I use RCA. Would using XLR be better? HQP+PCM/DSD

I just demo’d a couple different pairs of KEF speakers playing through a Rotel 1572, I believe. I was not blown away in the least. It persuaded me I don’t need new speakers and amp.

I wasn’t suggesting you don’t know how to listen. I am sorry I wasn’t clear but don’t know how I could have worded it differently so you didn’t take offence.

Maybe it is just me. When I am really into something, everything else just fades away. I can be in a room stuffed full of people and noise and can block it all out and be on my own.

Then you fulfilled the ambition you mentioned a post or two back. Good.

Yes, I did. I’m not saying the various KEF’s didn’t sound good. Just not way better than my Bose. I know some people laugh at Bose, but they do sound good.

I just rebuilt my system. I spent a few thousand dollars on power cords and cables and a power condioner. All things that I never believed made a difference before. well, I just found out they do. I added each thing one at a time. I will say that the first cable made a difference and then the rest as a whole made a difference. I would say, 2 things,

  1. if you spent 20k on a system and you buy a $100 power cord, I doubt you’ll hear a differnce. you have to spend enough to get something comparable to the quality of your system. in the same regard, I would recommend 20k speaker wire on your 20 system.
  2. the difference you will hear from cables may not be huge. It may not even be immediatley noticeable, but if you like to sit in the sweet spot and listen, then you will hear the difference. you will hear things that you never heard before. will your system then sound like junk if you remove the new cables? probably not, but there is definately a difference.

I took my old speakers which were the same brand just 2 models down and moved them to my theater set up, which has all cheap cables and older equipment that was pretty good in it’s day. I will not listen to music on this system. I can hear the sound quality difference from a room away.

I then took the speakers that were in the theater and built my son a system in his room using old stuff from the early 90’s. the amp and pre amp back then were about 4k and the speakers were $1600 and I added a $500 oppo cd player. it sounds like crap compared to my new system . Again, I can’t listen to it

with inflation figured in , I probably spent a comparable amount on the new system. more on some pieces, less on others

as for the xlr question, ? not sure what you spent on your system, but I would pick a comfortable number, but not too cheap and give them a try

Hi, it depends on how the output and inputs are designed on your equipment, if they are true fully balanced utilising the earth , and you are using a cable with the three conductors then you will hear an improvement. I find improvement in every area due to the lower noise. Also, the quality of cable conductor is a little less important with xlr but high quality cables using occ silver compliment the improvement in the signal and sound very nice.

I forgot to say, good Ethernet cables make a difference, if you are using the micro rendu which has a crystal oscillator then i wouldn’t bother with the expensive filtered cables , I’ve got an optical rendu and I noticed that when I swapped from a big standard Ethernet cable to a £200 one that there was an improvement in clarity and detail , when I stepped up to a very expensive filtered cable the improvement was very minimal and I could hear a tangible difference, switching back to the cheap cable and it was a clear step down, I would recommend a good cable with quality conductors , the metal plugs and shielded, if you were using just your MacBook Pro connected usb straight into the dac, then I would pay for the more expensive cable with the built in filter blocks etc.

No specific need to use balanced / XLR in most home environments. It has no advantage over short distances and isn’t a “better sounding” connection method inherently. There are usage cases for it though. Such as running from a pre to amps located next to speakers, especially when that route could be electrically noisy (past a lot of mains cables etc). But even then, under 5m or so, XLR doesn’t really have any major benefits.

The ONLY reason i use balanced, is because my DAC runs far too much voltage from its single ended outputs and it result in too much gain into my amp. My Amp expects XLR to be higher in gain (because thats part of its standard), so its gain structure is different and gives me back more range on my volume knob.

If RCA works for you… use RCA / Unbalanced / Single ended. But if you have a practical reason to run XLR, then do so :slight_smile:

I was trying to add up what I have now. I would have to add a few thousand on top to take into account the money lost on buying mistakes.

I have speakers at just over £4000 for 3 pairs and a centre, all Monitor Audio Silver 8, not now made. Two Rel subs, can’t recall the cost but know I really had to think about it. The record player is a Pro-Ject Xtension 10 Evolution at about £3,500, a Yamaha AVR RX-A3080 at about £1700, a few MacBook Pros at approx £2000 each, an Audiolab 8300cdq at about £1200 but can be bought cheaper now, plus an OPPO105d, a Panasonic UMP9000 and a Sony 1100ES. Plus Roon and HQP.

What I have just done is buy, made to order, a 2m and a 3m set of Audioquest speaker cables fro the Fronts which are bi-wired now. These are very well made. Normal 1b and 1r bananas at one one end and 2 of each the other end for sticking into the speakers.

