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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
erik_squires OP
15,647 posts
 
outstanding scaler DSD files sound better then CD not mention Tidal Masters.


But why do we assume this has to do with the resolution of the files instead of the performance of the DAC?

For decades audiophiles were told that high resolution data sounded better just because. What if they just didn't play CD's very well to begin with, and now a lot of DACs play CDs much much better than they used to?

I was lucky enough to have DACs that bridged this temporal divide. The ARC DAC 8 and a Mytek Brooklyn. With 96k/24 music they both sounded very good, but with Redbook (44.1kHz/24) the Mytek was still outstanding.

This made me stop and consider that maybe the issue was not the resolution of the music, but rather that the DAC 8 just didn't perform very well at low resolutions.


Best,
E

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mayoradamwest
429 posts
 
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. 
ddude003
161 posts
 
Three things come to mind...  First, many DACs do upscaling/upsampling internally...  Second, often the provenance of a music file is unknown...  Is it just upsampled Redbook or a Studio Master that was really recorded at a higher resolution... Lastly, MQA and DSD are broken...  Therefore, it is often obscured as to what you are really listening to...  Apples are not equal to bananas...
erik_squires OP
15,647 posts
 
How do you know the DACs you’ve heard just aren’t very good at high resolution?

That would be a lot of DACs. .



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mayoradamwest
429 posts
 
Might be a time to check down stream. Preamp, amp, speakers, or most probably, your ears. 
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