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el`Ol wrote:

….I can´t say much about the dCS upsampler, because I only heard it in combination with a Lamm/Wilson combination that in my ears showed some surrealistic saccharine sweetness I found quite annoying. You mentioned some time that the sound quality "goes down the toilet" when it is actived. What is it that you don´t like about it?

Oliver,

It is hard to talk about those things with any degree of certainty. In past I made a number of attempts to evaluate if upsampling makes senses. However, I have no idea if the result I experienced was the clean outcome of the upsampling itself or it was due to any other issues, not to mention the specific implementation of upsampling. Generally it we look at DACs that do explicit upsampling then they do less interesting then DACs that output the same that impute. However there is a great dose of simplicity and even hypocrisy in it as most of the DACs (not all) do internal ?X oversampling and they anyhow introduce the assumed, or non-existing bits between the actual bits.

Probably the best would be to look at the DACs that allow changing the upsampling on fly. I play with a number of them and I always preferred the straight 44/16 in and 44/16 out (in that time the source was CD), though the DAC internally might run the 352.8kHz and I do not even knew about it.

What I do not like with sound quality in upsampling DACs? Well, many things. If audio sound changes during upsampling then obviously it is not good and it indicates the fault of upsampling (and most of them done in this way). What I do not like if the auditable sound was not changes? Here we arrive to the conversation hwy we need sound to begin with. As an applied illustration of audio sound juts for sake of sound itself the upsampling has no problems. However, I feel that upsampling might ruins a very fine and very delicate texture of sound, making our interest in sound less naturally curios and physically attractive. There is a certain sense of relaxed and not violent invite-ness in straight sound (analog has it even more) but upsampled sound has that “inviteness” more rough and less sophisticated. The straight sound I found is always more soft not in sonic terms but rather in humain terms… Perhaps it is some kind of self-hypnoses on my part as intellectually I always ask myself why we ever need upsampling as it anyhow introduces non existing events in recorded sound.

Sure, they are juts generalization and I think it all might be just upon the implementation. For instance the 2X upsampling on dCS upsampler do screw up aggressively even the auditable sound. The 2X upsampling on Pacific Microsonics is absolutely non-auditable in realms of auditable sound and to found the faults you need to drill deep into placebo consciousness.

I would like this post not to be my declaration of being pro or against of upsampling. Nevertheless, I think that for us, the people who try to do audio in the shorted and the most natural why possible it is necessary to prove to us, at least to me, that upsampling is truly necessary. So far I recognize the explicit upsampling as a tribute to something that contrived and my listening experience agrees with it. In my book any DSP activation ruins sound. Who decides what would be the value of the none-existing sample? A mechanical algorithm?

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