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 3 responses by mayoradamwest

As a self declared frugal, I would guess you simply don’t have a system resolving enough to hear the difference. No problem with that, but I have absolutely no problem hearing the difference when switching between 16/44 and 24/192. 
How do you know the DACs you’ve heard just aren’t very good at high resolution? I owned the Brooklyn DAC+ for quite a while and I heard the difference. Also, I’ll reiterate, that your system just might not be resolving enough or your room is not allowing maximum acoustics. 
I can see the difference between 4K and HD but not everyone can. Does that mean that maybe HD is just as good and we just haven’t seen the best upscaler yet? No, because that’s ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as your point. 
Might be a time to check down stream. Preamp, amp, speakers, or most probably, your ears.