I think Jussi is a genius, but alone to check all the filters he offers and to select the "right " ones would bring me in a status of vertigo…not for me, sorry.
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With bitperfect I mean to take the data how you get them from the music services without processing upstream to the DAC.
Here I do the opposite, I leave the DAC NEO iDSD 2 in BP:
“Bit-Perfect: no digital ltering, no pre or post ringing”
The filter part is done by Audirvana
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If you are having Audirvana upsample to PCM, the DAC will still do the delta-sigma modulation internally, though Audirvana’s filtering with the proper settings should take care of most of the nasties.
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@Jud
Correct 
I hope one day there will be an Audirvana upsample for DSD.
Ringing… 
Archimago has bit to say…
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You know… You and @Jud share basically the same DAC’s, maybe he can provide some insights into his r8Brain settings and DAC filter settings for PCM modulated to DSD playback…?
Since Audirvana filter settings are possible that do extremely well at getting rid of aliasing and imaging while not ringing much at all, we can pretty well avoid the whole controversy, whatever one thinks of the validity of concerns regarding ringing.
On my side I prefer using without upsampling, and my DAC is NOS (Holo Spring)
The Spring is known better in NOS than OS
I totally agree! There are many tracks that sound awesome even in half decent systems. With a higher-end system such tracks may sound even more “real” (as if the players are in the room with real instruments), but that is not always necessary for people to enjoy the music.
I would call those kind of recordings “demo tracks”, but for reference listening I prefer to use recordings that are not that “easy”. (In my auditions the only one of my reference tracks that is in the “easy” category for me is Dire Straits’ Love Over Gold. That always sounds pretty great, even before optimizing :))
Did you mean compared to DSD64, or to upsampled PCM?
This has also been my experience with 6-8th order modulator settings and DSD64: I found myself going back to Filter Type A (4th order).
Other things that made the music less lively to my ears were:
- Sox anti-aliasing filter settings above 25000;
- Sox filter phase below 60.
I have not heard DSD above DSD64 yet because it’s my DAC’s limit. Very happy with DSD over PCM though.
Any digital conversion can be done anywhere. But Audirvana does the upsampling before playback instead of real-time (except during the first seconds), has a (generally) much more powerful processor available, and offers more upsampling fine tuning capabilities than most DACs.
If a DAC’s engineers came up with the exact settings that sound best to my ears and in my system, that’d be awesome. But what are the chances of that? And what is the chance I find that DAC if it even existed … Which is why I’ve concluded that Audirvana has become almost indispensable.
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If you like the clean, crisp & incisive nature of your Benchmanrk DAC, you may also like the sound of some Chord products… The Qutest on to the Dave or something in-between…
I have pretty much a similar experience with good vs bad recordings… The good recordings sound sublime with my kit and the bad, well, lets just say that I tweak them with some mastering VST EQ plugins and they sound a bit better… Such is the nature of Martin Logan ESLs…
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Another deep look at SoX results in the conversion of PCM to DSD:
1-bit DSD vs WTA/DAVE (Watts Transient Alignment/ Digital Audio Veritas Extremis)… The Chord Devices do not provide an unfettered signal-path to a simple low-pass filtered output… The output of WTA is multi-bit DSD-wide… Just another approach if you don’t use a computer for modulation of PCM to 1-bit DSD… getting a bit dated in juxtaposition to DACs that are converting all input signals to 1-bit DSD256 for output.