The difference in sq was immediately audible. Sounds much more real and present with the bass vastly improved so that using PD no longer means I lose the bass.

I have also found that PD used when listening to MCH films, plays the MCH so we hear it out of the available speakers and much better than the not PD.

However, no matter which I try to play MCH music, it’s crap.

I had assumed that as it played MCH films thru PD it would do the same with music. Nope. I have MCH music files, bought and made using dBConverter. Can’t hear it. Only the fronts with a very quiet channel thru the other speakers which one has to put one’s ears to to hear it. Even when HQP is set to 7.1ch, it makes no difference, either with non MCH files or with MCH files.

However, am very pleased indeed with the bi-wiring of the fronts.

I know you didn’t asked about files, and feel completely free to don’t answer what I am going to say, but I can’t resist suggesting you not to encode CDs in DSD128. You have plenty of hd space, of course, but it’s still nonsense. CDs are codified to 44.1/16, so absolutely no gain in quality is achieved by ripping their content to higher resolution. It’s like taking a photo to a low res picture with a 8K camera: image won’t look any better.
Also, converting other kind of PCM files to DSD doesn’t make sense either. Best case scenario you are overloading the system by making useless conversions, worst case sound quality degrades (which seems to be your situation). PCM and DSD are simply two different ways to encode digital audio, and going from one to the other makes nos sense unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Sorry again, I mean no offense. But your main question was amply answered, and I since you included all this info in your post I felt I could help in this regard.
Best.

I appreciate you sharing what you think.

I can’t help but think tho that from you are saying HQP and ROON are relying on fools for sales as they both upsample hugely.

Whilst I can be accusaed of he`aring what I want to hear as I am. in charge of the progframs, my husband doesn’t have a clue about tech. He was played straight 16/44.1, 24/192, ans 32/384,. Finallt DSD 128. i played in a mixed order and he wrote down whicxh Nilsson. He chose DSD everytime.

So even if it’s nonsense, it appears his trained ears(trained Opera singer-bass) and untrained me both like the nonsense best.

I DO understand you are not mockiung me nor me you, but in the end it’s ears.

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The short answer is this is setup dependent. If your DAC has a fully balanced design like our products, and your amp also uses a fully balanced design, there is a good chance that XLR may bring SQ benefits.

With your setup, my personal opinion is that the primary opportunity for SQ upgrade would come from having RX-A3080 pre-out to external power amp, at least for the two front speakers. (Edit: I would have suggested a 2-channel integrated amp and bypass the AVR completely, if the OP does not need to play multichannel music.)

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Indeed, XLR/RCA/whatever is going to have no impact whatsoever when the primary amplification is an AV receiver.

I’m using XLR from a Lumin T2 to a Hegel H190, both fully balanced and it sounds absolutely ******* awesome. Better than RCA, and miles better than USB into the amp’s DAC. I certainly would not be putting any of this stuff through our Anthem MRX 720 to listen to stereo music, no matter how good it is for HT - and it is very good indeed.

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This is just what I was thinking of doing. My audio man says there is a simple way to change the fronts between an int. amp and the AVR.

However, the sound we have now is excellent. I know the letters AVR to many means crap SQ and it makes me wonder if it’s been heard or if AVR just isn’t listened to.

I can’t have strangers decide my SQ is crap because I use an AVR. I can have John decide. He has many years of listening experience. He is a trained Opera singer, bass. His preference is for Janet Baker , Sutherland and more modern sopranos and tenors. He thinks they sound wonderful thru our system.

When I bought the Pro-Ject Extension 10, plugged it into our poor SQ avr, he chose a 60 yr old recording of piano music to test drive the deck. Within a minute or so he was off and his eyes glistened. I knew I’d made the correct choice. When he was composed he said that 1. he had heard notes he had never heard before and 2, he chose piano music because it was the hardest to get right SQ wise.

Right now, I have to pay out £0000’s for my WAV (wheelchair adapted vehicle.) sometime in the next 8weeks. This will deplete my BB beyond what I am comfortable with. So a new Panasonic and a new Amp have to wait tho the Audiolab 8300a is not expensive at £899. To be frank I’d only be getting it for the wrong reason.
I can audition it so then I can really decide for ourselves. John who after 39 yrs is the opinion I truly respect is of the opinion that the SQ is excellent as is and thinks I should stop now. He thinks it would be a waste of money.

I am ashamed to say that right now my only real reason for getting an int. amp would be for appearances and t5hat attitude disgusts me.

