1. Home
  2. digital
  3. 144404-20253

High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.

Something that came as a surprise to me is how good DAC's have gotten over the past 5-10 years.

Before then, there was a consistent, marked improvement going from Redbook (44.1/16) to 96/24 or higher.

The modern DAC, the best of them, no longer do this. The Redbook playback is so good high resolution is almost not needed. Anyone else notice this?
erik_squires
fleschler
2,070 posts
 
There are 3 models of Kassandra DACs, between about $25k and $90K.  Which one did you choose?  
bonapardo
1 posts
 
I couldn’t agree more with the OP. The desire for high-res was to reduce the timing artifacts from older DACs.

I have the latest Beresford Caiman SEG DAC which is optimised to more accurately convert an SPDIF clock signal. The stability on Redbook is incredible. Standard Redbook choral music (Thalis Scholars) exhibits only natural harmonics and none of the harmonic timing artifacts that I’d previously assumed were on the recording.

High-res was a temporary workaround.
erik_squires OP
17,544 posts
 
I'm looking forward to Steve Huffman or Stereophile stealing this thread as an article idea, again.
Post removed 
orpheus10
8,668 posts
 

Hi-rez is dead for me because you can only get FLAC, and I prefer WAV; however, I am very much interested in DAC's and CD transports.
More to discover