When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Albertporter, There is nothing soft sounding about my system. It can whack an attack, sear a violin, and bloom a sax. AN, or any other NOS player is the perfect mate to Class D, and I might add SET systems.

You should hear the convincing live volume Grand here.

Kijanki,

I've implemented oversampling and dithering algorithms in software for both commercial and federal imaging applications. Less familiar with application in audio, but I suspect it is analogous.

I suspect it can make digital sound smoother and more acceptable maybe to an analogue lover, but I know that it cannot add detail that was lost upstream, as you have correctly pointed out before.

That is one of the reasons I hesitate to spend a lot on a CD player, I believe a lot of it is valid trickery played to achieve a particular sound.

It's the best you can do if that is the sound you want, but I would agree with Albert that it will never completely equal or surpass the detail possible with analog source, at least technically on paper.

Despite the clear technical limitations, I still find that most well recorded CDs meet my listening needs on my system (which I have tuned considerably as well) just fine, even though I know some more bits of real information in that stream could certainly never hurt.

I am of the long time opinion that the value in many high end CD players is providing a certain sound that someone is looking for, but it is not required just to get the best sound possible off off a CD in terms of information content.

As a result, I still live happily with my oversampling Denon player/recorder, whose sound matches my Denon phono cartridge quite well.

Learsfool, I will defer to your obvously superior knowledge.

My concern was that many audiophiles tend to overanalyze music to begin with. If you add to that a trained ear and the fact that most albums are poorly recorded, it just seems that it might be harder to focus on the music and not on the problems with the recording and playback system. I guess that we just have to learn to enjoy rather than critique.

Mmakshak - Dithering is a postprocessing technique that came, as Mapman pointed out, from imaging. It ads noise on sub-LSB level just before filtering. Master tapes are recorded in 24bit and it is not needed there.

Mapman - Trickery is used mostly to fix deficiencies of the format (resolution and sampling rate). Benchmark is using equivalent of 1 million times oversampling again with a trickery but many people prefer NOS DACs' sound.
Too much of the tech info, I'm afraid, but I just mentioned ring-dacs since you enjoyed the sound.

This has turned out to be a wonderfully informative thread for me. I may need to read this several times to fully absorb.

Mmakshak, regarding:

Tvad, I've got a conspiracy theory and/or an excuse that leaves me totally blameless for not reading Albertporter's posts. The conspiracy theory(which might just be an error in processing by Audiogon) is that Audiogon has decided to review my posts before they are posted. The excuse is that I'm getting old, and missed a complete page of postings when I posted. If none of these work, how about the male tendency to not listen, in order to get what we want to say in?

I hope that's just humor and Audiogon is not editing your posts.