I appreciate everyone’s input. It has truly helped me think things thru. Since my neuro problems started and my brain injury became apparent, writing or talking thru the same thing for a while helps me to sort it in my head. My biggest problem is that autism tells me everyone is lovely and coming from a good place and i know this isn’t true but its my default setting and i too often miss danger signs.

kind regards

Well, fair enough. Of course I am assuming the test is made from rips in different formats of exactly the same CD. If this is the case, then the reason is probably some component in your chain that sounds better with DSD than with PCM, because it’s impossible to argue with physics and quality can’t be created out of thin air. But it really doesn’t matter: if it sounds better, just go for it and enjoy. Like you say, truth is in the ears.
On a final note, just let me say that Roon upsamples so there is no quality loss when applying processing (DSP, etc.) There is no, and cannot be, any quality gain from upsampling lower resolution digital files.
Best to you and your husband. Listening to music is one of the most beautiful things in the world; listening with the loved one, even more so.

I will always accept science first and foremost.Yet I am confused. Never mind what our ears tell us, from you are saying, the upsampling Roon does and HQP does is nothing at all. If it cannot make a 16/44.1kHz sound better, and they must know this, are you suggesting that these expensive programs are a con? That my 8300cdq that automatically plays cd’s back at 32bit, is just pretending to offer something worthwhile?

I find it very hard to believe that these programs are a big con. Therefore, I am inclined to think that either you don’t know what you are writing about OR I am misunderstanding you.

To be clear, this is what I understand you to be saying: any upsampling of 16/44.1 is nonsense. No better SQ can be had because the physics says so.

This would also mean that the download files one can buy in ‘hi-res’ are also nonsense as I doubt they re-recorded the albums in hi-res. Carly does not sound the same today as she did on her first album, 50 years go, yet that album is sold as 24/192kHz. No way did she re-record it. So it seems to me they just upsampled what was available. I don’t bother buying hi-res now as Roon and HQP both upsample.

If it is not possible, based upon physics, to get better SQ by upsampling a 16/44.1kHz file, then we are being fed a load of tosh.

I understand there is no point upsampling an MP3 for example, as one cannot get back what was thrown away.

I don’t have the language to express myself adequately. I have no formal education beyond the age of 15. Everything I do, from fibre art to knitwear design (my work has been published but someone else had to write out the pattern instructions as I work from my head and do not have a clue how to write out instructions. I also can’t understand them hence being self taught) but to farting about on computers and my photography are all self taught.

I saw a graph of Analogue waves and DSD waves and how the DSD filled in the PCM wave with single bits. It was explaining how PCM is turned into DSD.

I also understand that 16/44.1 takes 44100 bits per second (bits might not be the right word), and can be recorded at 192000 whatsits a second. I understood it was the amount of these whatsits that altered the sound, improved the SQ.

Like I said, I have to leave my experience out of it as I knew what I was listening to and could easily fool myself into thinking that yes, the 192000 sounds better or the DSD64 does.

John doesn’t know and still doesn’t yet with every test, he chooses the hi res versions as sounding better.

If I have understood you, this is not possible as physics says so.

I sincerely hope I have misunderstood you. If I haven’t I have wasted an awful of money on programs I don’t need and may as well have stuck with iTunes and ALAC or AIFF.

However, I cannot get away from the fact that my ears hear different sound.

Aside: I have come to the conclusion that some cd’s/records were just made badly in the first place.

Something else just popped into my mind; i have an acquaintance who is a recording engineer. He has , secretly, remastered a number of records. They are now in 24/96. They do sound much better than. The originals.
Considering what he does for a living for his life(he isn’t young) why would he have done this if Physics says it isn’t possible for him to do it.

Just more reasons to believe I have not understood your point about Physics. (Which by the way is my favourite subject along with cosmology. I read what I can on both subjects, sometimes even papers but they are usually beyond my understanding. ) I will watch docs on Physics.

kind regards (especially if you read this far!)

I will try to answer in the most orderly fashion I can. Strap on, because this will be kind of long.

the upsampling Roon does and HQP does is nothing at all

No. Sorry if I was not clear in the previous answer. When you are just playing, upsampling from a lower quality digital file will not grant you better quality, because information cannot be created from nothing. But if you are going to manipulate the audio in some way (for example, applying an EQ or a compressor, or converting the audio to another format), working with higher resolutions does make sense, because manipulating digital sound means in one way or another adding information to it, and doing so with the highest possible quality yields better results.
Let me show you how this works in Roon.
In this screen capture I am playing a CD quality audio with no processing. Looking at the processing chain, it shows how the audio goes unchanged from the source to the OS mixer:


But what happens if I add an EQ to the chain? Now Roon increases the audio resolution for better processing. The result is not that Bowie now sounds better than before, but that the sound does not degrade when applying the EQ.

