Chord Electronics Owners & Discussion Thread

[bhobba]

Just now, Ittaku said:

Sorry then, I took your comment on face value alone. There were no other qualifiers in your original statement about aliasing. The rest of the debate is relevant sure, but audible or not is a pure binary assertion which isn't what you meant.

There is no need to apologize.   Part of the discussion is understanding what each person means with the terms they use.   If anyone has to apologize it's me - conciseness of expression is something I should aspire to and be more careful.

 

Thanks

Bill

[sir sanders zingmore]

@bhobba we are clearly talking across each other here. Let’s leave it as I don’t want to derail the thread

[Cruncher]

I think it is a good idea to start another thread (or two) where the technology, people, processes, alternatives can be discussed.

 

I have enjoyed the few mscaler impressions that have been shared here. There are a number of Blu2 owners who could share their experience(s).

 

@bhobba you have a mscaler.  Can you share you impressions ?

[davewantsmoore]

1 hour ago, bhobba said:

It is way beyond what can be done on a PC or Mac.

Absolutely incorrect....  by many orders of magnitude.        It isn't even close.

1 hour ago, bhobba said:

What he is saying is he has done calculations that shows to perfectly reconstruct a sync (ie brick-wall) filtered signal to 16 bit accuracy you need 1 millon taps.  What shocked his ears was that when doing that it made a big jump in sound quality.

OK.   So use 200 million taps on a computer   <shrug>  .... use more.

 

 

There is an extra part to this you are missing .... it is not the "you need 1 million" which is the core of the work .... it is how the windowing of the sinc function, with respect to the approximation you have chosen.    This is really where all the 'work' was.

 

As you move closer to a more complete representation of the sinc function (which you can do with the vastly increased processing power available in a computer), you no longer need to (worry so much about) window the sinc function, as you are using a longer representation of it.

[rocky500]

@davewantsmoore Just tried HQPlayer on my PC. Can only get to 384K. Can't say I hear a difference. I have an i5T CPU.

So many settings in HQPlayer, as it looks like you have do a lot of research to understand what they all might do and what might work best in each persons situation.

Not a good friendly interface to play something. Had to work out to import a album and even that took a bit. Can't play MP3's, which is a lot of my recorded stuff. Surprisingly the mp3's come from my Internet Radio and sound superb as I think it is in the way they were mastered maybe. World Music, EDM, Electro House, Chill tropical etc.

 

What sort of PC would you need to compete with the M scaler?

How much power would it need? I guess some big power supplies.

 

Can see the m scaler being far Superior fot its ease of use (just plug it in and away you go), lower power requirements and not needing a very high speed computer if the results are what people are hearing from what I have read.

Seems like a great product. 

 

I can see it being great for someone like me who jumps between Foobar, Aimp for Internet radio ( it automatically records and breaks them into individual tracks with correct names) and occasionally JRiver and anything else I might fancy at the time.

Edited January 25, 2019 by rocky500

[bhobba]

1 hour ago, Cruncher said:

 

@bhobba you have a mscaler.  Can you share you impressions ?

 

Haven't heard it yet because of my broken Femur that is likely to last a year at least.

 

Sorry.

 

Thanks

Bill

[legend]

2 hours ago, Cruncher said:

I think it is a good idea to start another thread (or two) where the technology, people, processes, alternatives can be discussed.

 

I have enjoyed the few mscaler impressions that have been shared here. There are a number of Blu2 owners who could share their experience(s).

 

@bhobba you have a mscaler.  Can you share you impressions ?

There may not be a large number of M-Scalers out there?  According to my NZ dealer there is a world-wide shortage as production supply can't keep up with demand - he wants one and can't get one even though he is very friendly with the Chord NZ distributer. 

[Cruncher]

 @bhobba Nothing to be sorry for. You did say that your setup was broken and I assumed you had heard the mscaler before it broke.

 

Sorry to hear about your broken Femur. I damaged my Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) playing backyard Soccer one Christmas holidays just as we were to leave for a vacation. It was hugely disruptive but I can't even to start to imagine having a broken Femur with a year recovery time.

 

[davewantsmoore]

4 hours ago, bhobba said:

And you don't think audibility varies from person to person?

What people "care about" varies quite a lot .... but when the test is properly controlled, audibility is found to be reasonably constant.

 

We are not the special snowflakes we sometimes imagine.

4 hours ago, bhobba said:

increase aliasing - decrease temporal smear - how to separate the two - beats me.

