Well, if this is you trying to stay on the sidelines, I look forward to when you jump in and assert yourself : ) A few things come to mind; all of the large venerable companies to which you've referred make their chip sets to a very strict cost ratio. They would never consider making a great r2r module as the applications are too small and the cost too large. Secondly, the applications are wonderfully broad, perhaps in some instances placing variety of uses over simply making something sound great in a 2 channel atmosphere. Have you ever read the manual on the latest Sabre Chip? It's vast, and the multitude of implementations is in part why I feel its taken years for makers to come to a place of making them sound decent...a learning curve at the least. Don't get me wrong, it's a phenomenally impressive piece of engineering, (which doesn't mean it sounds good) but there's very little it couldn't be positioned to do.One can only imagine what Digital Signal Processing Javier is performing on the digital signal stream in the ASIC IC. Has a sample of the Wadax been provided to Stereophile? John Atkinson’s measurements would provide some insight, in particular the sine wave reconstruction analysis. It would sure to be interesting to prove or dispel the claim that the Wadax is a “straight” digital to analog conversion or just a very expensive Digital Signal Processor.
Where is the AES White Paper with the technical details of how Javier’s /Wadax’s conversion is higher precision, provides higher resolution, or offers more accurate digital to analog conversion than commercial solutions from Asahi Kasei Microdevices (AKM), ESS Technology Sabre, Texas Instruments (TI)/Burr-Brown (BB), Crystal Semiconductors (Cirrus Logic), Analog Devices (AD), or Wolfson Microelectronics (WM)? Hey, maybe Javier and Wadax know something that these multi-billion dollar corporate giants, with extensive PHD led Research and Development teams, do not.
When you take a step back and think for a second, you realize how silly this is and how gullible audiophiles are. If it is Digital Signal Processing you are after nothing beats HQPLAYER for this application, incredibly inexpensive, with tons of options and permutations, many orders of magnitude compared to tube rolling with tubes in the Horizon and Pacific:
Resampling filters:
- 28 linear phase
- 3 intermediate phase
- 11 minimum phase
- 3 impulse optimal
- 3 closed form
Dithers and noise-shapers:
- 4 dithers
- 5 noise shapers
Delta-Sigma conversion:
HQPLAYER with its filters, modulators, and DSP pipeline architecture is so good that even my re-mastering systems have been silenced and may soon be put up for sale.
- 14 modulators
- 49 oversampling filters (64x - 2048x)
- Direct rate conversions, 3 algorithms
- Digital volume control
- Convolution engine
- Routing and mixing
”We” audiophiles are supposed to be smart or at least most pretend to be, but the lunacy, silliness and ignorance that permeates these forum pages really make me wonder how low in IQ , short in general logic & common sense, and gullible some of our deep-pocket colleagues can be.
Sorry, I have been trying to stay away and on the sidelines but I can’t close my eyes and pretend something is something that it’s not.
The idea that larger companies produce better sound has never been a constant. With the size of the companies you rightly brought up, their goals were never to satisfy something as small as high-end audio, or even audio. Take a look at Burr Brown, which was not as broad in applications as say, T.I. and they still worked in industrial process and control, including nuclear power generation, telecommunications, test and measurement, medical and scientific instrumentation, medical imaging, personal computing and multimedia, and somewhere near the end of their focus, digital audio and video. Do you imagine they did quite a bit of listening on high-end gear outside of the lab? Or do you imagine they were more concerned with how many things it could accomplish, how many niches it could fill? Nothing in my listening has led me to believe that larger tech companies set the standard for sound.
HQ Player sounds like a great tool. A few of the studio engineers I work with use it. That doesn't mean that your average audiophile would ever want to take it on...it is a rather broad tool that is only effective when someone has taken the time to learn how to use it. Perhaps a few would go down that road, but not many.
Lastly, before you knock something about which you admittedly know very little, (if only due to the manufacturer not providing their thinking and process) go have a listen. Do you prefer to wade through white papers on why something may be better before taking the time to hear it? Once you do have a listen, you can lob all of the haymakers you want, or conversely, if you're delighted with what you've heard, you make have to order a 'Gullible Audiophile' t-shirt. I have a few of those myself.
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