Upsampling CD player

crazy

Since we're on this CD topic - what is an upsampling CD player?

I've heard of video upsampling but not of audio upsampling.

http://store.acousticsounds.com/browse_detail.cfm?Title_ID=13475&section=music

janmike

Good article expains it all.

Article

crazy

Thanks a lot for the link to the article.

shack

janmike wrote:

Good article expains it all.

Article

CLASSIC! Moon using other's marketing hype to market hype their product.

"Their stuff is voodoo....but our voodoo is real...;)"

Ferres

Video upsampling is more logical since you can up size an image and sharpen it to make it appear better.

How can you do the same with music?

unc2701

Think of it as 480i vs 480p. All DVD's are recorded in 480i- 30frames a second, but a progressive DVD player has an algorithm to make the image smoother- 60 frames a second. CD oversampling does the same thing. The sound is sampled a discrete number of times per second and an oversampler has an algorithm that make it sound like it was sampled many more times.

Early B.

OK, but is upsampling mostly marketing hype or does it actually provide an improvement in sound quality for CDPs?

smglbrth

What Early said, I wouldn't mind knowing either...

BlueMDPicker

It depends on the implementation of the upsampling.

Some products use asynchronous interpolation to increase the data rate from a CD to 96 kHz or 192 kHz. My Shanling CDT-100 uses (user switchable) asyncronous interpolation. While this process does increase the number of samples, it technically does not recover any additional information that would have been captured during a true 96/192 kHz recording. In fact, it discards the original CD data and can reduce the clarity and detail of the original recording. I find upsampling with the Shanling to be "bright" sounding.

By contrast, a synchronous interpolation process preserves the entire original signal and provides up to 2.8 MHz data rate – almost 30 times the data rate of 96 kHz upsampling systems. The DigiMaster system, employed in my Wadia 301, uses a continuous (not user defeatable) 12th-order polynomial Spline curve fitting to generate up to 63 new samples for each original sample. I find it much more "life like" and engaging than any other CD playback I've experienced.

Early B.

Thanks for the explanation, Blue.

How can you determine which upsampling CDP is synchronous or asynchronous?

I'm guessing the "lower priced" players that tout upsampling are likely to be of the asynchronous variety?

smglbrth

Thanks also for the explanation. Some it was Greek to me but I get the "jist" of it.

Funny how just one piece of equipment in your whole set-up can take things to a new level.