So does this mean you don't care about LFE (freq below 30Hz) when you're at the movies/home theatre since you can't hear the frequencies anyway?
That's why I said "hear and feel". Does Saracon filter away low frequencies as well?
The correlation I was trying to make with Saracon is that DSD files that are downsampled to PCM are exactly the same, whether they are 88.2, 176.4, 96, or 192 or whatever. ALL information is being cut off at ~35k. So paying more for a 192 file is a waste of money. In my view, paying money for any file that came from DSD done by Saracon is a waste of money. No matter what sample rate you choose, it creates the same exact file.
Yes you've said the first part of this already. But, again, how can it be "the exact same file" if the frequency of samples is vastly different? That's like saying, to use my 2D photo analogy, a 10x8in image sampled at 180ppi is the same as one sampled at 360ppi. Taken to the extreme, regardless of bit depth, one file could have two observations to describe the scene and the other 176,000. You are saying these are one and the same. I don't understand how a snippet of sound (let's say one second) described by 88,200 observations can be a worse description of the analogue as the same second of sound described by 176,400 observations. Surely, the 2nd description has more detail, more resolution (subject to Nyquist limits). (I recognise that increasing the sample rate in my 10x8in image beyond a certain point for a given viewing distance will not improve my perception of the image and that there is a limit to improvement in perception as we increase sample rate in audio.)
When it comes to where to limit the range of each observation, do I really care that my observing device (or my transformation from one digital format to another) hits (or imposes) a limit so long as this is outside my ability to perceive differences at that point and there are no flow-on affects to other observations where I can perceive differences? (I could record an image's "colour" for any given pixel into the infrared band but that doesn't help me record my vision of the image. As far as I'm concerned, because I am interested in the image for what it looks like, the fact that certain parts of it are emitting invisible light is of no relevance, albeit it might have some relevance to my health!) What if the original analogue signal never exceeded the boundaries of human hearing, wouldn't a digital representation of that signal with more observations per second be more accurate (up to the Nyquist frequency)? And if the signal did exceed the boundaries of human hearing at certain points but these observations were truncated to lower levels still outside the boundaries of my hearing would I care then?
I still don't understand your principle criticism that a 176.4k samples per second file from Saracon is
exactly the same as an 88.2k samples second rendition
because Saracon imposes a filter not far enough outside the audible frequency range. How can they be exactly the same when one has twice the density of observations? Doesn't this double density of observations add value whenever any of those observations are within the audible range? I must be missing something very fundamental if this isn't the case.
It sounds to me like your criticism of Saracon is not that the files are the same but that Saracon's filter discolours in some way the sound that we can hear, that the effects of the filter at this level are discernible versus if the DSD were converted directly to analogue or, more to the point, versus the rendition that can be achieved with other software. But surely this has nothing to do with the impact to our perception of observations outside the audible range - hence my point that one needs to look for "damage"
within the audible range and not
outside. (And surely this isn't directly related to whether the output has twice the samples of the other.) If I played you a file of a single tone (at any sample rate you chose) where all information was cut off or capped at 35kHz and another where it was cutoff or capped at 50kHz, could you tell me which was which?
I love Saracon for strictly PCM work, but there are other, more efficient and better sounding SRC out there for DSD. Audiogate is a great DSD converter. It allows you to select filters and dither. Audiogate is a free software that can be used in Windows or OSX.
I'm glad you like Audiogate. The problem is, I've heard completely the opposite about its quality from many people. The fact that it doesn't do multichannel is also not in its favour. Given it's free I will give it a go but experimenting takes time, a commodity I have very little of. What settings in Audiogate do you prefer?
We worked for months with HDtracks in choosing the best DSD->PCM conversions for all the SACD rips we were doing. We tried AudioGate, Saracon, SBM, Pyramix and even DiscWelder. In every case, the Saracon converters just seemed to take the life out of every file. I've posted samples here for folks to test for themselves.
Did HDTracks take your advice? What software do they employ?
Lastly, by "here" do you mean in this section of the forum? I will take a dig around.
I even created a thread on what people should listen for when they compare hi-rez files to Redbook.
But we are comparing different methods of DSD to PCM conversion.
Incidentally, does anyone know how the Oppo converts DSD to LPCM on the fly? Filters?