The Chord way, using "perfect" band-limiting, and a "good" approximation of sinc .....  in theory decreases both.

 

You can artificially separate the two (by 'manually adding certain distortion').... to test for the audibility of each.

 

The non-linear distortion will not be audible (like MQA says).    The linear distortion part (the incorrect level), could definitely be audible.   As RW says, in theory if you use the usual suspects to reconstruct the output, (including an "MQA filter") then you can get this level problem ....  my understanding is MQA corrects this (or intends to) in the playback filter.

[davewantsmoore]

2 hours ago, rocky500 said:

looks like you have do a lot of research to understand what they all might do and what might work best in each persons situation.

Which is why people "using a computer to apply long filters" are not going to impinge on the target market for an M Scaler.

2 hours ago, rocky500 said:

What sort of PC would you need to compete with the M scaler?

"Compete" is a complicated word.    Don't just think, you will get better sound if you have a fast computer.    It's about what you do with it .... and doing what is suggested in the article that kicked off this discussion isn't particularly practical  (ie. it isn't real-time for a start).

 

 

If you are asking how much computing power do you need to compute 1 million filter taps ?!

 

.... As an example.    The parallel processing pipe in my (2016 era) computer, can handle over 10 trillion ops/seconds.... but there are all sorts of efficiency problems using all of this effectively for something as 'mickey-mouse' as an audio filter.      If we say we would take a 90% performance penalty (ie. crushingly enormous), then we have 1 trillion filter tapes .... which is a million times higher (than 1 million taps)

 

If we instead look at the general purpose CPU, which is less geared for such work, but won't have such an efficiency problem .... it has (2016 era) very conservatively around 25 billion ops/second, and we might need a factor of 4 hit to that ..... so let's say around 6 billion filter taps  (ie. 6000 times higher throughput).

2 hours ago, rocky500 said:

How much power would it need? I guess some big power supplies.

No.   Typical computer processors top out at 100w .... and most are ~half this or less.

2 hours ago, rocky500 said:

Can see the m scaler being far Superior if its ease of use (just plug it and way  you go)

Of course.

 

This discussion was specifically looking at it from the perspective that there isn't some magical "breakthrough" that got them to 1 million taps.....   If they need(ed) more, then they could just have them.

[Guest]

I’ve listened to way more MQA compared to the M-Scaler in the time I’ve had it, and I own a top ranked MQA dac to boot. There’s only really been one album (Avalon) that really impressed me with MQA, where as the M Scaler has rocked my world. Imo, the two aren’t in the same league. All MQA has to offer is hi-Rez compression for streaming, so that’s my stance on the two. 

Edited January 25, 2019 by Sime V2

[powerav]

8 minutes ago, Sime V2 said:

All MQA has to offer in hi-Rez compression for streaming, so that’s my stance on the two. 

Exactly nothing more and nothing less, I have no idea why people try to analyze it so much. They are just 24/92,196 shrunk down so you can stream them without stuttering. Keep it simple.

[agisthos]

I remember Rob saying the length of TAPS is not the important factor, its the WTA math. He said 256 WTA taps sounded substantially better than 2000 normal taps. Of course he would say that, but if true it points to this talk about millions of generic computer taps being a moot point.

 

If the WTA alog is so different - the fact a PC can do millions of taps is comparing apples to oranges.

[Kaynin]

1 hour ago, agisthos said:

 

If the WTA alog is so different - the fact a PC can do millions of taps is comparing apples to Windows.

 

 

[Ittaku]

2 hours ago, davewantsmoore said:

It's about what you do with it .... and doing what is suggested in the article that kicked off this discussion isn't particularly practical  (ie. it isn't real-time for a start)
 

At 600ms latency, the mscaler isn't real time either, but that's not a problem at all for music. My DAC has 500ms latency in the worst case scenario and I have never once had an issue from said latency.

[Cruncher]

S

32 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

At 600ms latency, the mscaler isn't real time either

So a cable that is thousands of km long is not real time ?

[Ittaku]

3 minutes ago, Cruncher said:

S

So a cable that is thousands of km long is not real time ?

No?

[Guest]

Even playing a normal cd in a normal system has delay, technically

[the sound of Tao]

Have had the marvy m scaler here since early November and so I’ve had plenty of time now to get my head around what m scale brings to the system.

 

Essentially for me it’s greatest trick is just to keep things so naturally clear and flowing that connecting deeply to music becomes much less difficult. There are seeming less distractions because timbre sounds so natural that the brain just locks in.

