MUSINGS: On Michael Fremer's "How Best to Hear Patricia Barber's 'Clique!'" - selective hearing and more MQA nonsense. [Extended Edition!]

A little bit of dramatics for effect. ;-)

Like many audiophiles, I've been well aware of Patricia Barber's recordings over the years. Her discography of "reference"-sounding quality albums have already had decades of influence among hi-fi enthusiasts with increased exposure beginning in the 1990's (her first album was Split in 1989). Personally, I was introduced to her music with Café Blue released in 1994.

I think Barber is an interesting contrast to the other well-known female jazz vocalist we all know well - Diana Krall. Barber's material tends to be more original (less of the standards), more edgy, compared to Krall's accessibility and mainstream appeal.

Already, on this blog, I've mentioned the most recent album Clique! (2021, DR14 hi-res, DR13 MQA-CD) but we're not going to be mainly talking about the music on the album in this post. Rather, I want to explore the opinions and beliefs of Michael Fremer in his article "How Best to Hear Patricia Barber's Clique!" recently posted on Tracking Angle.

Miscellany: FlexASIO for 384kHz, Philips 2001 SACD/DSD64 test signals (thanks Black Elk!), and Roon network multicast. [And Coltrane's A Love Supreme Live Hi-Res, Music Industry Crystal Ball, Magic Quantum Fuses!]

A scene from The Simpsons 1996...

Hey everyone, for this week, let's talk about a few "miscellaneous" topics which I've either wanted to mention over the last few months or have just come up as interesting tidbits I think worth documenting but not necessarily large enough as topics in individual posts. The main topics are:

A. Instead of ASIO4All, we can use FlexASIO with the E1DA Cosmos ADC for 384kHz samplerate measurements in Room EQ Wizard.

B. A look at some "standard" SACD test signals from Philips back in 2001. With many thanks and great discussions with Black Elk.

C. Roon needs network multicasting. Check this out if you're running into network issues; I had some problems initially with my ASUS ROG GT-AX11000 and relatively complex home network.

 

RETRO-MEASURE: 2001 Sony SCD-CE775 5-disc SACD/CD Player (CD test)

Sony SCD-CE775 sitting below the Panasonic Blu-Ray player... A relatively large box - 17" wide, 15" deep, 5" tall.

Every once awhile, I like putting up measurements and thoughts on gear that I either own or borrowed of an older "vintage". I think it's good to have measurements of these older equipment for the sake of perspective! These days, it seems like the moment one buys a new smartphone, wait a few days and we see an announcement for the next generation of product... It was not always like this of course :-).

For this post, let's have a look at the performance of one of my favourite budget audio players that I have owned for the last 16 years - the Sony SCD-CE775, one of the earlier consumer-level SACD players released back when the SACD was viewed as the new-kid-on-the-block of digital formats. This specific model was released in 2001, at around the same time as multi-channel SACDs became available for sale - there was a copy of Kind Of Blue multichannel SACD in the box. I picked this unit up new in the summer of 2002 I believe and it has been a constant on my audio rack since then. My thought at the time was that this would be my back-up SACD/CD player, but as history would have it, with the transition to computer audio, I sold off my Sony SCD-555ES at some point back in 2004 and just stayed with this multi-changer and my old DVD player for spinning disks.

LIST: Suspected 44 or 48kHz PCM upsampled SACDs.

 The sentence says "supported by Japanese SACD manufacturer" (whatever that means!). An example of how the term SACD gets thrown around in cheap domestic and pirated Asian markets (this wasn't a true XRCD either)...

As I mentioned previously in my post on SACD (and DSD), there are a number of SACDs I have digitally ripped over the years that appear to be sourced from 44kHz PCM. This is of course the same sample rate as good ol' RedBook CD and therefore it's unlikely that these titles should sound any "better" than the CD release since the PCM-to-DSD conversion process will add some distortion to the original signal.

It's not difficult to detect these releases because of the "brickwall" loss of frequencies beyond 22kHz. Note that this list is of course unofficial and even though there's evidence that these come from 44 or 48kHz PCM, it's still possible they're from 24-bit data which could still be "hi-res".

An example of the 22kHz brickwall - Thelonious Monk's "Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea" off Straight, No Chaser SACD. Notice the typical ultrasonic 'noise shaped' SACD quantization noise from 22kHz up - filtered off in this case before 40kHz.

MUSINGS: On SACD & DSD audio...

SONY multi-page spread (with hybrid SACD 'RS500' sampler!).
Rolling Stones magazine, December 2003.

Okay, now that I have posted a number of measurements over the last months, permit me a moment to play "Speakers Corner" and talk a little about the state of affairs around DSD now in early 2013...

Firstly, remember that DSD isn't anything new. It's basically a digital format based on Delta-Sigma modulation which has been used in consumer digital audio since the late-80's and early 90's - remember those old Sony 1-bit and Panasonic MASH players from around that era? It was said that as the CD patents were set to expire, Sony and Philips decided to create a new disk format for the 21st century - hence the birth of SACD around 2000 using the "1-bit" encoding method instead of multibit-PCM carried on DVD-like disks capable of higher data capacity (multi-bit ended up being DVD-A of course). Sound quality was said to be better because of things like "100kHz frequency response", better noise floor and in time, multichannel. Of course in creating this new standard, copy protection was job one and they did a great job. I remember in 2004 visiting China and seeing pirated DVD-A's which were easily "cracked" soon after release, but not so SACD's.

MEASUREMENTS: Pioneer DV-588A - DVD-A and SACD "universal" player!

