Dsd - how far does one go?
- Thread starter Audiophile Bill
- Start date
Bruce B
WBF Founding Member, Pro Audio Production Member
Bruce B
WBF Founding Member, Pro Audio Production Member
I will once my audio system is back up and running.
Would it cost over $100000? That's what it would take for a rig like Bruce's. Plus the time and effort and knowhow he has to use the gear.
I would just ship the whole vat, sell off the vinyl rig and ADC, and sit back and wait for Bruce to make SOTA rips in quad DSD. He can ship the vat of records back along with some hard drives loaded with the best rips you will ever hear from you collection.
But that's just me
Not the PI, I was looking for a very pared-down device, including an audio-specific designed motherboard. The uRendu will supposedly fit the bill so we'll have to wait for that.
This just arrived courtesy of UPS. I'll provide an update after break-in. I have no idea what 16X DSD brings to the table. But if Ed Meitner thinks there is something to it, I wouldn't be quick to bet against him.
Steve williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Oh cool, Marty. Looking forward to your views.
How are you going to get 16x dsd then? You are going to need a powerful computer to upsample to that level if indeed any computer package supports that (yet)!
Bill, I'm not sure I need to do anything. My understanding is that the unit does all its upsampling, or whatever it need to do, internally. My only interest is plug and play.
Yeah uses an FPGA chip to do it. Same concept as the PS Audio Direct stream. EMM Labs is fairly tight lipped about the chips they use. The hide them under covers so prying eyes can't see how they are doing things.
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In 1973, I bought an Audi Fox. It was one of the earliest models made that were brought into the US. However, not only did water leak into the cabin through the air conditioning vents when going through the car wash, but one day, the back seat spontaneously burst into flames. It wasn't long before I learned never to buy brand new models of anything ever again. My new Meitner TX2 and DA2 units are surely some of the earliest made (#1 for the transport?), yet the lessons of the Audi Fox have apparently been forgotten. I opened the boxes and set up the units and lo and behold, they worked. That's the good news. Since my units are in a cabinet, I then tried to use LED repeater emitters over the infrared sensors that are commonplace on the front panels of many pieces of audio/video gear. The next 4 hours were an exercise in total frustration as I could not get the units to work remotely using their remote and the LED repeaters unless I stood right in front of the units. To begin, when I called Meitner they told me that the sensors were smack dab in the middle (both horizonatally and vertically) of the display panels. They are not. Then they told me I had the emitters mounted incorrectly on the panel. Instead of placing the flat side of the plastic housing the LED on the glass panel, they told me to turn it around since they said the LED is meant to shine through the bubble round top. Huh? I asked them if they were kidding and reminded them I was using the same damn sensor that I used on the XDS1v2 that these units replaced. They replied that the bubble side of the sensor is the side that allows the most light to be emitted. I replied that the light can easily be seen coming from the flat bottom as well as the round part of the LED diode housing. After a good deal of struggling and a good deal of frustration, i realized that they obviously never tested these unit with any LED emitters that are commonly used by audiophiles (i.e SpeakerCraft). However, while pondering how fast I could repack these units and return them, I experimented and soon discovered the answer myself. It turns out the emitter receivers are at the very very top of the display glass, and are so near the edge that the only way to get the LED emitter to work is to mount them sideways!! Hooray! Problem #1 solved and my blood pressure was only in the risk of having a stroke for about 3 hours. Next, I have to tell you that while the display on the DAC is just fine because you can control the brightness as well as the contrast so you can get crisp white letters on a black background, that not the case for the matching transport, which only has a brightness control. No matter what level of brightness is chosen, the display panel looks terrible. It is in fact the worst digital display I have ever seen, with background streaks, lines, and poor background uniformity that no doubt occurs as a result of not being to adjust the contrast. The net result is that I am now the proud owner of a matching set of transport and dac with displays that don't look the same at all when viewed together when the units are stacked. One looks great, the other looks like crap. I've learned that the only way the transport display looks good, wait for it.... is when you turn it off! At least they allow me to do that! I should be thankful, right?
Folks, with all of the problems in the world and in all our lives, I am truly embarrassed to cry about the poor problems I encountered with a new pair of audio components that cost as much as a nice car. But I am pissed. What's worse, this is my 4th piece of Meitner gear and this story isn't that different to my previous experiences with their gear. To be blunt, their quality control is just not very good, and moreover, they provided me with misinformation when I called them to try and figure out the problem. I know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, but I just can't seem to help myself with Meitner. He makes sonically exceptional gear. I truly hope this unit is no different. I've been a Meitner fan for along time because of the fact that to my ears, his top end, in particular, is the most natural and analogue sounding of all the digital devices I have heard, so I am sticking with the "Meitner sound". I certainly hope that the unit breaks in and performs as expected at a reference caliber level, and my guess is that it will. But I have to tell you, I have zero joy or pride of ownership in owning his expensive gear. Never have. Rather, it's all about the sound. How does that nursery rhyme go "...and when he was good, he was very very good, and when he was bad he was horrid". So it has it been my experience with EMM labs.
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It's all about the upsampling algorithms. After the FPGA upsamples all incoming audio to 16X DSD, it just goes through a simple low pass filter. He uses good quality parts, and great board layouts, and there's the end result.
There's something magical about the Meitner stuff
But make sure you check the directionality of the optical cable.
Enjoy!
But make sure you check the directionality of the optical cable.
Enjoy!
You have no choice with their optical cable linking the two units. It only goes on one way.
What??? Did Meitner just changed specs on their optilink?
Show photos of both sides please...
Does this mean one can't bypass the SDM with this dac? I thought that software based pc implementation of the SDM side was best?
No you can't bypass it. It has the SDM/SRC built in just like HQplayer does, only running on a FPGA. But there's not many DAC's out there designed to spacifically get the best out of software based SDM/SRC. This is because not everyone wants to setup a system like this, and up until the Roon integration, software like Hqplayer with it's rudimentary GUI would only appeal to very few. As you can see there's a companion SACD transport that it's designed to pair with. Where are you going to run Hqplayer on it?
To get the best out of software based SDM/SRC like Hqplayer, you want a DAC like the Lampi chipless DSD models and DAC's like the AAVIK C-300:
"The Aavik C-300 DSD DAC section features a very simplistic gain structure with only one gain stage and a purely passive LC type analog filter, made from shielded coils and the highest quality capacitors available. The passive 6th order filter is placed at 60 kHz where it effectively removes all switching artefacts without adding excess noise in the audio-band. A pure and unique method of making the D to A conversion without passing the signal through any type of DAC chipset and software based noise shaping."
"The Aavik C-300 DSD DAC section features a very simplistic gain structure with only one gain stage and a purely passive LC type analog filter, made from shielded coils and the highest quality capacitors available. The passive 6th order filter is placed at 60 kHz where it effectively removes all switching artefacts without adding excess noise in the audio-band. A pure and unique method of making the D to A conversion without passing the signal through any type of DAC chipset and software based noise shaping."
This is what I thought. Blizz - in the interests of being future proof, I would have thought that the Lampi or Aavik approach makes a good deal of sense since I assume the processing power and the statistical algorithms behind the software based approach are only getting better. Imagine Hqplayer "HD" in 5 years - what will that achieve only with "standard" quad upsampling.
So this opens my next question. Is it the quality of the upsampling that is key or the actual numbers (2x, 4x, 8x, 16x etc)? I would argue the former based on listening. Hqplayer upsampling PCM to double dsd sounds better than jriver upsampling to quad for example - thoughts?
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