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Upsampling by dac, can't hear an improvement.


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On 8/20/2017 at 12:36 PM, Lebouwsky said:

My dac is an AMR dp-777 (fed by a sms200), the dac is able to upsample pcm to 192khz. I can't notice an improvement, at most a shift sidewards. When I started streaming I used a hummingboard / gungnir running Moode and could't notice an improvement either.

 

Does upsampling in PCM make sence anyway?

 

I had a teac nt503 and tried the automatic upsampling, and it usually sounded worse in my opinion...fortunately i have a fairly large native dsd collection...so I just play native.

I heard the FPGA PS directstream does an excellent job of upsampling everything though....i wish it was in my budget...have to wait for someone to come along with a worthy product for less...hope it will be in usa.

Hope someone will come out soon with a worthy dac with ethernet and/or sd card under $1500 (maybe sonica v2....v1 didn't get great reviews, so maybe with some tweaks).

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On 8/20/2017 at 1:53 PM, Lebouwsky said:

Sotm gave me a trial of Roon, which I installed on my w10 server. Upsampling did not improve things. Will try hqplayer now that I think of it.

 

 @esldude some 16/44 of my collection sound better than 24/192 which are supposed to be highly respecten recordings. In fact I've got some 24/192 that sound dreadfull. Somehow I think 96khz sounds best, wether it's my previous gungnir or my current amr dac.

 

I find HQplayer upsampled 44k to 192K with no further dickering sounded better...i just hate the interface.

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On 8/21/2017 at 8:33 AM, Speed Racer said:

 

People on this site, in general, are in love with discreet upsampling. They like to say that the upsampling code in a DAC must be worse than what can be achieved in the DAC. Just as an example, how can you call the upsampling code in Yggdrasil "resource constrained" when it upsamples in real time all the time without fail. It has a filter that is "a time- and frequency-domain optimized digital filter with a true closed-form solution".

 

My listening acuity must suck too since I disagree.....

I am having difficulty in understanding what you are saying here...are you saying the yggi dac does or doesn't improve the SQ with it's upsampling?

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On 8/22/2017 at 1:29 AM, Lebouwsky said:

I think we're on the same boat when it comes to upsampling PCM. But when it comes to upsampling PCM to DSD I have no experience.  I recently invested in good PCM dac. When you discribe the PCM tot DSD upsampling as "somewhat changed" I don't feel the need to go DSD real soon. What's your opinion about PCM to DSD?

 

I didn't like it on TEAC nt503...i prefer native, but i also prefer a well recorded native dsd to most anything pcm....I believe I like HQplayer upsampling in moderation, but haven't played with it in awhile...couldn't get used to the interface.  Again, I have heard the PD direct stream does upsampling beautifully, but don't have first hand experience. The first upsampling dac i heard sounded tremendous and was my first exposure to DSD (Antelope Zodiac w/external clock at CES about 5 years ago).  So I am sure some do it well...the teac made it sound worse, but great playing native dsd....jmo

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12 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

I am having difficulty in understanding what you are saying here...are you saying the yggi dac does or doesn't improve the SQ with it's upsampling?

 

I am saying that Yggdrasil upsamples in real time with a complex filter that is "a time- and frequency-domain optimized digital filter with a true closed-form solution". In other words, the Yggdrasil and its filter are NOT resource constrained.

 

There is no way to turn this filter off so I can't compare apples to apples and say whether or not it improves sound quality. What I can say is that I really like how Yggdrasil sounds compared to other DACs have heard so I would say the filter improves the sound quality.

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On 8/23/2017 at 4:08 AM, Lebouwsky said:

If you'd imagine a track like a digital picture with a certain resulution, lets say 800x600 dots of red blue yellow and the dot in the upper right is red. If the picture would be upsampled to a higher resulution by a factor 4 (1600x1200), all the 4 upper right square dots should be red. The picture remains the same, there's no more info, just more dots or bits. To me, with limited knowledge of digital music files, that's what upsampling in pcm does.

