MikeL
I respect your points of view much more than you give me credit for. Yours are of a true music lover and serious, purist audiophiles. I would like to consider myself to be both too.
I however do not subscribe to the trust my ears mantra.. My ears and my senses in general helped by my brain fool me too often. I need a solid ground on which to base my beliefs. In matter of religion only do I go on the "simply believe" and I am not a religious person...
It's been said that SACD is superior to CD , yet many if not most SACD are mastered with a conversion to PCM then reconverted to DSD/SACD .. Even the most mathematics-challenged person would tell me that this can't be a good thing ... you go from something to PCM and back to that something a process that is inherently lossy. I also would add that the maths involved in SACD are not trivial either.. The sampling rates is high because of the bit depth which is only 1 bit, so to compensate you take more samples with each sample less accurate than the equivalent in PCM.. You make up with sheer numbers... PCM is getting there in the meantime 384 is out already...
Now I cna understand one preferring a medium to another... I take the example of a person preferring Tang to Orange juice often to which Audiophiles answer which is the Tang? To ne that's not the point, people like what they like It could be there there are differences between SACD and Redbook CD... The problem that I have had in comparing the two was that the machine on which the comparison were made were of a different level of excellence. I have compared my Burmester DAC with a top of the line Sony machine and I liked the CD better .. might have been different with a DSD DAC of the Burmester caliber ... I know however controlled experience using a protocol in which I believe and you may not (more or less blind) showed the difference to vanish at 24/96 for DSD. I don't know if it was DSD64 or 128. And it should be so . CD can't reproduce a 10 KHz but 24/96 is flat to almost 50 KHz and we can debate all we want of the audibility of UHF but there are very few speakers that get in this region .. The better ones crap out at 40 Khz .. so the 100 Khz bandwidth of SACD ... I doubt we can hear that high but that is an aside.
A mistake not to be made is that PCM shops the signals and therefore it no longer resembles the original .. This is due to the graphics generally used to describe a purely mathematical process... If the signal is band limited the maths say that the signal can be recovered perfectly if you sample at twice the highest frequency in the signal. Physics say we are not there yet but we have made progress... considerable progress and that progress is not DSD IMHO. I could be wrong.
While I can understand someone preferring Analog to digital, I almost find it almost amusing for anyone to qualify digital as "unlistenable". The only qualifier for such statement would be an hyperbole, to make a point .. This might have been true 25 years ago.. The earth has circled the sun a few times in the meantime.. This is no longer the case
Frantz,
thanks, i know we respect each other's perspectives.
to be clear, i don't recall referring to PCM as a format as unlistenable ever. in fact, i likely listen to it 25% to 50% of the time and enjoy it. sometimes i'll listen only to my music server for a week at a time. the Playback Design MPS-5 has great PCM at all levels of sample rate.
i respect that many excellent systems are PCM sourced exclusively and i don't consider those systems invalid because of that.
it's only when comparing it to higher level analog vinyl and RTR tape, or SACD and dsd done properly, where PCM falls short.
i think it's a mistake to use the multiple ways SACD's might be mastered as evidence that SACD or DSD is flawed. of the first 10,000 CD's ever mastered, how many sounded like crap? most simply due to poor sloppy mastering. Bruce finds redbook sourced SACD's regularly. you'll note my specific comments refer mostly to dsd where i personally know about the source used.
i recommend considering one of the new Playback Designs players/dacs with the 'super' hirez USB capability. they are reasonably priced, and you can get those files with info on the source and compare things for yourself.
i agree that in the short term trusting your ears can be less than reliable. however, over time, when you can listen in many states of mind and awareness the truth will 'out'. your body does not lie to you while your mind is fickle. music is one of those things to be enjoyed and savored, not dissected and proved.
and yet if it's important to you to get that proof then that's the way you gotta play it.
take care,
Mike