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In Reply to: About: " Something about the sound that is pleasant." posted by AbeCollins on November 18, 2020 at 07:03:28:
I recently got an Analogue Productions SACD of Bill Evans/Shelly Manne Empathy and initially thought I had completely wasted my money when I heard the CD layer (first). The piano had a nasty "ping" to it and the recording sounded flat - the drums lacked ambience in the decay.
When I flicked to the SACD layer, the difference could not be greater - the "ping" had gone on the piano and the drums sounded incredibly natural in the recorded acoustic.
These were both played through the same PCM DAC so the conversion stage is identical - I use an Oppo 103 set to output PCM and use an HDMI link to a NAD M51 which enables the SACD layer to be output to the DAC. Since the M51 uses a 108MHz video clock, the HDMI input has the same very low jitter performance of the other inputs.
So I decided to investigate further:
I took a CD track (The Washington Twist) and converted it to DSD64. Since the conversion involves reducing the bit depth to 1 bit, adding noise-shaped dither is essential so I decided to investigate what adding dither to the standard Redbook PCM would do. I did two versions, one with simple TPDF and the other with a lightly noise-shaped dither (iZotope MBit+) for comparison.
The results were very interesting:
The DSD64 conversion of the CD layer was virtually identical to the SACD layer.
The TPDF dither solved the annoying "ping" and removed the slight harshness and restored the imaging and ambience that the DSD64 version had although it wasn't quite as smooth.
So, this says 3 things to me.....one is that there is nothing wrong with Redbook PCM when properly mastered and dithered. Secondly, I suspect that "harsh" sounding CDs are likely not properly dithered and finally, conversion to DSD64 does sound noticeably smoother and subjectively "better" when directly comparing the original Redbook version (as presented on the disc). I am convinced that this is not because of the format so much (since the final conversion to analogue was PCM in all cases) and definitely not due to bandwidth (since it is identical in all cases).
I also repeated the experiment on the new MoFi SACD of Run DMC "Raising Hell". The CD layer on this was incredibly awful with a really harsh glare on the higher frequencies (and I am not crazy about the "yelling" now that I have become older....and hesitate to call this music), but repeating the same experiment as for the Bill Evans fixed the harshness.
I therefore conclude that dither and possibly noise-shaping is responsible for the (very clear) audible differences and I am convinced that the CD layer was likely not properly dithered when it was converted from the DSD file.
Regards Anthony
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.." Keats
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Follow Ups
- I did an experiment recently...and I think dither is the key - flood2 01:44:20 01/15/21 (0)
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