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Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

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mathematical comparison of formats

The best bet to what? Only to hear what is factually on your medium,
but do you really want that?

Let's look at it from a scientific point of view. Here are some facts:

* The ideal: The analog waveform of the music you intend to hear.
* The cripple: The 16bit 44kHz reduced version of that material (RBCD)
* The alternative: SACD, 2,8224 MHz of 1 bits.
* The improvement: RBCD run thru an upsampler to make 192/24 out of it.

The cripple may sound interesting, but it is surely not close to the
original material.

Let's look at SACD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD
suggests the format can at best be compared to a 88 kHz 20 bit
stream. That would be quite good.

The improvement: Upsampling means soften out the edges with
mathematical spline emulation. This will help restore the original
softness of the recording, but of course it cannot re-introduce
any level of detail that got lost when rendering to RBCD format.

Mathematically, there is no doubt both SACD and upsampled CD must
be superior to the lo-res RBCD format. Which one gets closer to
the original is hard to tell. Mathematical tests could show.
This could be done algorithmically if the SACD encoding and decoding
algorithms were available. Alternatively you could try comparing
the waveforms in an oscilloscope.

Mathematically it could also be determined if upsampling SACD
should lead to even better resemblance to the original waveform,
or if it is already in a range where it is no longer useful.
This should be empirically determinable, but I'm not spending
time and thought on that now.

When it comes to digital vs analog amplification, we leave the
grounds of empiric knowledge again. Analog is likely to sound
more pleasant, digital is likely to tell you the truth, wether
you like it or not, but that's just my opinion.

I gotta get me a soundcard that delivers 192/24 straight, so I
can output my own music productions directly at that bitrate
without any conversions. That would be superior to all 4 options
above.

Unless there is some other problem with it, like, hello jitter,
as I wouldn't have a synchronized link between the soundcard and
the digital amp. HDMI would help though, if there was an HDMI
card that could transmit audio at such a high rate.

Yeah yeah always striving for perfection.

(And yes, I left out the problem of room correction, but we talked
about that in other postings more than enough).

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