1.536Mhz PCM/DSD 1024 do we need it?

+1

Interested in playing back some HQP Pro & PGGB upsampled material with Roon. Hopefully it’s not too much to ask

3 Likes

But you also realize this is a “one percenter request”, right? :slight_smile:
Not many people are willing to sacrifice the disk space required in contrast to the percieved quality enhancements, i’d think.

1 Like

You realise roon itself is a ‘one percenter’ product?
And even within roon there’s a lot of ‘one percenter’ features. Not many people use upsampling in roon, or the procedural EQ, or the HQPlayer integration itself, but some do, so why not?

Adding these features doesn’t somehow detract from your own experience if you don’t need them.

I don’t use tags, or MQA decoding, or dropbox integration, but I don’t get angry that they’re there…

19 Likes

Great post ! Thanks for taking the time to set it out with the graphs.

I suspect support for higher sampling rate files or input will be implemented as more equipment starts to use them. At the moment the cost and power to run my preferred HQPlayer modulators and filters at 1024 DSD is a bit much, but it will come down over time. I doubt that I will ever store local upsampled files at those rates though. That’s a lot of zeros that can be created on the fly.

11 Likes

+1 please, it has already been discussed by many experts, and I can’t explain it better than @GoldenSound
I don’t get it why people shout “oh no we don’t need that feature it’s stupid”.
A feature request is exactly that, for the requester and the developer to discuss. If your client comes to you saying they need a special feature, you wouldn’t send them away shouting they shouldn’t need that feature, would you?

6 Likes

Not correct for DACs like the Holo Spring or May that have direct DSD discrete converters, allowing completely external upsampling and modulation.

2 Likes

Additionally many DS DACs you can entirely bypass any internal oversampling and modulation and replace it with your own oversampling/modulator by feeding it DSD.

On AKM DACs for example if you do HQP upsampling to DSD you use the HQP modulator and the DAC does no further processing whatsoever, it just goes straight to output (assuming DSP vol control is not enabled in which case it converts to PCM first).

6 Likes

I’m not sure I understand. If you feed the DAC “wide” PCM at 32fs, won’t the DAC up-sample further and do bit reduction to get to a “narrow” 128fs or 256fs before D/A conversion? It’s not about DSD.

If there is hardware available supporting those formats Roon should too.

3 Likes

My point was not about using or not using external DSD modulators, it was about the fact that DSD256 and even DSD128 is already enough oversampling. Going beyond 256 is just for “my DAC is better than yours” marketing. It’s a manufactured demand, like bottled water.

1 Like

Fact?? You mean it’s your opinion that DSD128 is enough.

Personally, I find upsampling to DSD256 with HQPlayer to be enough but I am not going to tell @GoldenSound or anyone else that they should stop at DSD256 if they like DSD512 or DSD1024 better.

7 Likes

You know I rarely driver faster then 130kmh on the Autobahn but I don’t need a speedlimit for that…

2 Likes

I feed my Holo May DSD256 from PCM->DSD conversion (upsampling + modulation) in HQPlayer.

1 Like

Ok, so you don’t need 1.5 MHz PCM.

The idea is for everyone to make an informed decision. If I see someone on the street whose butt is showing, I’d want to tell them about it, before I assume it’s intentional. (It’s just an analogy, please don’t rat-hole on it).

But with your version of the “facts”, right?

2 Likes

There’s only one version of a fact. While it goes without saying that everything I post is my opinion, there are opinions (e.g. “the Earth is round”) that should be accepted as facts when evidence support them and can only be dismissed as “just an opinion” when such evidence is ignored or twisted.

I personally may not need it at the moment, but given that @GoldenSound measures and evaluates high-end gear, it’s very natural to want to explore the limits of external upsampling and modulation. In particular, it would be very interesting to compare DACs like the Holo May and similar across the range of sample rates they accept. You may believe a priori that it won’t matter, but the rest of us would prefer to get the actual data.

2 Likes

Well, then you should start using real facts in your opinions. Because “DSD128 is already enough oversampling” is not a fact. It’s only your opinion…

3 Likes

That can be done outside of Roon, no need to wait for anything. You can use open source code to up-convert and modulate to your heart’s desire. However, it seems to me this request is based solely on the existence of DACs that can support astronomical rates. This will never end.