When is digital going to get the soul of music?

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.

Mapman - I looked into DCs Ring Dacs to see how they get more detail thru dithering and found out that they don't. Addition of noise in not intentional - it's just byproduct of their scheme. If I understand it correctly now, they use number of current sources at lower bits and rotate them constantly to even out bit-weight. Extra resolution they try to preserve comes from digital oversampling filter. I found this description of differences between Multibit, Onebit and Ring Dacs :

"Multi-bit Nonlinearity — In multi-bit DACs there is a resistor associated with a current source for each bit. Each resistor is half the value of the one before it. So the ratio goes something like this 1 : 0.5 : 0.25 : 0.125 : 0.0625 etc. By the time we divide by two 24 times, the theoretically correct value of the last resistor is 0.000000119209289550781 of the first. Because it is physically impossible to achieve this type of accuracy, all multi-bit DACs suffer from some non-linearity (they distort the signal). This distortion becomes greater as you move from more significant bits to less significant (loud stuff to background detail). Typically, somewhere around the 20th bit the ability to resolve any additional detail is lost.

One-Bit Noise — In Bitstream (1-bit) DACs the resistor matching problem is eliminated and linearity is very good. However, the signal to noise ratio is terrible (6dB). A technique called oversampling is used to improve the signal to noise ratio to acceptable levels. However, the high oversampling frequencies result in narrow pulse widths. Timing errors now become significant, jitter increases, and the end result is thesame. The signal is distorted and the resolution of low level detail is degraded.

dCS Elgar Ring DAC — The dCS Ring DAC uses a patented 5-bit unitary weighted design (i.e., all the resistor values are the same). Oversampling frequencies are low (i.e., it’s less vulnerable to clock frequency errors). But, even this design isn’t perfect. Small variations in resistor value could still have an adverse effect on performance. Even with the carefully matched resistors used in the Elgar their resistance can change with age or temperature. To address this the Ring DAC, instead of using one resistor per bit, uses a large array of resistors. By using a proprietary algorithm (or is it Elgar-ithm) to continuously vary the number and positions of the selected resistors from sample to sample, as though around a circle (hence the name "Ring DAC"), the inevitable slight variations in the values of the resistors are randomly distributed throughout the quantizing range. This effectively turns any tolerance errors into random white noise, which is far more benign than the distortion that would otherwise have occurred. Finally, sophisticated noise shaping is used to move the bulk of the random noise into the high frequency spectrum above 100 kHz, where it is easily removed with analog filtering."

So, previous description I read (from Arcam if I remember correctly) was claiming extra resolution by random switching of current sources and dithering (adding noise). Now I found that they only try to preserve resolution coming from low order oversampler by rotating resistors in multibit converter (that follows) to keep necessary linearity - that would make more sense.