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Marantz SA-10 arriving Monday!

I've been hearing and reading all I can about this player during this last year. I have a 6005 right now and it's a nice player but not as good as my analog rig (10k) so it's not a fair comparison. Elizabeth mentioned that her SA-10 is better than her analog. I will be comparing the 2 SACD players side by side. I have at least 3 CD's in which I have duplicates. I'm fascinated about how the circuitry upsamples to DSD SACD. Well not exactly but somehow an improvement over Redbook CD. I have a 2" thick maple block coming in the same day for it. It's going to be a long weekend. I know it can't work miracles on all CD's. If there is jitter in the recording then supposedly you will never get that out. Speak up if I'm wrong about that.
blueranger
elizabeth
6,726 posts
 
"different settings'... So don't use them. I leave dither at one, which is the typical normal. Plenty of high end DAC have alternate filter settings. and I leave the noise shaper settings off.Though I turn off he headphone, and leave the phase reverse to US standard (normal Japan standard) on XLR.     
I think your notion that there is some 'faithful' setting is a fantasy.
astru
19 posts
 
I believe the point of the settings is that the PCM format is not lossless, and Marantz provides the option to play with different settings because there is no agreed way to reconstruct the original acoustic signal. None of those settings work for DSD, which has "enough" resolution. In fact, I plan to try finding out which combination of settings on PCM comes as close as possible to DSD by using hybrid discs - but that’s a pretty substantial effort (for long winter evenings), and it will be recording-dependent most likely.

Elizabeth, if your unit is made for the US market then the XLR polarity follows the US standard: pin 2 is hot and pin 3 is cold. You should not reverse it. (BTW, phase and polarity are different things.) Also, except for dither, there is no "Off". You may keep Marantz default settings, but those do not provide the highest SNR, as they documented in the manual.
cleeds
2,065 posts
 
astru
... the point of the settings is that the PCM format is not lossless ... there is no agreed way to reconstruct the original acoustic signal.
You must be confused. PCM is very much a lossless format. That doesn't mean it's perfect, but it is most certainly lossless.
astru
19 posts
 
You are saying that a discrete encoding using 16-bit resolution at 44KHz sampling rate of continuous signals from 0 to 20KHz is not lossless? You get quantization errors + you are guaranteed not to be able to recover perfectly the high frequencies. Please "unconfuse" me.
cleeds
2,065 posts
 
astru
You are saying that a discrete encoding using 16-bit resolution at 44KHz sampling rate of continuous signals from 0 to 20KHz is not lossless?
No, not at all. As I said:
PCM is very much a lossless format.
That doesn't mean PCM is perfect. But all audio formats are subject to limited bandwidth and various distortions, to some extent. But no, 16/44 PCM is not a lossy format.
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