+1Yes, using HQPlayer you need to have a very powerful PC or Mac as your source in order to reach those dramatic bit rates. There is the issue of the cleanliness of the PC environment for audio, and it is expensive and very tweaky to ameliorate. A Zenith is not powerful enough to upscale anywhere close to the highest bit rates these guys are talking about. Innuos's philosophy is be as simple as possible and to use the least amount of CPU and power as possible to enhance sound quality.
You either like what upsampling does to music or you don't. I have worked in the area in the past, but I've never found a satisfactory 100% improvement, it always comes with some negatives. I did play with an HQPlayer PC a year ago, while I didn't get to the highest sample rates, it was not rewarding enough to invest the extra thousands of resources and hundreds of hours to pursue.
But you can buy tracks that have been upsampled with their very top process and compare to the originals. I did this recently and it was not for me. The results were smoother, more liquid, deeper bass, more crystalline highs. But the cost was loss of fine detail in vocal, less acoustic quality to instruments, less natural ambience, less dynamic jump overall to the sound. So like I said, it either works for your priorities or doesn't.
If you want to compare, you might want to check some NativeDSD releases. I upgraded to their Plus plan recently. This allows you to buy the highest resolution track, and download all other sample rates as well. So by buying the DSD512 version which is upsampled in the professional version of HQPlayer, you can also download the non-upsampled version to compare. There are other albums out there. Also the following album is fantastic and state of the art sonically.
Nagra 70th Anniversary Collection
Can digital get to vinyl sound and at what price?
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Keep in mind that the Native DSD DSD512 files are done with one set of settings offered by HQPLAYER and those settings have been preselected for you. In my view, this is the antithesis of using HQPLAYER as HQPLAYER offers you countless permutations and features to adjust the resultant sound to your liking.
I agree that the use of HQPLAYER is not simple as it requires additional ultra fast hardware and network devices but for those of us that are “hardcore” and want to push this hobby to its limit, it is not very difficult to set up a high performance system to support HQPLAYER to reach the pinnacle of what is possible in the digital domain.
Depending on your level of acuity with digital audio and computers the learning curve can be steep but well worth the effort. As one of my favorite bands, L’arm, quite correctly stated: “Nothing is hard in this world if you dare to scale the heights!”
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I hope Ron invite expert digital designers here to see what they think about digital vs analog.
Daniel Weiss (Weiss Engineering)
Ed Meitner (Emm Labs)
Javier Guadalajara (Wadax)
I also like to read subjective experience of Jim Smith, Roy Gregory and David Karmeli about digital vs analog.
I prefer to be quiet and read their comments here.
Daniel Weiss (Weiss Engineering)
Ed Meitner (Emm Labs)
Javier Guadalajara (Wadax)
I also like to read subjective experience of Jim Smith, Roy Gregory and David Karmeli about digital vs analog.
I prefer to be quiet and read their comments here.
Jason Victor Serinus | Feb 28, 2019 Stereophile
Ed Meitner (EM)
JVS: In some quarters, there's rivalry among DSD, PCM, and PCM-based MQA. What do you want to say about those different formats and—
EM: Bullshit. It's just disruptive. You have one format where it's demonstrated that if you have your chops and learn about it, you can have good audio. PCM is readily available in chips; hence, it lives. I don't know where the rivalry comes from, because whoever uses DSD DACs? It's all chips. So I don't understand the rivalry. I don't get it. The only place that matters is right at the conversion point from analog to digital and digital to analog. About the rest, I could care less. The rest doesn't matter. The rest is bits.
Ed Meitner (EM)
JVS: In some quarters, there's rivalry among DSD, PCM, and PCM-based MQA. What do you want to say about those different formats and—
EM: Bullshit. It's just disruptive. You have one format where it's demonstrated that if you have your chops and learn about it, you can have good audio. PCM is readily available in chips; hence, it lives. I don't know where the rivalry comes from, because whoever uses DSD DACs? It's all chips. So I don't understand the rivalry. I don't get it. The only place that matters is right at the conversion point from analog to digital and digital to analog. About the rest, I could care less. The rest doesn't matter. The rest is bits.
