Digital Is Digital

While talking with my #1 Technician again the other day about the state of Digital in the Audio Industry and it's associated performance limitations we came to the agree upon some of the following misguided folly by the general public.

He has a very unique way of explaining things to people that can make the most complex of subjects totally understandable and interesting to the widest of audiences.

Far better than I could ever manage to do. It is from this man that some of by best ideas have come from so to borrow parts of our conversation I would like to share some of this information with you so you can make up your own minds before you next Hi-Fi purchase.

Unless you are chasing SACD playback, in 2010 there is no logical reason to continue with optical based Disc Players. People who attempt to argue this fact with me, when I question them as to why they consider CD Players to be superior to Lossless Music Servers, I find they can never explain to me any compelling reason for this line of thought in any technical way. DAC's today use 64 times oversampling. Data gets sampled against a table of base data 64 times before it hits the output stage. When errors occur they occur randomly. It is just about mathematically impossible for there to be any errors with today's sampling technology that is used in even the cheapest of DAC's on the market. Jitter is not the problem it once used to be 25 years ago.

When I question customers further about why they think the way they do, it is painfully apparent to even the most untrained eye to see they do not fully understand even the most basic fundamentals of the digital processes in operation today. The whole idea of digital encoding, digital transfer and the digital encryption process is to preserve Lossless data in it's original form. You can transfer digital core data from a Hard Drive to a Solid State Drive to a USB Memory Stick to a Flash Drive to a CD-R to a DVD-R to a Pocket Drive and then back to the original Hard Drive with bit perfect integrity. This is fact not fiction and it should be obvious from understanding this process that the Optical Drive component of CD Players thus makes no difference to musical performance. You could use a $30.00 DVD-ROM Drive as a Transport and some Hi-End CD Players certainly do without any measurable loss. Because guess what, it makes no difference because digital is digital.

This line of thinking would be a bit like a photographer buying and using a memory card in the same old fashioned way we all bought and used film. Taking a picture on your digital camera and printing directly off the memory card and keeping the memory card with the original image as recorded by the camera as a digital negative instead of just having one memory card and transferring everything to a Hard Drive when it gets full because transferring and storing digital information on a Hard Drive would somehow degrade the original data. Crazy, yes. Logical, no.

When we transfer digital information from our computer's optical ROM Drive to the Hard Drive (which is the same as a CD Transport transferring information to a DAC) it does not matter which brand Drive we use and we do not obsess over having the most exotic and expensive optical Drive in our Desktop or Laptop. I have certainly never seen any computer optical ROM Drives engineered with with Hi-End Audophile Transport build quality and heard the I.T. Industry claim it makes a difference. Why..... well because any company that tried to market such a product would be the laughing stock of the developed World and risk bankruptcy overnight. The product wouldn't sell because, it does not make any difference to the transfer integrity and hence the final copy. The I.T. Industry make Optical Drives as cheaply as possible for a very good reason. Don't you think this is trying to tell you something... The data still gets there in the exact same form that is was on the original source CD. The Computer Industry's top engineers would find the way some Audiophiles' think highly delusional and I fully agree with them.

When the DAC receives the digital signal for decoding it does not know, nor does it care what sent the signal and I can assure you in no uncertain terms it will bare no prejudice or resentment if it comes from the most basic $50.00 DVD Player or the top of the range x tens of thousands of dollar Transport. It will either receive and Lock-On to the digital signal or it will not. There is no in-between with digital signal transfer. It is a 'Go' or 'No Go' type technology. That is the most critical point to understanding digital. I find it highly amusing when someone calls me and asks me to repair their $20K C.E.C. Transports that no longer reads. When I take the units apart and show them the plastic $100.00 Sanyo laser mechanism from 1990 these units use you should see their jaw drop and hit the floor in no time flat. Most of these companies produce nothing more than DAISy kit Players. DAISy can supply everything from the Laser Mech to the Display Kits that will facilitate any 3rd party audio company constructing and re-badging their 'own' CD Player and claiming it as their technology. You think this doesn't and couldn't happen? Well think again. Some of the most expensive CD Players on the markets today over $20K are built from DAISy parts.

