Can you hear bit rate?
Almost all the music I listen to these days is from Roon and often a "station" created from an artist I like. So I click on say Melody Gardot and Roon start randomly picking similar jazz music. All great.
As Roon finds new tracks I get stuff rom Qobuz or Tidal and in a variety of bit rates. from 44.1/16 to I think 96kHz/24. Sometimes I think "wow that sounds great" and the source material is high res, other times it is not.
I've typed here for a while that around the turn of the century DAC's have gotten much better at paying Redbook (44.1/16) music than before, so that the difference in sound quality is almost gone. In addition I use Roon to upsample everything to 176 or 192 kHz.
I'm finding the question of source depth, at least with PCM, kind of irrelevant these days. What do you think?
Benchmark Media (well-known DACs and amplifiers) offers at least two white papers from their library that discuss these matters: What High-Resolution Audio is NOT - Benchmark Media Systems Audio Myth -"DSD Provides a Direct Stream from A/D to D/A" - Benchmark Media Systems
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I’m not sure how to answer your question. When I listen to my SACD of Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms, it sounds noticeably fuller than my original CD. Am I hearing DSD X1 or am I hearing somebody who monkeyed with levels and phase when making the SACD? Some other SACD’s I have sound worse than the Hi Rez I get on Qobuz and some sound better. |
You can bet your last dollar that Brothers in Arms was not originally recorded in DSD in 1984/1985. DSD was not released until 1999. There would have been lots of individually miked tracks to play with, though. I think the 5.1 SACD soundtrack is superb - are you listening to the 2-channel SACD version? Almost certainly, Brothers in Arms for the SACD release would have been mastered using the DXD format, also co-invented by Philips. Many SACDs these days are originally recorded as high resolution PCM, including for example Chandos SACDs. When converting high-resolution PCM to DSD, something has to guess where to space out the bits in time. Different guesses, different outcomes. On the other hand, going from DSD to PCM is an exact calculation, when the frequencies are exact multiples, which is true for commercial recordings and why 2L.no archives in very high frequency DSD. |
It’s easy for me to tell the difference between 16 bit and 24 bit on symphonic works, the dynamic range is greater. But the difference between CD rate and 192 is more subtle, slightly better treble, minor compared to the audible difference between 16 and 24 bit. But the overarching problem with PCM is lesser detail definition and a propensity for treble glare compared to 128DSD or higher DSD rates. |
