Review

"The new DS player has tempted me to repeat the exercise [16/24 bit double-blind test], because I believe I am detecting a difference now." 

Vic, that's exactly what I was suggesting in my 'unclear' post yesterday. Could be interesting. But also could be expensive. What will you do if you find you can hear a difference?

Chris

As you can now see, I didn't eat that much, my fingers are still intact!

But be careful JKH, Vic and Parla don't approve of humour in the Forum.

Indeed, and thanks for the reply.

I was curious about the 16/24 bit because some years ago I aquired a s/h Meridian CD player and separate 20 bit DAC.  At the time Meridian offered an upgrade to 24 bit, but I decided against doing it (it was quite expensive). Your observations rather confirmed that I probably wouldn't notice any improvement (largely confirmed by other reports on the web). Of course there's also less difference between 20 & 24 than 16 & 24 bit.

Anyway, that was the main reason for my curiosity. I'm content with CD, and I don't think I could face the task of transferring them all (nearly 5,000) to a NAS either.

Chris

Well the DAC could be a major player but if one takes into account Ted's valid comments, the DAC must have an analogue output and the differences you are hearing may not be due to a different conversion from noughts and ones but to differences in the design & components used in the analogue circuitry. This will vary more from one CD player or DAC to another as each manufacturer will have their own ideas whereas  the actual conversion will be limited to a relatively few proprietary chips common to many CD or DAC manufacturers. Linn will not be the only outfit using the above referenced Wolfson chip, it could well be used in much cheaper equipment as it will not be of significant cost in relation to the selling price of the completed gadget.

"That is totally beyond my understanding, and will remain there.  Life's too short for some enquiries!"  

Same here Vic!  I don't feel I need to understand everything - but it would have been nice to know that somebody somewhere does understand. I'm still not sure of that even!

Thanks for the NAS comments. I know myself unfortunately. I'd never complete the job!

Chris

Well I finally picked up a copy of the current Gramophone yesterday & read Andrew Everard's review, not that I understood it all: terms like HDMI, Upnp etc mean nothing to me but then I have no interest in home cinema & possess no Apple, Android tablet devices or I'phones which also have no interest to me.

As I do not desire to go down Vic's route of transferring my CDs to a NAS but prefer to put them into a Cd player as far as I can see the only use I would have for the Linn or similar device would be to enable me to play high resolution files downloaded to a computer. I would need a lot of convincing of the superiority of such sounds to spend £5600 to do that. Equally of course I could seemingly spend £300 to achieve the same ends with the ARCAM DAC much praised in Gramophone's sister publication which apparently uses exactly the same Wolfson DAC chip chosen by Linn & referred to above. So what would the Linn give me for an additional £5300?

Whilst Mr Everard praises the high res sound of an old analogue recording I cannot believe that converting the analogue master to a digital format and then re-converting it to analogue can really give better sound than that obtained from properly playing an analogue source: an LP.

I did note that the Linn device has a phono stage but I doubt that will be superior to my own designed & made all valve phono stage (based largely on a circuit by Morgan Jones) but then of course I would say that. As to the £12000 Cd player referred to by Mr Everard I see that too uses valve analogue circuitry!

Hi sorry not had internet access recently. There is no jitter built into the original recording. The jitter when you play back a CD occurs because of timing errors in the electronics of the CD player which affects the stream of data before the DAC stage. However as I said earlier I think the term jitter here is used to mean something slightly different by your software. The information on the CD is read in blocks. Sometimes older computer CD drives can have problems playing these blocks without blips between because of the way they seek. I think this jitter correction probably just sorts out these kind of problems if they occur. I would leave it switched on. Even if you have it switched on when you play back a burned disc on a CD player you will still get the first type of jitter produced by that player.    

Ted