 

On the other hand, imagine this same picture, but contrast is made higher, or tones are softened or whatever filter is being used. The picture can be changed to a result, more apealing to the viewers preferences. I can imagine that these filters have more freedom of movement when the picture is brought to a higher resulution. I can also imagine these filters have more freedom if a 4th colour is added to the pallet (cyan, magenta, yellow key). 

 

Feel free to shoot.

 

the issue there, would be you would need a different filter for every song, and even every part of the one song....to appeal, you may want shrilling tamed, but if you turned on the "tame shrilling filter", it would likely filter other parts of the song that you would like more emphasis on. 

IMHO, the only thing one can really do is be selective in the recordings they listen to, to meet their "appealing" sonics, and play direct and natively and without noise, and with glass of sangria.

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7 minutes ago, Speed Racer said:

 

I am saying that Yggdrasil upsamples in real time with a complex filter that is "a time- and frequency-domain optimized digital filter with a true closed-form solution". In other words, the Yggdrasil and its filter are NOT resource constrained.

 

There is no way to turn this filter off so I can't compare apples to apples and say whether or not it improves sound quality. What I can say is that I really like how Yggdrasil sounds compared to other DACs have heard so I would say the filter improves the sound quality.

ok, thanks for that...I have read many of your posts and respect your thoughts....and I am actually contemplating the gungnir....so your input is appreciated. 

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On 8/22/2017 at 1:59 AM, firedog said:

 

I wouldn't get audiophillia nervosa over comments about upsampling you read on this site. I had a ESS based Dac that sounded better with music upsampled to DSD, and now I have a DAC that upsamples everything to PCM and sounds better that way.

If you like the sound of your DAC, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

 

I remember you had the Teac Nt503?  So did you move to Schiit?  I may be leaning that same direction...

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Yesterday I did a listening session again. It's really easy to switch between mpd/ dlna to hqplayer NAA mode from my laptop. 

 

First of all, hqplayer gives a more solid presentation, with a wider soundstage. Also the "thin presentation" of the sms200 (Sotm is known for that, but this is relatively speaking) moves to a more thicker sound. This is in the mids to lower mids range.

 

The overall presentation becomes more enjoyable, which for me is the goal of this hobby: enjoying music.

 

But there's more. With the filters you can stear the music a bit to your preferences, which is not an improvement in sound, but a movement to the left or right so to speak.

 

Last but not least, my right ear is slightly better then my left. This, in combination with the fact that the right speaker is much closer to the side wall, puts the centre of the presentation a bit to the right.  At least in my head. With hqplayer I can adjust this presentation.

 

The GUI is crap by the way. But because of the much better presentation, I notice a more relaxed state of mind, which results in less skipping to another album. GUI becomes less importend, just sit back and relax. 

 

Really like where the system is going these days.

 

 

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Lebouwsky, I'm sorry if I missed this in one of your earlier posts, but how do you connect from your W10 laptop to the SMS200?  Are you using ethernet bridging?  I just installed a trial version of HQPlayer on my Mac Mini but I'm scratching my head over how to have the music sent over to my SMS200.  Both Mac Mini and SMS200 are on the same network but they are in different rooms (BTW, I'm not subscribed to Roon and usually use Squeezelite on my SMS200.  I'm happy to try other applications like DLNA or HQPlayer if I can obtain a noticeable improvement in sound quality).

 

I'm a noob when it comes to such things and would deeply appreciate some guidance on this.  Thanks.

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On 9/18/2017 at 4:16 PM, Lebouwsky said:

HQplayer upsamples everything to 192kHz, with the poly-sync shrt filter and the NS4 dither. I don't have a clue what they mean or what they do, but the sound is superb. I just can't stop listening, it's so emotional engaging. OMG!!! My system has never sounded so good.

