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In Reply to: Re: well, think about it ... posted by Frank. on April 27, 2004 at 14:32:31:
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Follow Ups:
Christine,What Frank is reporting, ie amplifying the quiet section by 40dB could be a very long shot for a lot of software and converters. I wonder about some kind of post processing needed (eg whether any electrical artifacts or DC offset appear in the process). I would also check for the results at various bit rates.
But still, it's an interesting experiment, especially if you can compare it with an equivalent PCM version of the same material.
I plan to try the same thing to see if I get the same results, hopefully I can find a quiet section in one of my titles (don't feel like buying a Mahler title just to do a test :)Best
Eric
to keep the ad converters noise and non linearity out of the equasion as much as possible.
So what did you do exactly? You set your player to play a specific section, amplify it by 40dB (or just below clipping) and record the output from your receiver or preamp into your soundcad?Are you not recording / measuring distortion from the receiver if you do that?
Yes, you are including all the analog noise and distortion too if you capture from the player.With the Lynx you should be able to capture low sound levels with a good microphone and get raw pcm audio directly.
I used a 24/96 external usb interface M-Audio I had on loan.
I'm thinking of buying a Motu 896HD.
When I do I will put together a DVD Audio sampler with various tracks as example for various technologies. (SBM HDCD DVDA CD sacd)I also found a way to demonstrate the effect of dither.
I downrezzed a PCM recording with a bit crusher plugin to the point where bit resolution is 4 bits. By mixing in white noise through another channel before it is bitcrushed you can easily demonstrate the effect of adding dither noise.
Hey Frank,No wonder you've been so quiet :)
If you publish your tests, you should post it on this board...
With the Lynx, I was thinking of capturing through balanced inputs directly from my preamp, why would a microphone be better? (don't have mic preamps, either).
About the Motu 896HD: it looks cool, with so many inputs, I guess you can do multichannel recording and all kinds of cool stuff... but I heard their technical service is not always reliable so be careful where you buy it.
BTW, did you double-check your USB IRQs? I had some problems with that issue, and it clearly affected CE Pro (Adobe Audition) recording and playing at high resolution rates. I found that reserving one IRQ to the recording device helps a lot.
Best
Eric
You can use a microphone to capture low level sounds to test the low level sound quality of your dac. You can record familiar sounds to check if it sounds natural if you record with low gain setting.If you capture the output of a sacd or DVD Audio player you need a device with sufficient gain.
I didn't experienced problems with the usb(2) device.
do you mean: taking a well recorded SACD and recording onto 96/24 PCM (thus negating any benefit of DSD in the process), complain about the ambience and use it as evidence of DSD's "shortcomings", then compare it with a studio PCM recording as evidence of PCM superiority, then complain about the ambience being "noisy and grainy"?no thanks :-) it's already been done once, and that's enough.
Hold your horses, Milady...I think the experiment is interesting, especially if it's conducted with several digital recording devices. Of course the experiment is not scientific, but I have no pre-conception at all about DSD and will not draw any cheap conclusion from the experiment.
In fact, the experiment will tell very little about DSD, only about PCM. Since we don't know what happens with equivalent PCM data, the fact that it's DSD is irrelevant, and in fact, all the experiment says so far is that 24/96 PCM sounds "grainy" when amplified by 40dB on specific hardware :)
It could very well be that someone else, with different equipment and settings, would not find the result to be "grainy", or that the equivalent PCM material will also sound "grainy". Or it may be that with specific equipment and settings neither DSD nor PCM data captured at 24/96 sounds grainy.
What's the point? Well, from a practical point of view, since PCM is the only option available to me for recording analog data in high resolution, I find it interesting, because it may impact the way I record my SACDs at 24/96.
My first (very unscientific :) attempts at recording SACDs at 24/96 yielded similar results, I thought the sound was better at 24/48... but I also noticed that I had better results when recording a mono signal (less data to process) so the problem was on the processing side. So I upgraded my Motherboard to benefit from a faster bus, bought new hard disks, and changed the IRQ settings to avoid any conflict with my soundcard, and the results have greatly improved. But I didn't go as far as Frank, amplifying some sections by 40dB to check the sound...
I'll try that over the weekend, hopefully it will rain :)
Best
Eric
Frank has an ax to grind and can always be counted on to find problems with SACD. He is like some of our Supreme Court justices in the U.S., before the case is presented, everyone already knows what their ruling will be. It is always more interesting to hear tests from someone who is objective.
You are a bad judge of character.And already down to the point where you need to snipe at a person instead of contributing to a discussion.
There are no DSD benefits...If you do this with 24bit 192kHz the only thing you are listening for is the low level sound quality from each format. As long as you observe a difference in this comparison the results are valid.
Frank
isn't this a bit of circular logic?you don't believe there are any DSD benefits.
to prove your point, you record DSD onto PCM. so that even if there were any benefits, they would be lost.
then you hear what you think is a problem.
therefore, it proves your hypothesis that there is no benefit to DSD.
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