The Modern DAC killed High Resolution Music - has Stereophile proven it?


Hi Everyone,
One thing I've mentioned a lot is that over the past 10 years or so DAC's really closed the delta in how well they play CD (i.e. Redbook) vs. high resolution (96/24 or higher). I've stated for a long time that the delta closed so much that high resolution music no longer seemed to be as important.

Stereophile just released an interesting set of measurements regarding jitter performance of older players vs. today. It's not absolute proof of my thesis, but it certainly is correlated.


https://www.stereophile.com/content/2020-jitter-measurements

One thing, as I commented, you don't have to compare old DACs to the $15,000 Bartok. The Mytek Brooklyn and others in the $2,000 price range also demonstrate this, and in fact has a very similar jitter rejection profile to the Bartok. The point to me is, almost all decent DAC's have jumped leaps and bounds in jitter performance. That's for sure.  Perhaps this explains the disappearing gap in performance as well between Redbook and Hi Rez?

https://www.stereophile.com/content/mytek-hifi-brooklyn-da-processor%C2%96headphone-amplifier-measur... 

erik_squires

Showing 2 responses by lalitk

+1, mahler123.
Mr. Frugal seems to be stuck inside a box....he has been trying for so long to convince us that high resolution music no longer seemed to be as important.
“Remember how much money Wadia commanded for their upsampling DACs?.”

Wadia is long gone and so is the need for oversampling DAC’s. Today’s high resolution files (above 16bit/44.1kHz) are so darn good that you no longer feel the need of oversampling. IMHO, oversampling adds distortion that’s not only unpleasant but sounds pretty unnatural.  Oversampling is nothing but a cheap gimmick!