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Thanks for your gracious reply

I wasn't sure how you were going to react to my post, so thanks for taking it in the spirit that it was intended.

I do agree that subjective impressions are the heart of why we enjoy music - at the end of the day we have to enjoy the music, regardless of theoretical objections. However, subjective impressions can also be misleading - as Ted pointed out, some people seem to *like* jitter, and upsampling filters, PCM "ringing" artefacts, etc..

If the majority of APL owners prefer to listen to SA-CDs converted to PCM, then that is a valid mode of listening. However, it may be a result that is very system specific, and can't be generalised into "therefore DSD converted to PCM is a good thing under ALL circumstances"

Since you like stories, I can offer two short ones.

Once I visited the home of a well known SA-CD basher who used to frequent this forum. This person used to say that SA-CD sounded dull and the high frequencies don't have the crispness of PCM. Well, guess what, I listened to his system and he is right! On *his* system, it is clear that SA-CD high frequencies sounded terrible! However, that is *not* the experience I have listening to SA-CDs on Ted's or mikel's or even my system.

Another short story: at one stage CDs actually sounded better than SA-CDs on my (old) system. It surprised even me, but it was unmistakeable. High frequencies sounded dull and smeary, and lack the punchiness and crispness of DVD-Audio or even CD.

After some experimentation, I discovered the reason. My amp did not handle the ultrasonic noise generated by DSD very well - simply applying a low pass filter made it sound much better. On that basis, I upgraded my amps and now SA-CDs sound just fine.

So I'm not surprised that many APL owners may prefer the sound of DSD converted to PCM. But at the same time, I personally would prefer not converting and solving system specific issues with DSD playback directly.

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