The Brother Test

[Scroobius]

Well there is no bigger test than the "Brother Test". My brother is gifted musically and is blessed with the ability to pick up virtually any instrument and play it. He comes from the musically gifted of the family -  I come from the other!!!. Over the years he has shown abosolutely no interest whatsoever in my attempts at hi fi music reproduction. Sure he loves listening to music but to him it has not mattered what it sounded like. I often wondered if somehow he had the ability to reconstruct the sound he heard and fill in the missing and distorted bits so that what he heard was different to what I heard ie more like the original.

Over the last 3 years I have built heavily modified and upgraded my system. Certainly my Brother has quite liked with the sound of a SET based system but it has not really been that interesting to him. He humoured me with my hobby though!!!!.

All of that changed last week. He came over to stay and we had one of our regular "music evenings". This was the first time he had heard my system running engine#3 on 9y-4 with 2x arc prediction. He was absolutely blown away - for the first time ever he sat there speechless. We did not speak much and we did not sleep much that night either. He is now "believer".

It really surprises me how much better 2 x arc is compared with native 16/44.1. I used to be sceptical that any kind of upsampling could better than the native file but no more.  And if I had a DAC that could handle more than 96k well maybe I will find out one day.

P

 

[Gerard]

Very nice story!! 

[PeterSt]

Really a nice thing to read. Thank you !

[Per]

It really surprises me how much better 2 x arc is compared with native 16/44.1.

Very interesting, Scroobius. Have you tried to play some High-Res 24/96 files for your brother? It would be interesting to hear what he thinks about those compared to native 16/44.1 files with 2 x Arc Prediction.

Per

[Scroobius]

Hi Per

Yep we listened to 24/96 files and they sound great (from iTrax site and are fantastic recordings as well). But the really big increase in sound quality was moving to engine #3 on 9y-4. I have an off-ramp and it was only recently that I was able to use engine #3 after Peter got the 24 bit output working.

Today I downloaded some Linn demo tracks that are available in 24/88.2 and 16/44.1   I compared "Love is Real" by Claire Martin in 16/44 versus 24/88 and I have to say I find them really close when the 16/44 is upsampled to 88 with arc prediction. I was expecting a bigger difference. It could be because my DAC which accepts 24/96 but actually converts 24 down to 18 bit so maybe I am not hearing the best of the 24/88 native files.

I would be interested to hear other views on this. Has anyone else compared these ??????

One thing that has been really important in my system is the pace car reclocker (in an ideal world I would not need it but I am using long USB cable which is bad news for jitter) the pace car really has been essential to really appreciate what xx can do - maybe I can upgrade one day when NOS1 arrives !!!!!!

All the best

P