Yes, they are. Passionately, artfully and lovingly done. Having worked with Winston, I can attest to the meticulous care that he takes in everything he does.
Yes, Amir. HDCD is an interesting concept.
NOTE 3: An important advantage is that the "brick wall" low-pass filter required to prevent Nyquist--Alias errors can be implemented as a digital filter, which has highly reproducible characteristics free from phase distortions. The characteristics of this filter can be chosen dynamically based upon an analysis of the high resolution signal to minimize distortion. Hence major filter and analog to digital encode system problems such as pre-echo, transient ringing, group delay anomalies, missing code errors, alias distortion and beats are greatly reduced or eliminated.
I read the entire patent some time ago and have tried to summarize all the major points (it is really repetitive at times); see HDCD patent overview. The emboldened points is all you need to read at first if you are in a hurry, but I suggest you go through the entirely article which is extremely smaller than the patent itself (which took me well over 10 hours to read).
Wow! That is dedication. I haven't managed to plow through the entire patent.
As you and I have discussed on another forum, the fact that two of three HDCD inventors are principals @ Berkeley doesn't hurt! ;-)...why the .......Berkeley Alpha DAC sound(s) so spectacular.
As you and I have discussed on another forum, the fact that two of three HDCD inventors are principals @ Berkeley doesn't hurt! ;-)
It's actually research before a purchase (as you may have also seen on my new-speaker search in the Magico V3 thread);
I just updated my post, pointing to the very important Note 3, which for me, is all the explanation I need to understand why the Spectral 4000 and Berkeley Alpha DAC sound so spectacular.
As well as a 20bit NOS DAC. ;-)There is nothing special about an HDCD transport. The magic is an HDCD decoder which sits in front of a 20 bit DAC. So yes, your DAC could be upgraded to support HDCD but that would require a DSP or now obsolete motorola HDCD decoder.
Gary, the DAC 2 was one of the DACs in my comparison and was, IMSO, inferior to the BADA. I've not heard the new DAC 202.
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