[Arny Krueger[_4_]]

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:07:13 -0800, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"Chuck Finley" wrote in message
...
I bought an Escient music server several years ago when hard drive space
was
still relatively expensive. Most of my music on there is encoded at 320
and
192.

Shouldn't be a problem.

Reviews of DACs typically discuss how they can improve the sound of CD
quality or hi-rez music,

Generally, false claims. Audiophile myths. Dreams, not actualities.
Blatantly false sales pitches. The results of sighted evaluations.

Not exactly true. While I agree that most DACs that are constructed using
IC
converters sound so much alike that the differences (if any) are trivial,
high-end DACs using discrete, proprietary circuitry not only can sound
better
than the mass-produced IC chip-based DACs, but they sound significantly
different from one another.

How can these significant differences arise? We already know that the better
chip DACs are highly sonically transparent, which is to say that you can
pass audio through them many times without causing any reliably-detectible
audible difference. If we hypothesize the existance of some more sonically
accurate component, then the audible differences that it creates must be
even smaller and even less audible.

These differences manifest themselves mostly as
differences in top-end musicality and sound-staging. The better the DAC,
the
more real the top-end sounds, strings, even percussion such as high-hats,
take on a sheen and a realism that one generally only hears live. This is
hardly subtle, and in a DBT is jaw-droppingly and statistically apparent.

How can there be more realism than there is in a signal that
indistinguishable from the origional signal?

but I'm wondering what effect they would have on compressed music.

No less false.

What is no less false?

I'm talking about the audiophile myth that ADC quality can be improved
beyond that which we already achieve with reasonably-priced chips that are
demonstrably sonically transparent, even when cascaded over more than a
dozen repeated conversions.

He's asking if a stand-alone DAC will help MP3 files
sound better. The answer, of course, is no. Any compression artifacts
audible
before up-converting or playing through a mega-buck DAC, will be there
after,
as well. The damage is done, there is no "fixing" it after the fact.

On that we can agree.

Would some kind of up-sampling device have to be added to the DAC for
this?

Up sampling, other than that which happens implicitly in modern DACs in
order to facilitate digital filtering, is yet another audiophile myth.

This seems to be a common reaction of people who have limited experience
in
this area.

The idea that upsampling could possibly make a improvement is a mystical
belief that sufficient education in how digital audio works can easily
dispel.

That's what information theory says, and that is what suitable experiments
and listening tests can demonstrate.

Once you sample a signal, upsampling can add no more information or relevant
detail. It only spreads the same information across more samples.