Also guess what... all these Laser Mechanisms in C.E.C. TL-0 Transports are using obsolete analogue servo boards from at least 15 to 20 years ago that are no longer in production for the one reason and one reason only as far as I can tell. They are the only ones capable of having their clock speed slowed down far enough to cope with a belt drive optical pick-up system. Today's new digital servo boards process the data too fast for such an antiquated system. Yeah, I thought you would all get a kick from that one. So why does C.E.C. use a belt driven CD Transport? Because being belt driven is analogue technology and analogue is known to be superior to digital so logically it is easy to convince potential customers that having an analogue optical Transport for what is essentially a purely digital technology (that would be a hard sell if ever there was one and a contradiction of basic logic) is somehow superior to models of their competitors. BAHAHAHA some of these audio companies crack me up.

This is hardly an uncommon occurrence from small boutique manufacturers. Why.... well because there are huge profit margins that require extremely low engineering costs to produce the end product to be taken advantage of and fully exploited. If there is a lot of money to be made and it is not illegal you can bet someone will do it. Many overpriced 'Audiophile' CD Players on the market today are nothing more than an over dressed and over priced fancy box which houses nothing more than the cheapest of cheap laser mechanisms that can be found in your bottom of the range Pioneer or Sony DVD Player combined with a new generation DAC on-board to make it sound quite ok and decent. Little does the buyer know why and neither will the manufacturer disclose these reasons to the buyer in their glossy product brochures.

Because the Hi-End Audio buyer is coming from a 'Hi-Fi Culture' which has been carefully cultivated over decades by marketing Spin Doctors rather than a 'Computing Culture' where there are no such false pretences or misgivings. These customers expect there to be a significant difference in optical Transports and are willing to foolishly pay exorbitant prices to justify their misguided dedication to their beliefs and they talk themselves into believing there really is a difference without doing any blind testing to justify their assumptions. This seat-of-the-pants testing and the level of spin passed off as Urban Legend would never fly in the I.T. Industry but in the Hi-Fi World it is common place and universally accepted and expected.

Instead of thinking in a digital domain they are all still thinking with an analogue mindset which by it's very definition must adhere to analogue engineering principles. There is a hell of a lot of voodoo logic, snake oil and smoke & mirrors used in the Hi-End Audio Industry to fleece uneducated buyers from their money which they obviously have too much of. To be fair, the same could also be said of many other industries. Many Hi-Fi companies market their digital products that are pushed in the audio trash magazines with the same false ideology they use with their analogue products. Everyone reading this, get it through your head. Digital is Digital and Analogue is Analogue. They are not the same and the thus do not require the same engineering requirements. If manufacturers actually told the public the truth about digital technology, nobody would be able to make any money on it. Considering that digital products today represent a technology that is the bulk of the Hi-Fi market place, you start to get an idea of just how much money we are talking about here and you might begin to realize the lengths they will go to in order to protect their financial interests.

No, not all CD Players or DAC's for that matter sound the same but it is not for the reasons that you might first think. The differences one hears from good to bad CD Players come more from the power supply, capacitors, wiring and circuit integrity, output stage and to a lesser extent the DAC than anything else. Certainly not the Transport drive. I put the DAC down the back end because I have tested external DAC's from some of the industry's best manufacturers like Audio Research, Esoteric, Cambridge and Mark Levinson and I estimate that unless you are spending well over the $10K mark (although not even confirmed yet) a, the differences I have yet to encounter are fully non existent. So unless you are talking about an extreme Hi-End CD Player I would think twice and to buy an extremely good CD Player today in the age of Lossless Music Servers (eg. Wadia 170i) is false economy of the largest scale.

In the digital world the most critical conversion is always performed in the recording studio from the analogue tracks to digital data storage desks not the conversion done in your listening room with your Digital to Analogue Converter. Do you honestly think that all CD's are mastered perfectly and every record label uses the same State -Of-The-Art equipment? Information that is lost at the source can never be recovered. The original A to D conversion of data is more than 1,000 times more important than the subsequent D to A conversion in terms of performance. By understand this process and how music is recorded and encoded form a Sound Engineer's perspective, you might begin to see why you are very much wasting your time and money chasing the Holy Grail of Hi-End DAC's. We all have CD's in our collection that are simply unlistenable. Now you know why.