 

The next point might seem a bit more obscure but I’ll do my best... I find myself thinking less about the differences in recordings and now it just more seems like each album is just different instruments present in the soundfield rather than a different recording being played.

 

Also the intelligibility improves. It’s quite a deal easier to listen through to the vocals. Lyrics become more enmeshed in the music experience so meaningfullness is deeper. The difference between a good singer and a great singer also becomes more immediately evident. The timbre and resolution make subtle nuance easy to track. 

 

Other benefits include the closing of the gap that existed between streamed audio with sonically better hi-res downloads.

 

When first streaming off tidal I’d do it on the downstairs system because the Harbeth 30.1s were kinder to the signal whereas the Maggie 20.7s upstairs would make the sonic step backwards involved streaming just a bit too obvious.

 

Now I’d not make that distinction now and my Harby 40.2s and the Pap trio horns (very much as revealing as the Maggie 20.7s) both do zero regret streaming. The M scaler turns any good 16 bit track recording almost into something more like a studio master. That’s for me incredibly impressive because now streaming is essentially sonically seamless. No more apologies for slightly less res music streams and that for a music lover is just absolutely fantastic.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 25, 2019 by the sound of Tao

[Ittaku]

33 minutes ago, the sound of Tao said:

Have had the marvy m scaler here since early November and so I’ve had plenty of time now to get my head around what m scale brings to the system.

What DAC have you got it plugged into?

[Kaynin]

@the sound of Tao   does it improve lesser quality streaming such as Spotify even more so that it's to the level of Tidal?

[the sound of Tao]

3 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

What DAC have you got it plugged into?

Setup goes Sotm Snh-10g switch > Sotm 200 Ultra > Chord M Scaler > Chord Qutest 

All of them are up on stillpoint Ultra 5s and all have linear psu (except the m scaler atm) with Shunyata PCs and all are in Shunyata Triton Typhon combo and with wireworld platinum digital and signal cables. 

[the sound of Tao]

9 minutes ago, Kaynin said:

@the sound of Tao   does it improve lesser quality streaming such as Spotify even more so that it's to the level of Tidal?

Haven’t gone with Spotify so unfortunately can’t say... tho I do think the magic starts with 16 bit redbook and upsampling the full million taps. 

[Kaynin]

1 minute ago, the sound of Tao said:

Haven’t gone with Spotify so unfortunately can’t say... tho I do think the magic starts with 16 bit redbook and upsampling the full million taps. 

 

Hmm, okay, good to know. 

[Guest]

7 hours ago, the sound of Tao said:

Have had the marvy m scaler here since early November and so I’ve had plenty of time now to get my head around what m scale brings to the system.

 

Essentially for me it’s greatest trick is just to keep things so naturally clear and flowing that connecting deeply to music becomes much less difficult. There are seeming less distractions because timbre sounds so natural that the brain just locks in.

 

The next point might seem a bit more obscure but I’ll do my best... I find myself thinking less about the differences in recordings and now it just more seems like each album is just different instruments present in the soundfield rather than a different recording being played.

 

Also the intelligibility improves. It’s quite a deal easier to listen through to the vocals. Lyrics become more enmeshed in the music experience so meaningfullness is deeper. The difference between a good singer and a great singer also becomes more immediately evident. The timbre and resolution make subtle nuance easy to track. 

 

Other benefits include the closing of the gap that existed between streamed audio with sonically better hi-res downloads.

 

When first streaming off tidal I’d do it on the downstairs system because the Harbeth 30.1s were kinder to the signal whereas the Maggie 20.7s upstairs would make the sonic step backwards involved streaming just a bit too obvious.

 

Now I’d not make that distinction now and my Harby 40.2s and the Pap trio horns (very much as revealing as the Maggie 20.7s) both do zero regret streaming. The M scaler turns any good 16 bit track recording almost into something more like a studio master. That’s for me incredibly impressive because now streaming is essentially sonically seamless. No more apologies for slightly less res music streams and that for a music lover is just absolutely fantastic.

 

 

 

 

 

Pretty much agree with everything there, I simply want to listen more now. I have an old Philips recording of Mozart’s Requiem, was never really a great sounding album, always to small sounding and not overly Hi-Fi, but for the first time in 20 odd years, that album sounded like it should, like a group of people performing a piece of music. A lot of credit has to go with the vast improvements the 8805 has over the 8801, but the M Scaler has tied it all together. I get up in the morning now, and my routine is simply listening to music from the get go.