Solid State vs Valve, Digital vs Analogue, SACD vs DVD-A, the arguments rage on, with one persons point of view seemingly contradicting others, which is right?, which is wrong?, are there any winners, and losers ?, or is it down to personal tastes at the end of the day ? now we have opposing technologies in the digital world, Digital Filters vs Filterless Dac's, Up-sampling vs No up-sampling, Over-sampling vs no Oversampling, how are we supposed to make a decision with so many opposing viewpoints?
There seems to be only one way to decide, and that is with your ears, if you like the sound of the latest technology with 24/192 up-sampling[or more], with brick-wall fliters to block unwanted spurious noise, and beleive that the measured signal is of utmost importance, then that is what you are looking for, if on the other hand you trust your ears to make a buying decision, then the alternative "Simple" approach is worth looking out for. Is 16 bit/44.1 enough? Clearly not!!, but we are stuck with it for now, SACD/DVD-A are currently not taking the world by storm, so we have to make the best of 16/44.1 CDplayer.
Philips's TDA-1543 non-oversampling DACs had one unique quality: a very high output. This helped to use discrete passive I/V conversion circuit rather than IC chips. The discrete I/V circuit sounds much better than the ICs. The non-oversampling DACs have distinctive tonal quality, it's sound clearly indicated that oversampling was not the culprit of sound degrading, but the real offender was the digital filter. If the reasons to alter the original CD format are to expand frequency range and dynamic range, they are barking up the wrong tree. This is why the new technologies can provide just a tiny improvement to the sound quality compared to using better quality capacitors and resistors.