 

After a lot of experimenting, I settled on the poly-sync-short-mp filter and the NS4 dither for RB to 24/192 upsampling. HQPlayer has a warm, natural sound, compared to Audirvana which is a little more bright and detailed. I find myself going back and forth between the two every few weeks. What is interesting about them is that the soundstage is quite different on the same piece of music.

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2 hours ago, EMMM said:

Lebouwsky, I'm sorry if I missed this in one of your earlier posts, but how do you connect from your W10 laptop to the SMS200?  Are you using ethernet bridging?  I just installed a trial version of HQPlayer on my Mac Mini but I'm scratching my head over how to have the music sent over to my SMS200.  Both Mac Mini and SMS200 are on the same network but they are in different rooms (BTW, I'm not subscribed to Roon and usually use Squeezelite on my SMS200.  I'm happy to try other applications like DLNA or HQPlayer if I can obtain a noticeable improvement in sound quality).

 

I'm a noob when it comes to such things and would deeply appreciate some guidance on this.  Thanks.

You can send me a pm and from there guide you step by step. That's what this forum is for isn't it, share and learn.

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46 minutes ago, wwaldmanfan said:

 

After a lot of experimenting, I settled on the poly-sync-short-mp filter and the NS4 dither for RB to 24/192 upsampling. HQPlayer has a warm, natural sound, compared to Audirvana which is a little more bright and detailed. I find myself going back and forth between the two every few weeks. What is interesting about them is that the soundstage is quite different on the same piece of music.

Those filter/dither settings are most apealing to me too. But I'm open for more suggestions. It's nice to experiment a little bit.

 

Hqplayer is easy to set up, eventhough some people might suggest it's not. And upsampling PCM to 192kHz takes a tiny bit of processing capability (3% of my core i3) and some memory (40mb)

 

Therefore I just ordered a second hand small lightweight passive cooled small footprint pc. It's got an Intel j1900 processor with 4gb memory, which will be more than enough. It has a nice aluminium case and it will get a nice place in my rack (headless). Costs me 100 euro. Will report back ofcourse.

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6 hours ago, wwaldmanfan said:

 

After a lot of experimenting, I settled on the poly-sync-short-mp filter and the NS4 dither for RB to 24/192 upsampling. HQPlayer has a warm, natural sound, compared to Audirvana which is a little more bright and detailed.

To get a similar sound character with A+ you have to switch A+ to Direct/Integer Mode 2 and set the iZotope SRC settings to steepness: 27 / cutoff 0.92 / pre-ringing: 0 (... IIRC.... have to double check the values when I‘m back home on the weekend). Lowpass filtering starts slowly  at around 18kHz...

____________________________________________________

Mac Mini, HQPlayer | iFi Zenstream | Intona 7055-B | Singxer SDA-6 pro | Vincent SV237 | Buchardt S400 | SPL Phonitor One | Beyer DT1990pro | Avantone Planar II
Desktop: Audirvana Origin | Intona 7054 | SMSL M500MKII | NAD C 316BEE | Aperion Novus B5 Bookshelf | Lehmann Rhinelander | Beyer DT700proX

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1 hour ago, copy_of_a said:

To get a similar sound character with A+ you have to switch A+ to Direct/Integer Mode 2 and set the iZotope SRC settings to steepness: 27 / cutoff 0.92 / pre-ringing: 0 (... IIRC.... have to double check the values when I‘m back home on the weekend). Lowpass filtering starts slowly  at around 18kHz...

 Valuable contribution @copy_of_a

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Just now, Speed Racer said:

 

Nor is ignoring confirmation bias......which runs rampant around this place.

I'm all for freedom of each person to chose what they want to do when enjoying a hobby. If this was an FDA trial where people could die and they were scientists, that's a different story. This is a fun hobby and some people don't want to become scientists just to listen to audio gear. 

 

 

Founder of Audiophile Style | My Audio Systems AudiophileStyleStickerWhite2.0.png AudiophileStyleStickerWhite7.1.4.png

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