On Nov 14, 6:11 pm, "Arny Krueger" wrote:
"DJ" wrote in message
It's supposed to upsample CDs to SACD. Has anyone heard
about this player, and better yet, auditioned or own one?
Reference -
http://www.emmlabs.com/html/audio/cdsa/cdsa.html
The basic premise is ludicrously flawed. No mechanical or electrical
process can accurately recreate music that isn't already present in the
recording.
"MDAT is unlike anything the industry has seen, or heard, before. Here's
why: Rather than address the digital signal as a series of sine waves--as is
standard convention
This just isn't true. Standard convention is to address the digital signal
as a series of samples.
"--the MDAT-equipped CDSA SE processes (and upsamples CD audio to DSD for
conversion to analog) by dynamically adapting to the transient nature of the
musical signal.
In fact the basic nature of musical signals is exactly what they just said
they don't do. Musical signals are composed of a series of sine waves. Every
musical signal can be accurately analyzed and represented as a collection of
sine and cosine waves. CD players don't do that, but FFTs do. The human
ear, being largely composed of a collection of narrow-band filters, can also
be characterized as addressing the musical sound as being composed of a
series of sine waves.
In this way, the CDSA SE is utterly unique and singularly able to
preserve the phase, frequency and
dynamic integrity of the original signal.
In fact the best way to preserve the phase, frequency and dynamic integrity
of the original signal is to treat it as a series of samples, which is what
they already said that their product does not do.
Once you've heard this level of improvement in terms of resolution, nuance
and dynamic shading, there's no going back.
So where's their reliable bias-controlled lisetening test data that supports
this claim?
Doesn't all this assume perfect behavior of a D/A system? The main
reason that oversampling came about is to deal with the limitations or
flaws in the digital filtering process. Things like smearing and phase
issues. By oversampling, you're not re-creating, but rather improving
the phasing and smearing issue. It is well known that part of the
reason that 44.1/16 was "flawed" because the filter digital filter
that needs to be applied should have so steep a curve which tends to
cause unwanted, audibly unpleasant artifacts.
I know that this does not apply to this device because its a DSD based
system, but surely the same philosophy applies, in that digital
circuits are not perfect and over sampling would somehow help to
better re-create the analog signal. The issue is to deliver more
accurately.
With this recently introduced Consonance Linear 120 player, it boasts
no over-sampling and no digital filter. It's well received by several
reviewers. Here's a link to the theory behind the digital filterless
DAC;
http://www.sakurasystems.com/articles/Kusunoki.html
I find this player very fascinating because it goes a whole new way
about extracting digital audio data. My guess is that to go the route
of making a digital filterless DAC, you have to build all the
associated components, the opamps and clocks and ICs to a
fantastically high, and expensive, standard. In other words, to deal
with imperfect components in the DAC chain, they got rid of the
digital filter and made them remaining components to much more
stringent standards. This comes at a price, of course. If there ever
comes a time when gold plated, silver deposited, 1 u meter ICs became
cheap, this technology may find its way to the lower end consumer
audio market like that $50 Walmart CD player.
All these implementations of D to A address the simple fact that
nothing's perfrect. Remember the 1st, basic electronic lessons, where
a resistors are not ideal? They have some capacitance. Capacitors have
resistance, etc. So DACs, made of of these imperfect electronic
components, have imprefections of their own. Yes, electrical engineers
do design their circuits to compensate for the imperfections, but
there's always a compromise. Nothing is ideal.
So, nothing's perfect, but its getting much much better all the time
CD