upscaling, bits and resampling ??


Obviously I'm confused how a CD player works. I see specifications that don't mean much. I'd love to get some help understanding what 20 bit vs. 24 bit means to the music; what a DAC that goes from 96 to 192 to whatever means to the sound; and how some players that have lower "scores" in these areas sound better than other players with higher scores!
128x128dennis_the_menace

Showing 2 responses by marakanetz

To be strictly theoretical the number of bits represent an amplitude. Thus for red-book CD the 16th bit represents the highest amplitude. There also the number of samples that divides the audiable freequency spectrum 20Hz...20kHz. 44.1kHz is the sampling rate of the red-book CD. Any represented analogue audiable signal can be placed in the grid of bits and samples.

Imagine that you want to make a copy of the picture and you drow the grid on your empty piece of paper and you drow the same grid on the picture and start re-producing exact copy.
The same thing happens in digital recording. The more density grid the more precise "picture" you will be able to drow.

So finally if you want to know what realy upsampling and upscaling can do:

Upsampling is simply increasing the sampling freequency. It decreases the overall probability of error. One sample from red-book CD decoded by upsampled 192kHz DAC will be decoded by ~4 samples. The resulting probability of error of 4 samples at the same time is much smaller than the probability of error of pure 1 red-book sample.

Upscaling basically will not change even a thing for a red-book CD placing the same way 16-bit amplitude into 20 or 24-bit amplitude. It might only benefit HDCD if coding is present and higher mastered CDs.

New tech made it easier to perform the reading with minimal error in comparison to the older machines but still "former heavy weight digital champs" sound great -- do your research and deside.
Zaikesman, I'm stuck for now with old machines EAD DSP7000 MKII and Monarchy DT 40b as a transport. I'm also curious what units you're going to a/b.
I'm aiming to keep transport but upgrade the DAC and the best so-far I've heard is TACT RCS(pre-amp with DAC)