What I want in a DAC

[Doc B.]

I doubt very much that Nojima plays Liszt would have been transferred from a vinyl pressing to a high res file for commercial sale. Our Tape Project album of that title has been made from the original tape recording - which is in very good condition. AFAIK it was recorded simultaneously in 176/24, so there would be little reason to waste time transferring it from an LP.

Your description of the level being set above normal listening levels to hear the effect makes me think you are hearing the tape hiss starting as the tape was rolled (if it was transferred from the analog master) or possibly air conditioning rumble in the noise floor.

[earwaxxer]

Good point Shawn!

That is exactly my sentiment when I think about purchasing a 'new'  'high res' download. If there was all this effort placed in remix/remaster etc, etc, I would think that the studio would also be interested in releasing it in a blu-ray, DVD, CD, box set  etc. for mass distribution. Anyone can, and do (illegally), upload a vinyl high res. 'remaster'. When buying a new remaster I take into account who did the work (ex. Rhino) and what reviewers are saying about it.

[Noskipallwd]

Your description of the level being set above normal listening levels to hear the effect makes me think you are hearing the tape hiss starting as the tape was rolled (if it was transferred from the analog master) or possibly air conditioning rumble in the noise floor.

So many avenues for noise to get into the process, no wonder sound engineers tend to have obsessive personalities. I would love to hear the Tape Project version of Nojima Plays Liszt, it is a favorite of mine. I think you are right about the noise, the sound quality is darn good at 24/96, not as good as my vinyl version but good enough to listen to regularly. Maybe I should quit thinking about it and just listen!

Cheers,
Shawn

[Yoder]

Dang, three high-and-inside fast balls!

Not all masters are multitrack and thus you can't make that generalization.

True, but when talking about high-resolution audio don't you think it is a fair assumption that they are using multi-track studio tape masters?

The term for mixing multitrack session tapes to stereo is mixing, not compressing.

After years of working with Logic, I was taught that the term used to combine several tracks into mono or stereo is "bounce;" it is also a standard term in audio. Likewise, "mixing" was a term used to described the process of shaping the overall sound of the project by adjusting vol levels, panning, messing with the EQ, and using other effects on the project. But, being half brain dead and suffering from tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon at the time of the writing, all I could think of was compression, which actually deals with the "attack" and "release" in audio. So, I used the computer file definition of compression and related it to making a file smaller as in going from a huge multi-track project to a smaller file like an AIFF.

A bad master tape will not have lathe rumble.

Oops, forgot a word--perceived. 'The perceived "rumble" you hear is probably the result of a poor quality master tape.' In other words, I was questioning if the perceived "rumble"  was some other sound on the tape and was being mistaken as "rumble." In any case, I was suggesting that the poor sound was due to the tape.

Personally, I do not see how a company like HDTracks could burn "hi-res" audio off of vinyl and re-sale it as being "remastered." There are some crappy re-masterings out there, but they usually seem to be casualties of the "loudness wars," or as if someone went out for coffee and put the process on auto-pilot and allowed over clipping to take place.

@earwaxer: I got my hybrid two hybrid SACDs the other day. Looks like SACD uses the same licensing scheme as HDMI does. Ergo, SACD audio can only be played through analog outs. As soon as I change the output to my SPDIF or optical the player reverts to CD mode. Then it is in big print in the manual that "SACD can only be used with analog outs." Bad news is that one is reduced to using the DAC in the SACD player, but if one wanted a better DAC then there are always the high-end CD/SACD players available. So, I was unable to see if there is a much difference in down-sampling from 96 to 44. The good news is that I can still burn the Redbook CD to my hard drive.

[Doc B.]

I think that companies that are reissuing stereo releases in high res are most often working from stereo mixes rather than multitracks. Bouncing is that act of mixing two or more tracks together onto an unused track so that the original tracks can be repurposed.

[Jim R.]

Yes, what Doc says -- most of these companies are using stereo masters even though sometimes they use differently mixed masters from the album that is in general circulation  -- there is a thread on the Hi-rez music circle on audio circle that has a list of bad or alternate mixes being used by HD Tracks and others and people being mad about the fact that they don't sound like the same album they were expecting, but in hi-res.

As for SACD,it's not so much the licensing scheme as it is the underlying technology.  SACD is DSD encoding (Direct Streaming Digital), not PCM so there is only a streaming rate spec, not a bit-depth (as it is all one-bit depth)  This is in contrast to what Ryan Mintz of Core Audio seeems to be implying in his article in ETM that was mentioned earlier, and in fact, one-bit digital is here and has been here for a while and is obviously within reach of many.  Furthermore you can almost always bet that if you see a file on HDTracks that only comes in 24/88.2  PCM format, it was made from an SACD/DSD master as that is the PCM limit for commercial SACD recordings.

As a side note, Pure Music can natively play DSD files if the dac it is feeding has a DSD chip, but it can also take dDSD files and convert them on-the-fly to PCM format and play them on your normal PCM dac.

From my subjective perspective, I have a 2-layer SACD of Jorma Kaukonen and friends' "Blue Country Heart" and I'd far rather listen to the redbook layer through a good PCM dac than the sacd layer -- just sounds more like real music to me.

Several people have conducted a/b/c tests with vinyl, redbook and SACD, and most people preferred them in that order with SACD a fairly distant third.

