWW.

Already got some of the Bridge. Not interested in the WWW thing though; I’m a businessman, not a charity. FS.

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Ah, there’s lovely: some things never change - political lies, the squalid horror and bleak hopelessness of the human condition, that itchy, blistery rash you got from Polly Pantsdown in 1972, and most especially you horrible, cynical, faithless cunch of bunts :+1: :sparkling_heart::two_hearts::cupid:

Being a cynical bittervet requires the utmost dedication.

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Yes, that’s what I mean - it’s easy to give that stuff decent fidelity - it’d sound (technically) good on Bose FFS.

Trouble is, those few recordings actually made with and edited for hi-res sound really bloody good… It all goes tits-up as soon as the sucker-market starts re-issuing stuff upsampled from shitty old recordings/digital renders… UGH! Too confuzz…

What’s worse is that during some of the discussions over MQA, for example, it has been found that a significant proportion (over 50% in a small sample) of the catalogue comes from a different master than the 16/44 it is being compared to.

In some ways this is good, because it gives us all exposure to another master and choice is great. In other ways, it’s shocking that sound quality differences (improvements?) attributed to MQA and being touted by the proponents of another proprietary, niche technology are nothing of the sort.

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