Harley: How do you feel about the standard measurements used today to evaluate audio equipment?
Meitner: They're very inadequate. We should at least understand the blindness of a lot of these measurements. They're all good in one certain area, but they're blind to many other things.
IMD [intermodulation distortion] was a measurement for in-band distortion. It was meaningless to look at harmonic distortion because the harmonics were above the passband. So you developed IMD measurements that would allow you to measure in the passband. There is your warning sign: why do we need both? What does the one tell us that the other doesn't?
So we look at the imprecisions in measurements. We know that amplitude precision is covered 100%. Frequency response is covered 100%. But time response is not covered at all. So what's the obvious solution? Let's look at it. I'm sure this way of thinking was instrumental in me trying to go after jitter.
Harley: How important is it to you to quantify through measurement new tricks that make an audible improvement in a design? Is it important to measure that difference, or can you just accept that it sounds better and move on?
Meitner: I'd like to clarify that a little better. If someone says to me that something measures terribly, I'd first like to know how it measures terribly and still sounds good. There's got to be a reason for it. And we're not that far away from correlating a measurement to what we hear.
We've taken some measurements to the ridiculous limit. I'm sure that no one hears the difference between 0.001% and 0.1% distortion—we know that. But it really depends on what the measurement is and what we hear. And when we get the measurements that are relevant or based on timing—phase, group delay, or jitter—then yes, I would like to know what the measurement is and be happy if it correlates to good sound. If it doesn't correlate to good sound, I would look somewhere else. To me, it's important that it measure well according to all common measurements. But it has to measure well in terms of my criteria for measurement, and of course, it has to sound good. Then I feel comfortable about the design.
Meitner: They're very inadequate. We should at least understand the blindness of a lot of these measurements. They're all good in one certain area, but they're blind to many other things.
IMD [intermodulation distortion] was a measurement for in-band distortion. It was meaningless to look at harmonic distortion because the harmonics were above the passband. So you developed IMD measurements that would allow you to measure in the passband. There is your warning sign: why do we need both? What does the one tell us that the other doesn't?
So we look at the imprecisions in measurements. We know that amplitude precision is covered 100%. Frequency response is covered 100%. But time response is not covered at all. So what's the obvious solution? Let's look at it. I'm sure this way of thinking was instrumental in me trying to go after jitter.
Harley: How important is it to you to quantify through measurement new tricks that make an audible improvement in a design? Is it important to measure that difference, or can you just accept that it sounds better and move on?
Meitner: I'd like to clarify that a little better. If someone says to me that something measures terribly, I'd first like to know how it measures terribly and still sounds good. There's got to be a reason for it. And we're not that far away from correlating a measurement to what we hear.
We've taken some measurements to the ridiculous limit. I'm sure that no one hears the difference between 0.001% and 0.1% distortion—we know that. But it really depends on what the measurement is and what we hear. And when we get the measurements that are relevant or based on timing—phase, group delay, or jitter—then yes, I would like to know what the measurement is and be happy if it correlates to good sound. If it doesn't correlate to good sound, I would look somewhere else. To me, it's important that it measure well according to all common measurements. But it has to measure well in terms of my criteria for measurement, and of course, it has to sound good. Then I feel comfortable about the design.
I think reading comments of expert designers and expert audiophiles will help to have better view about the subject.
Yes sure, I regard your experience and thank you for sharing your knowledge here. I said before I like analog more than what I hear from digital.
In my opinion what we need is trying to invite experts here and learn from them.
Attachments
Some audio manufacturers have interesting points of view about measurements as well. Sometimes its not a question of what you can or cannot measure "theoretically", but also that the measurements do not always reflect actual performance.