BTW, there are ways to rip the DSD layer of an SACD to  PCM, but it does take some special software and a special disc drive, but not having done it myself, and only owning a very small handful of SACDs, I don't plan to to this myself -- especially when PM can do it for me.

-- Jim

[Yoder]

From my subjective perspective, I have a 2-layer SACD of Jorma Kaukonen and friends' "Blue Country Heart" and I'd far rather listen to the redbook layer through a good PCM dac than the sacd layer -- just sounds more like real music to me.

That is a good CD, though I think "Quah" is his all time classic and is on my top ten list.

I burned the CD version of "Cahoots" onto my hd and played it through Amarra and, like you, preferred the CD version over the SACD. Think I will stick to CDs, and hi-res downloads.

[Jim R.]

Yeah, Jorma is one of my all-time fave guitarists.  I was scheduled to go to his guitar camp in the summer of 2000  if I'm remembering correctly), but that was the summer a bonehead doc damaged my transplanted kidney and the rest of that summer was a total waste.

Of course most any good guitarist in the style of Rev. Gary Davis is just somebody I have to listen to.

-- Jim

[Yoder]

I to have checked out his guitar camp but it is an expensive weekend, not to mention a drive through the mid-west.

I own a couple of Rev Gary Davis CDs, and have a song book with most of his notable songs in it. Just traded my thick bodied Gibson AJ, for a sweet thin bodied Martin 000-28EC. The Gibson really aggravated my shoulder so I played it very little, the Martin is a beauty and I have played it more in the last two months than I did the Gibson in 12 years.

Finally got all of my CDs re-burnt, and am now reorganizing the hd library. Somebody in the household dinked with my computer and I noticed that the jazz library was in m4a (sorry Doc.) Plus I have acquired about a 50 CDs since the last burn, and a lot of hi-res audio. Everything is now in AIFF. Once the Eros arrives and is built, then I have to rip about 300 LPs, hence any possible SACD conversion is a very low priority. I actually sold my Duet I (24/96) for the price I paid so that I can get an ADC that will rip at 24/192.

Anyway, what I want in a DAC?

ADC capabilities?

[earwaxxer]

like SACD uses the same licensing scheme as HDMI does. Ergo, SACD audio can only be played through analog outs. As soon as I change the output to my SPDIF or optical the player reverts to CD mode. Then it is in big print in the manual that "SACD can only be used with analog outs." Bad news is that one is reduced to using the DAC in the SACD player, but if one wanted a better DAC then there are always the high-end CD/SACD players available. So, I was unable to see if there is a much difference in down-sampling from 96 to 44. The good news is that I can still burn the Redbook CD to my hard drive.

Hey Yoder - Yep - a shame it is! Now you have outfits like HD tracks that rip SACD's and sell them as a high res. 'remaster'. Its BS. High res will stand on its own if its worth it. Audiophiles are picky bunch. We can find the chink in anyone's armor.

[Jim R.]

Eric,

Why is a 24/88.2 hi-res download made from a DSD master BS?  It's not a rip-off, it is hi-res -- meaning something more than16/48, and in the case of my Ry Cooder and V. M. Bhat's "A meeting by the River", the 24/88.2 HD Tracks download in PCM is better than both my own high quality CD rip and the SACD played on a SACD player.

No, it won't sound as good as a 24/96 or 24/192 pcm made fromoriginal analog masters (I assume), because as far as I know, no such release exists.  But again, so much is in the hands of the remastering bguys and what they are given for masters that it's pretty much impossible to predict exactly what you'll get -- and that goes all the way back to the original performance/recording.

-- Jim

[Yoder]

I think earwaxer is going on the assumption that some companies may be grabbing Redbook CDs and up-sampling them and then selling them as hi-res, based on earlier comments about the alleged burning of hi-res from vinyl. One LP/CD/SACD company that I am really impressed with is MoFi, their stuff is of the highest quality and they use the original recording masters. I have downloaded some quality hi-res files from the Web, while at the same time have purchased some "remastered" CDs that were absolute junk--a John Lee Hooker CD comes to mind.

[Jim R.]

Of course things like that have happened and it sucks, but it is a tiny, tiny minority, and generally somebody figures it out and calls the offender on it.  As I pointed out earlier, there are threads on several of the audio forums that both review new hi-res releases and in a few cases folks like HDTracks have been called on their cheating and have either redone their ddescriptions to be more truthful and some have even been pulled from their catalog.

However, hasn't this always been the case with any medium?  Even some of today's "audiophile" vinyl is poorly done and the sound quality severely lacking.  Again though, hasn't this always been the case with whatever -- R2R/cassette/8 track, vinyl, and certainly CDs?  Anybody remember K-tel? :-)

I think like any purchasing decision, caveat emptor should be the rule -- and these days a quick google search will typically turn up any number of professional and user reviews on new and re-releases from which we should be able to get some idea of whether what is being delivered is what is being advertised.

-- Jim

[Noskipallwd]

Jim makes some good points, I've done a little research and while I was not wrong about some of the early files I downloaded, these files were either removed from their respective sites or replaced. I think that some of the problems early on can be due to the fact that the technology to play hi-res was widely available and relatively cheap, while there was little or no media available. There was a scramble to meet the demand and this lent itself to some crap making it to market. K-Tel, you know Jim I have a couple of boxes of 8-Tracks that were my folks, some of which are K-Tel.

Cheers,
Shawn

[jdm]

K-Tel is still alive.  Their HQ is two doors away from my old work location. 

jdm