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<I>Stereophile</I> Test CD 3 Test CD 3 Track Listing

Sidebar: Test CD 3 Track Listing

Stereophile Test CD 3 STPH006-2
Total Playing Time: 76:08

[1] Home Theater & Stereo Channel Identification 2:05
(Left, Right, Center, Subwoofer, Surround)

[2] Stereo Channel Phasing 0:34
(Stereo channels in-phase, out-of-phase)

[3] Empire Brass Quintet: "Sibley Sanctus Lydian" 3:59
(from Passage 138 B.C.- A.D.1611, Telarc CD-80355, Surround-encoded)

[4] Dick Hyman: "Topsy" (HDCD-encoded) 6:11
(from From the Age of Swing, Reference Recordings RR-59CD)

[5] Sara K.: "History Repeats Itself" 5:54
(from…

Hi-Fi Retailing: The Avid Audiophile's Advisory

I hate hi-fi stores.

Even after years of intensive Small Business Therapy, it appears my audemporiphobia will remain a destructive, debilitating syndrome (after all, I make my living selling to these places).

For maximum therapeutic effect I shall not presume with this article merely to perpetuate a manufacturer's biases; I confess to having owned a hi-fi store at one time, and working years as a salesperson in another; this message is directed at the music-loving consumer rather than at the few sincere and knowledgeable audio merchants, or the (regrettably larger) quantity of…

dCS 972 D/D converter

I've heard it all a thousand times before:

"J-10, you won't believe this component!"

For sure.

"It'll redefine the listening experience and blow away everything else you've ever heard!"

Yadda yadda yadda. We'll see.

I try not to become blasé about things. Really, I do. Fortunately, Kathleen is such an earthy person that somehow she keeps me from floating completely away.

But the buzz around the Nagra/dCS room at HI-FI '98 was sizzling hot. Steve Lee (footnote 1) was preaching to the converted by upsampling commercial 16-bit/44.1kHz recordings to a…

dCS 972 D/D converter Page 2

A little bit better
Fast forward a bit. (A bit is an undefined unit of audiophile time in which a reviewer waits and a vendor endlessly repeats "Any day now...") Expectations were high as I sent the 24/96-capable 972 and Elgar (serial number ELG289) I'd been auditioning back to the UK for the 192kHz upgrade. Once they'd returned (a "bit" later), I warmed them up and, raising the bar as high as possible, cued up some vinyl on the SpJ/La Luce. Settling into the Ribbon Chair, I turned my attention to a document entitled "A Suggested Explanation for (Some of) the Audible Differences between…

dCS 972 D/D converter Page 3

The 972/Elgar delivered an extremely balanced presentation withal, the lush textures of the music and harmonics never "over-plushed" or obscuring, the incredible detail never chaffy or too sharp. Upsampled, the totality of the musical experience was completely available to me. In fact, it was hard just playing the system in the background—the sound was so interesting and compelling that I usually found myself gravitating toward the Ribbon Chair. I sensed—truly for the first time so profoundly—that I was hearing a full and complete restitution of the original acoustic, down and into the noise…

dCS 972 D/D converter Page 4

Other bits
Up to now I've described the sound of 16/44.1-bit commercial media upsampled to the Full Monty at 24/192. But it was also interesting to play a few Chesky DVD Super Audio Discs and Classic 24/96 Digital Audio Discs upsampled from 96kHz to 192kHz. With the dCS gear set to Auto, the 972 successfully detected changes in media from CD to DVD. That's as should be; at $19k, the equipment must work intuitively, flawlessly, and as transparently as possible.

And mostly it did. But I learned to lower the volume when changing from CD to DVD or back again. Sometimes the Elgar would…

dCS 972 D/D converter Specifications

Sidebar 1: Specifications

Description: Digital to digital converter with bit activity, error, and level meters and digital control of polarity, level, and balance. Input frequencies: 192kHz, 176.4kHz, 96kHz, 88.2kHz, 48kHz, 44.1kHz, 32kHz, 24kHz, 22.05kHz, 16kHz, 12kHz, 11.025kHz. Output frequencies: 192kHz, 176.4kHz, 96kHz, 88.2kHz, 48kHz, 44.1kHz, 32kHz, 24kHz, 22.05kHz, 16kHz, 12kHz, 11.025kHz. Syncs to word clock on both input and output. Input data formats: AES/EBU (XLR), Dual AES (XLR), S/PDIF (Phono, BNC, TosLink), SDIF-2 (BNC). Output data formats: AES/EBU (XLR), Dual AES (XLR),…

dCS 972 D/D converter Associated Bits

Sidebar 2: Associated Bits

Source transport was the Theta DaViD, a 24/96-capable machine.. It sat atop a trio of Black Diamond Racing Cones screwed into Those Things carbon-fiber squares atop a Signal Guard II anti-resonance platform. The Signal Guard was itself suspended on four PolyCrystal-coated brass footers and set up on the top shelf of a PolyCrystal Rack. This effectively decoupled the DaViD from the environment at large. For whatever reason, the DaViD sounded better with its display left on.

I used a number of digital datalinks between the DaViD and the 972. For 16/44.1…

dCS 972 D/D converter Measurements

Sidebar 4: Measurements

It must be clearly understood that upsampling from 44.1kHz to 96kHz or 192kHz doesn't add high-frequency information that was above the Nyquist Frequency—22.05kHz—of the first, lower sample rate.

This is graphically shown in fig.1, which shows the the dCS 972/Elgar's frequency response of the digital signal for three different input conditions. In all three cases, the 972 was set to output a 192kHz datastream to the dCS Elgar, and the Audio Precision System One output an analog sinewave (swept from 20Hz to 100kHz) to a dCS 904 24-bit A/D converter. The…

dCS 972 D/D converter Measurements part 2

To examine what the dCS 972 does when it increases word length, I generated a 16-bit datastream with the PrismSound DScope. Again, this datastream represented a 1kHz tone at -0.1dBFS, and I set the 972 to output this data with a 24-bit word length, as well as adding dither with a triangular probability density function (PDF). These data were fed to the DScope analyzer's digital input. The resultant spectrum is shown in fig.5. The spectrum looks a little smoother, but otherwise appears identical to the 16-bit spectrum shown in fig.4. The greater word length does not result in increased…