Upsampling DACS: Take the Pepsi Challenge

Carl, it seems that Resolution Audio wasn't frustrated by my question. Why must you?

Hi Greysquirrel-- excellent post, and thanks. Finally an answer to the oversampling versus upsampling question from someone who really does know. And I now admit that my original perception, that the two were different, was wrong. You may be interested to know that I emailed Theta Digital with essentially the same question. I got a reply from their Customer Services Rep. (not an engineer or designer); the Rep. asked their digital designers, and they flatly told him that "over-sampling and upsampling are the same thing", but implementation techniques vary. Cheers. Craig.

I guess Jeff Kalt is a better man than me. That's why I bought his CD player over a year ago. I guess since there's no difference in upsampling and oversampling, then there'd be no difference between my CD50, and the new CD55. I'm ok with that, too. Why aren't you, you little squirrely thing, you?

Again I advise reading August HFNRR, which describes the two techniques, although they can acheive the same end result, the "process" is different......read and find out the differences, they claim they can hear the difference

Check out the MSB site's description of their new Platinum DAC where they take a stab at describing the differences. BTW this is an excellent unit. I replaced by Theta Pro Gen Va upraded to 96k with the MSB Platinum unit. I directly compared the Perpetual Technologies upsampler with both DACs and thought the result was inferior. I actually had the dCs units in my system on a borrowed basis earlier this year. In my opinion (but from my memory) while they gave better sound the Platinum covers more than half the distance from the Theta to the dCs. The Platinum's balanced outputs are able to drive my power amp directly from the DAC without an intermediate analog buffer stage. I think good comparison to heat the effects of the digital processing, if you have an excellent analog rig, is to compare the RCA Reiner recordings of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta on the Classics Records vinyl to the most recent remaster on CD. These recordings are some of the most realistic recordings of a symphony orchestra ever made. The difference with upsampling jumps out. (The vinyl is still better but not so much that really bothers me)