Upsampling CDP's & DAC's

Seems to be the latest in improving the sound of redbook CD's. A friend of mine is considering the new Musical Fidelity A3.2 upsampling CDP.

Does anybody have any personal experience with this relatively new model or other upsampling products?

 

Good question Tangent as I've kind of wondered about this one as well, particularely the "full nelson" up-grade.

 

I've got a Dodson 217mkII D DAC

It's a one box unit that takes a 16 bit, 44.1 kHz signal and through math and a little bit of voodoo, stretches it to a word length of 24 bits (kind of impossible to realize at the speaker end due to thermal noise of electronics) and a sampling frequency of 96kHz. It then oversamples by a factor of 8, the literature states.

I'm not a digital circuit designer, like Ralph Dodson, however there's a lot of controversy over this process. I'll not go into detail, but it is a box that actually manipulates the standard redbook signal and a lot of components use 24/192 DACs only because they're what's being produced, but these products don't use math to alter the signal and are not true upsamplers like the Dodson, Perpetual Tech., or the dCS gear. The Dodson actually converts every signal to 24/96.

Whether it makes a difference to your ears, I can't say. Since you'll get opinions all over the map, it's best to listen to as many as you can, for free, and buy what's best for ears.

Take care, Chris

 

I know that when I increase the bit-depth from 16-bit to 24-bit or 32-bit in Cool Edit I get a slightly more open, clearer sound.

I don't know about upsampling, though. I never bothered to test it.