Your favorite DAC?

philipjohnson · September 6, 2024, 1:18am

I know when to stop but I just like keep going.

Ddude003 · September 9, 2024, 5:09am

Oh look more air…

Oops… I may have had a few too many gin and tonics… You know to keep the covid away…

Agoldnear · September 9, 2024, 7:21am

Apparently you do not grok the connotative context that I’ve been speaking about here in my previous posts in this thread, regarding contextual “airiness” imbued in the recording, in the context of the OP’s quoted statement above.

I understand folks may want to sweeten to taste or manipulate phase/timing/frequency amplitude through subsequent EQ and room-correction DSP. or to compensate for hearing anomalies… However, you cannot synthesize “air” that was never captured by the original recording… whether this is digital or analog…. You only create a synthetic iteration of the original source signal… The ability of any given DAC to be able to transparently reproduce the captured “airiness” of any given recorded performance is the point of the OP’s statement… Not whether the effect of boosting a range of frequencies substitues as recorded “Air”… Again, I am not talking about creative uses of EQ and the employment of room-correction DSP under subjective conditions.

My previous response to you in the context of the OP’s statement …

Agoldnear:

Ahh… I see now… trapped in the prison of certainty… Do yourself a favor and listen to the tracks of the recording “Cloud Song” and tell me that your connotative interpretation of “more airy sound” is a simple adjustment of frequency bias and that timbre of an instrument and the timbral spatiality of the environment don’t mean a thing and can be simply brought to life with some ‘character’ superimposed on the reality… Are you brave enough to challenge the status quo thinking you hold as certainty, by listening to this single-mic recording, where qualitative timbre of the instruments and timbre related spaciousness is indelibly imbued into the encoding of these performances. Tell me there is no airiness to reproduce and to perceive in these recordings without some overlay of EQ and electronics character beyond the recording chain employed in this production… Tell me that airiness is just a pile of high-frequencies to be boosted and manufactured…

reddog1 · September 9, 2024, 7:40am

If the ‘air’ is not recorded at source, eq on playback won’t make it so.

Agoldnear · September 9, 2024, 1:58pm

Yes… The only thing the ‘AIR’ control on an equalizer will do on a source signal, is to boost harmonics of high-frequencies that were captured in the recording and harmonic equalizers will synthesize a new set of harmonics based on the fundamentals that exist in the source signal.