Here's an example of an engineer explaining how interferences in a DAC can degrade the DAC's clock, and why you don't necessarily see that using jitter measurements based on test signals (quoted from DIYAudio):
"Graphs won’t tell you what audible advantages or disadvantages to expect, because these jitter graphs are based on single or dual test tones (fundamentals). Music is infinitely more complex, it has a fast changing dynamic spectrum that creates the biggest problems in any DAC. The jitter graph won’t cover this because it only shows the DAC jitter response with these test signals only, it doesn’t show what happens when the data content and spectrum are infinitely more complex."
Unfortunately, discussing the relevance of measurements unavoidably leads to technical discussions. Perhaps at best these technical discussions give us pointers towards interesting things to test, but the proof of the pudding is always in listening.
Here's an example of an engineer explaining how interferences in a DAC can degrade the DAC's clock, and why you don't necessarily see that using jitter measurements based on test signals (quoted from DIYAudio):
"Graphs won’t tell you what audible advantages or disadvantages to expect, because these jitter graphs are based on single or dual test tones (fundamentals). Music is infinitely more complex, it has a fast changing dynamic spectrum that creates the biggest problems in any DAC. The jitter graph won’t cover this because it only shows the DAC jitter response with these test signals only, it doesn’t show what happens when the data content and spectrum are infinitely more complex."
Unfortunately, discussing the relevance of measurements unavoidably leads to technical discussions. Perhaps at best these technical discussions give us pointers towards interesting things to test, but the proof of the pudding is always in listening.
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I think we should avoid technical discussions and let expert designers like Ed Meitner talk about technical discussions.
We can just share our subjective experience without going to technical details
We can just share our subjective experience without going to technical details
Ed Meitner is not a digital designer per se. he is an analog designer working with digital products. when he first did his EMM Labs dac he brought in Andreas Koch to do the heavy digital lifting (who later started Playback Designs with Jonathan Tinn). when Andreas left EMM Labs Ed brought in someone else. maybe since then that has changed; that was in 2008 last i knew about it. not knocking Ed Meitner, he has legit designer credentials, just not a heavy hitter on the digital design side. his products are first rate for sure.
My point is that no matter what you ask us, our answer will never be completely free of personal bias.
The old argument of the "infinitely more complex musical signals". Although this was true thirty years ago, modern measuring instruments and methods take in consideration such aspects. I do not expect measurements to predict sound quality, but used together with listening impressions they can help us a lot to understand what we hear and make better buying decisions, as well as saving a lot of time.
Unfortunately our source of trusty measurements is nowadays reduced to a few magazines - the information is very reduced and high-end manufacturers are systematically not wanting to share their measurements - surely with a few exceptions.
what I know about ed meitner is here :Bidat DAC
IDAT DAC
Emm Labs DAC
Meitner IDAT D/A processor
There are as many ways of designing a digital-to-analog converter as there are engineers. One approach is to select parts from manufacturers' data books and build the product according to the "application notes" provided by the parts manufacturers. This is the electronic equivalent of a...
www.stereophile.com
Ed Meitner: Audio Maverick
www.stereophile.com
This would have to be debated between experts...and I don't think they all agree on that.
Do measurements help? Maybe some do.
Perhaps. Never read about an expert designer who tells that measurements do not matter at all and he never took a measurement, but I read about a few who told us that they did not listen in the development phase.
Remember that there a purpose built and proprietary measurements that we do not even dream about ...
This dac (1bit )with accu power supply is bargain.Ed Meitner and his team have developed for sony sacd(dsd)View attachment 114205what I know about ed meitner is here :
Bidat DAC
IDAT DAC
Emm Labs DAC
Meitner IDAT D/A processor
There are as many ways of designing a digital-to-analog converter as there are engineers. One approach is to select parts from manufacturers' data books and build the product according to the "application notes" provided by the parts manufacturers. This is the electronic equivalent of a...
Ed Meitner: Audio Maverick
Neither have I. And not the one I quoted.
The example I gave concerned a single metric, albeit an important one in digital audio, and we should not generalize to extreme conclusions.
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