Hey guys, remember the SACD vs. DVD-A "war" back in the early-mid 2000's?

In the heat of the battle, it was nice that a few manufacturers gave us these "universal" DVD players that could handle both competing formats. Pioneer was one of them and in mid-2003, released to the world the very reasonably priced DV-563A (~$200). A year or so later, this model under consideration, the DV-588A was released. I remember browsing around Future Shop (owned by BestBuy these days) in 2005 to pick up this unit since my previous Panasonic DVD player failed on me. At <$200, I figured I couldn't go wrong since this would 'in a pinch' also play my small collection of DVD-A and larger collection of SACD's.

The innards of this player revolves around the MediaTek MT1389EE SoC chipset which graced many <$400 players back in the day (including the Oppo DV-981HD and Sony NS955 [chip apparently relabeled as Sony CXD9804R]). Although it has been said that this chip is capable of "PureDSD", I do not believe any of the lower priced units operated in this mode because multichannel and bass management were performed in the PCM domain. As a result, the 1-bit DSD (actually DSD64 for the 64 x 44.1kHz = 2.8224MHz SACD sampling rate) in these machines are converted to 24/88 prior to conversion by the DAC (supposedly a BB DAC is used in this unit).

With the advent of PS3 SACD digital ripping in 2011 and a firmware upgrade to the Pioneer, this unit joined the ranks of the relatively few SACD players capable of playing backup SACD-R's.

Given the low price, let's see how well this player measures... First I created a DVD-A with the RightMark test signals along with the J-Test to have a look at how it performs as a hi-res PCM unit.

Setup: Pioneer DV-588A --> 6' shielded RCA --> E-MU 0404USB --> AMD X4 laptop, battery power, Win 8 x64
- Equipment plugged into Belkin PureAV PF60 power filter (same general setup as what I used for the Transporter previously).

Okay, so far not too bad for a budget player...  It can benefit from 24-bit audio with a dynamic range around 17-bits. Here's the 24/192 frequency response:

And here's the noise level (useful when we look at the SACD graph) - reasonably flat to about 50kHz:

As usual, I plotted the Dunn Jitter Test (24/48):

Quite jittery as you can see with a number of sidebands congregated +/- 1kHz around the 12kHz main signal.

Now as I mentioned above, this player is capable of SACD-R playback. So, I downloaded KORG AudioGate and went about converting the 24/192 PCM RightMark test and calibration signals and 24/48 Dunn J-Test into DSD64. With the help of a friend who's into this stuff, we got the tracks authored onto a SACD-R for testing.

Here's what RightMark looks like playing the SACD-R:

Not good... Just marginally better than DVD-A 16/44.

Lets have a look at the frequency response curve:

Not unexpectedly, the fact that it's resampled to 24/88 leads to an earlier cut off in frequency response than the DVD-A 24/192 spectrum above. I wonder if AudioGate is imposing a low pass filter starting around 30kHz to create that early steep drop off...

Noise spectrum:

Note that extra "bump" at 25 to 44kHz thanks to the DSD noise shaping (absent in the PCM noise graph above) - remember that this is a log scale so it's all scrunched up in the corner. The fact that the noise gets truncated at ~44kHz makes sense for the 24/88 PCM conversion, that's why I wondered above if AudioGate is cutting off the frequencies of the test signal earlier at 30kHz.

Although the Dunn J-Test is invalid in terms of stimulating worse-case jitter in the DSD domain, for the heck of it here's the spectrum (again 24/48 test):

It's cleaner than the PCM graph above. Possibly the resampling from DSD to PCM done internally - like ASRC's - is cleaner than the direct PCM from the DVD transport (I don't think it has to do with corruption of the LSB jitter modulation tone since even a straight 12kHz sine wave looks very jittery in DVD-A).

Summary:
Hey, I got to measure a DVD-A / SACD player with my custom SACD-R & DVD-A disks :-)! I've often wondered how this old Pioneer compared in terms of SACD vs. DVD-A playback. Subjectively, I've always thought it sounded good but not exceptional. I never bought the same title on both DVD-A and SACD to actually compare how the two would sound. Even if I did, there would be no assurance that the mastering would be identical anyways. Although I have about 30 SACD's still, they're barely listened to compared to the computer music server and my Squeezebox players. The fact that I do have a dedicated SACD changer still (the venerable Sony SCD-CD775) also means I don't bother with the Pioneer for music playback the few times I spin a disk not for the purpose of audio ripping.

Overall, the objective data points to a 'fair' DVD-A player for its price and a 'mediocre' SACD player with dynamic range just a hair above that of an ideal 16-bit CD. Of course I'm converting my test tracks from PCM to DSD and then the player is re-converting back to PCM again so this will affect the sound quality negatively...  Furthermore, I haven't played with AudioGate enough to get a sense of how good it is as a PCM to DSD converter compared to something like Weiss Saracon which is much too expensive for the casual hobbyist. Nonetheless, since RightMark is measuring dynamic range at 1kHz (should be quite good for DSD64), it should still measure better than what I got assuming the digital data conversion was done competently and the 24/88 internal conversion algorithm is good.

The question of course is how well does a good "pure DSD" SACD player measure compared to something like this budget Pioneer? Can anyone suggest a good SACD unit to try which can play back SACD-R's?

[It would have been nice to convert 24/176 test audio to DSD rather than 24/192 due to the even multiple 44kHz sampling rate. Unfortunately the EMU-0404USB seems unable to handle this sampling rate well for me. Ideally of course, DXD 24/352 would be even better!]