Many purist in digital audio will say, actually, that the second option will sound worse than the previous (look up in internet the debate about bit perfect playback for more info in this subject).
Going back to Roon, then, of course they are not vending snake oil, or conning us, or anything like that. It’s just that the upsampling they are applying is for technical reasons other than improving the quality of the original digital file, and they apply it only when it’s absolutely neccesary.

If the hi-res files are taken from a CD, yes it’s utter nonsense. But keep in mind that there are other formats in music, like SACDs (which use DSD as native format) and vinyl (which are analog, so sound information in them can be think of “infinite”, in a way), so hi-res file taken from any of these formats will make a lot of sense.

The “16” in 16/44 means “16 bit depth”, and the “44” refers to “44.100 sampling frequency”. The latter indicates how many samples per second the digital converter takes from the analog sound, and the bit depth indicates how many different values each of those samples can take.
Higher numbers mean more information, and more information means (usually) better quality. So if you have a vinyl record and digitize it using 24/96, you will capture more sound information than if you do it using 16/44. But this only works because vinyl records have INFINITE sound information, so you can go up with the numbers all you want and you will never be able to capture all of it.
Digital sources, on the other hand, will always have a finite amount of information, limited by the format the were captured in. CDs, for example, use the 16/44 format, so they have 44.100 samples per second with a 16 bit resolution. Adding more samples or resolution will NOT add more information, because that would mean creating information out of thin air. And that is magic, and it doesn’t exist.

That’s absolutely true. The format is nothing more than the vessel; if the content is poorly made, it will sound bad no matter which format you use.

You can ask him about all of I wrote here, and I am sure he will suscribe it to the letter. It’s all in the textbooks, nothing here is from personal opinions.
If the remasters sound better, let me assure you it’s because of the work your acquaintance did on them, not because they are 24/96. Try asking him to give you a 16/44 version of any of his remasters, make a blind test with them, and you will find not much of a difference if at all.
Also, remastering is of course processing audio, so it makes total sense for him to use higher resolutions as it was explained above.

Well, I hope you had the patience to read up to the end. And I also hope it will help you understand a little bit better all of this digital audio shenanigans
Let me end by saying that digital audio is much more than just numbers, resolutions and samples. Is an art. So the reason DSD sounds better in your system than PCM may be linked to an infinite number of reasons, but it’s for sure not because a 44/16 file was upsampled to a higher resolution.

Best regards.

Before I forget: my record engineer friend was like you and questioned why I was upsampling to DSD and he gave the same reason. I just said we found it to sound better and the discussion of it went no further and we wrote about other music stuff.

Of course I read all you wrote. I find it very interesting.

I understand what you wrote about the upsampling happening when one uses the DSP which I gather is more than the EQ).

However, both Roon and HQP let it be known very clearly how one can upsample one’s files to much higher rates. To me that is unethical if as you say it does nothing and cannot do anything.

It is a big part of the attraction of both programs and both push that part of it’s abilities. Why would they do that if there is no difference in SQ after one has upsampled? Why is there even the ability to do it? I don’t understand.

This afternoon I went through the process again with John listening and choosing the sound he preferred. I did not alter any filters in HQP from the ones I normally use. As far as I am aware there are no such filters in Roon.

The result was the same. Once DSD was chosen, the sound improved. For the same reasons for both of us. The singers voice lost the edge it had, the music the high notes were also cleaner and the bass no longer sounded muffled. I have no trouble listening to soprano voices via DSD but cannot abide it via PCM which to me sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. DSD takes that edge off. Not only that but I am beginning to be able tell if an opera singer is good or not. When used to say ‘her voice is hard or has a hard edge’ or something I had no idea what he meant. I couldn’t hear it. It all sounded like I wanted it to stop! However, thru DSD files and playback, or PCM to DSD on the fly, I could hear the difference between voices he liked and didn’t like but I no longer was made so uncomfortable by it. Thge edge had gone.

One thing we both said: we heard no difference between DSD64 and DSD128.

The difference we hear is between 16/44.1 and 32/384 and DSD64/128.

I am confident I have understood you with regard to this: the laws of physics say this can’t be. But it is.

I have thought of several things. Why do we need DACS? I think I learned that digital must be turned into analogue or we won’t hear it. This makes me wonder why have digital then? This only just occurred to me: if PCM is analogue, then how can I keep such files on my computer which is digital.

Why are there DACS that have the ability to handle 1536PCM and 1024 or higher DSD when it can’t be heard?

It is confusing to me.

kind regards

PCM is digital data, not an analog stream of music.

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Thank you. There is more I don’t know than I thought.

kind regards

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