was a tiny bit better sounding in that group, but it was a very, very small and elusive difference that was not obvious at all. What was surprising was how little apparent difference there was between #1-#6. was close, but it had what I thought was some slight, very HF hash, which might have been caused by the JRiver DSD-PCM conversion at that sampling rate or an interaction of HF ultrasonic noise with my amp. I am sure that will raise eyebrows and be controversial, but that is what I heard. 5-8 used JRiver on the fly conversion from DSD to PCM.įor me in my system, the best sound was easily #8. Mastered at DSD64 converted at 88k PCM, Dirac Live onġ-4 were played directly to the DAC at the mastered format. Mastered at DSD64 converted at 176k PCM, Dirac Live onĨ. Mastered at DSD64 converted at 88k PCM, Dirac Live offħ. Mastered at DSD64 converted at 176k PCM, Dirac Live offĦ. I also introduced Dirac EQ for 2 of the playback choices, as follows:ĥ. I recently did some subjective comparisons of a very well regarded analog 2-channel classical track that had been digitally remastered by the producers at different resolutions/formats. Also, keeping the library in Dsf avoided the time consuming extra step of converting to PCM on the hard drive.

Dsfs are, of course, better than Dffs or ISOs for tagging. I am quite happy storing them as Dsfs and using JRiver 19 or 20 with on the fly conversion to PCM for use with Dirac Live EQ. I have a very large > 2,000 disc library of DSD rips.

I am not sure which workflow I should adopt to avoid sonic degradation as much as possible. Now I have a bunch of DSF files, that JRiver plays without problems, but I guess this on-the-fly conversion cannot help sound and I think I should downsample this to 24/96 as well, but the DSD format confused me. To avoid conversion on-the-fly by JRiver or my DAC, I always downsample my 24/192 files to 24/96 offline with an old version of iZotope I have (and keep my 24/192 files in an archive, for the day I will change my DAC, if it ever happens). I have a 24/96 DAC ( Metric Halo ULN 2) and I use JRiver 19 (Windows) as a playback system.

Jriver dsd