That said, there may be other areas for the rest as well that may require bump-ups in performance, such as the S800 board - which required a hardware swap during the 2.0 upgrade by the way.
Well, it is an older architecture from which everything else trickled down. So, I suppose that’s to be expected? (And likely where the next-generation will once again start from? )
Possibly. Although at the time, I seem to recall multiple discussions about the rate bump up (but can’t seem to find reference to that in any of my old docs. Have to look harder).
ps: Just caught this part;
On a normal system I would agree that’s true. However, as the incoming PCM/DSD are requantized into the Ring DAC, your statement may not quite be true (at least from a mathematical standpoint ).
Just a note for those interested–and breathing some air back into this thread–here’s lookin at you @James ; ) --Eudora Records, based in Madrid, is making some of the finest high resolution recordings out there.
Many are recorded in DSD256 (not upsampled to that level).
While of course I know it is not apples to apples because of bit depth, that is a sample rate of 11.3 MHz, versus 353 kHz with DXD, a difference of ~32x, or nearly 11 million samples per second more. That’s a big difference!
The maximum bitrate rate of DXD is 384kHz x 32bit, which turns out to be about the same bits/second as DSD256 (bits contain information too).
So from an information carrying perspective, DSD256 does not offer anything above DXD. Unfortunately there is some very nice music that is recorded at DSD256 and quality is lost in a conversion to DXD. Admittedly the quality loss is not huge, but it is there by principle.
I find DSD Master has the smallest quality loss when converting DSD256 to DXD.
my 2 cents…
I don’t care about fancy highres super formats as long as the recording engineer makes a good job. Some of my ol’ CDs sound better than 192/24 recordings today
Most DSD captured recordings are converted to DXD for editing. NativeDSD (who is likely the largest DSD download service) is very transparent about this. The catalogue of pure Native DSD recordings is very very small - mostly tape transfers and Live performances captured in DSD with no editing.
Nevertheless, it would be interesting to know if running the dCS mappers at a higher speed for DSD 256 would improve the playback of everything else.
Everything that goes into the dac will be converted to 5 bit up to 6.144MHz. I don’t think adding DSD256 as an accepted format at the input end will change anything for the speed of the Ring DAC including mapper of the latches. This would just be a matter of FPGA programming I presume.
Indeed this does make me laugh - click on each of the recordings in the top row. The first was captured in DSD 256 but likely converted to DXD for editing. The next 3 were all captured in PCM from 96 to DXD.
Hello the community. I read again the thread, perhaps too quickly, but not able to find an answer. I’m happy with the DSD128 compatibility and upsampling but is the ring DAC design and/or upsampler design enable to go further than dsd128 (dsd256 and above) for compatibility and upsampling ?
I’m not evaluating the interest just try to understand if an hardware evolution needs to be taken into account or a software solution is an option.
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