This is the main reason why vinyl even today in the age of SACD still sounds so much better than digital in so many ways. Obviously you are skipping one and sometimes two full conversion processes (depending on how the Record is cut) to start with. This is a huge advantage that I am yet to personally see digital technology recover from. Analogue by it's very nature is just getting too much of a head start in this race I must say for it to be a fair comparison. The original A to D conversion process is where the most damage is done to the sound source.

I have proven this time and time again. When connecting a Digital source to multiple DAC's simultaneously and then all to my VTL TL-7.5 Series II Line Stage in my Reference System 1 it provided for a very interesting comparison. The TL-7.5 Series II allows for each input to be level matched and all DAC's were connected via their respective Balanced outputs. Trimming the levels of each input to it's corresponding source is vitally important for a far and equal comparison to rule out any obvious volume differences that may otherwise affect the outcome.

This allowed me to switch inputs between a Cambridge Audio DacMagic approx $500.00, Esoteric D-07 approx $5,000.00 and a dCD Paganini approx $20,000.00 in real time and observe the differences. Sonically, there were none. If I did not set this test up myself I would seriously question the results.

The outcome was so shocking to me the first time I did this I went back and fourth, switching between the inputs to be faced with what could only be described as one of the Audio Industry's greatest hoaxes of all time.

I compare everything to a base level DAC that uses a standard DAC chipset. I use a Cambridge Audio DacMagic that costs only $599.00 as a modern reference level of an affordable product. Now you know why I also use it in my Reference system as opposed to something more exotic.

With the DacMagic you are not really paying for the performance of the DAC but the convenience it offers. USB, Balanced Outputs, sampling frequency between 32-96kHz and up-converting to 24 bit/192kHz.

Marantz SA-11S2 (Analogue Out) vs Marantz SA-11S2 (Digital Out) > Cambridge DacMagic (Analogue Out)

Pioneer DV-410V (Analogue Out) vs Pioneer DV-410V (Digital Out) > Cambridge DacMagic (Analogue Out)

To take things a step further I also set-up a comparison test between the DacMagic and two Disc Players. The first being a Pioneer DV-410V DVD Player. It's list price was about $200.00 when new. The second was the Marantz SA-11S2 at around $5.5K. A test CD was played on the Pioneer and the Marantz and their analogue audio outputs run to my VTL TL-7.5 Series II Line Stage again through my Reference System 1. The digital output of the CD Players were also connected to the DacMagic and then that was connected to another input on the VTL TL-7.5 Series II Line Stage. Once again switching between the CD Players analogue outputs and DacMagic analogue outputs there was absolutely no sonic differences. Did this secondary revelation surprise me? No, not really. After the first comparison between the DacMagic and other DAC's on the market up to the value of $20K I was subconsciously prepared for anything that might seem like an unpopular and unusual result.

We now live in an age of very advanced DAC modules that have been perfected over decades of engineering development and through trickle down technology these can be picked up from around $500.00. Today DAC's in this price range sound fantastic. If your system sounds bad with a DacMagic, let me be the one to break it to you. Guess what, "It's not your DAC, it's the rest of it!" These simple comparison tests have proven to me that there is no difference in any of the DAC's under $20K that I have tested so far in terms of sonic performance. Probably not all that surprising knowing that they all use basically the same off the shelf DAC modules with extremely similar technology benchmarks in their respective output stages'. The exception being dCS who run their own proprietary Ring DAC circuit which is made up of around 40 chips, none of which are DAC chips. You can read all the other techno mumbo jumbo on their website rather than e-mailing me about it asking me why why why.

Basically, the biggest differences will be found in Amplifiers, Line Stages, Loudspeakers, Subwoofers, Turntables, Cartridges and Phono Stages. In other words; anything that is analogue in nature will make a considerable difference to the overall performance. Spend your money in these key areas. Digital components reveal the least differences per dollar spent. This fact is very clear and has been confirmed in numerous tests. At the end of the day it is just as easy for me to sell expensive digital products to a customer that I know will make little to no difference to their system then it is for me to recommend something that will really work and give maximum value for money spent.

Just like you can buy even the cheapest mobile phone today that has more than twice the features of the top models 5 years ago, DAC technology is the same. It is of course all computer based and just like the computing industry according to Moore's Law that dictates computing power will double approximately every two years. This trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until at least 2015 or later.