Have 1-bit DACs killed hi-end CD players?

I just have read a series of articles from 1989 about 1-bit DACs. I must say I understood less than 20% of what is written there, but I guess the gist is that until the end of 1980s building a properly-sounding CD player required fiddling with parts like resistors and maybe later adjustment by QC and maybe even an adjustment control to be used by a future owner. So, CD players at that time were either carefully crafted Rolls Royces or Yugos, nothing in between.

1-bit DACs changed everything, they allowed consistent high-quality as-designed performance without fiddling with parts and without constant adjustment. Basically, 1-bit DACs brought the age of Toyota. You can have a Camry or a Lexus, but aside of extra chrome outside, they have the same parts inside that work reliably for years to come without repair.

One could still have their Rolls Royce, but it might have visible seams or uneven wood trim or exposed screws. But on the better side of the equation, all those who could only have a Yugo would now have a reliable Toyota which would have performance no worse or better than a Rolls Royce for just a fraction of the price.

Recently I picked up a 1997 portable Sony CD player on Ebay with 1-bit DAC. Has a line out too. Twenty bucks. No digital output, though.

 

I started with a dual 16-bit, which actually sounded very musical if not the final word on detail. This was at a time when CDs were kinda new and were not mastered that well. I had a 20-bit and a 24-bit CD that sounded considerably better than the standard CDs, but I had no way of knowing if the dual 16 was taking advantage of that or if they were just better masterings.

I graduated to a 1-bit Wolfson, which did not sound nearly as good. Then I got an Oppo 980-H, which was OK, but also did not sound so great. Now I've got a cheap-as-chips ES9023 that is by far the best of the bunch. It's 24-bit.

 

With the exception of a handful of SACD players, nobody has made one-bit DAC chips since the mid 90s. But these one-bit DACs did begin the age of the Delta-Sigma DACs, which work in a similar way, except that these typically use a handful of bits inside of their modulators rather than just one.

 

If I am reading some technical articles correctly, sigma-delta DACs can be both 1-bit and multi-bit. Or, saying another way, 1-bit DAC is a sigma-delta DAC as well. Right?

 

All "one-bit" DACs are Delta-Sigma DACs. But most delta-sigma DACs today use a few bits inside of their modulators instead of just one (because you can achieve better measured performance by doing so).

 

Love your avatar, one of my favorite CDs (have it on XRCD).

With the current crop of great DAC chips available, I believe it comes down to three things. 1) How good the listeners ears are as in how accurate and how high ones hearing goes. 2) What ones system from start to finish is IE it adds the minimum to the music to ensure accurate playback or adds all kinds of things from noise, to damping, to coloring. 3) The overall quality of the Master the CD was Mastered from IE the greatest live performance in the world can be ruined by terrible over engineering during the recording and mastering so ones DAC doesn't really matter because it in and of itself can't fix a badly Mastered recording!

Is ones DAC important, sure, it must do its job which is accurately changing ones and zeros back to analog proper full musical notes with nothing added and nothing removed that was in the original digital master which brings us all the way back to how good the Original Master is in the first place. IE the best DACs do one and only one thing, they faithfully reproduce what was on the original master so with the proper listening equipment one gets as close as possible to what was heard while the Master was being recorded. I have come down to three DACs I trust, my Dodson DA-218, my Ayre QX-8, and my ModWright Transporter.

But back to the OP's question, if one is not using strictly digital files like FLAC files, then for me a high end CD Transport feeding a great high end DAC is the way to listen to CD and if not, then might as well get a high end Blu Ray player with a killer ESS Technology DAC chip for direct CD play back. But that is just my opinion and point of view when it comes to Digital Playback.

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Agreed. I have this album on its original Direct Disc LP as well as all of 3 of the CD releases. And the FIM XRCD is the best sounding digital version.

I had long wished for it to be released on SACD too. But that's never going to happen at this point.

Agreed. I think that buying a good DAC today is the way to go, even if one only listens to redbook CDs.

 

The Marantz CD52 from that era has a bitstream DAC, and it still sounds FANTASTIC - better than most modern Cd players. Warm, together and smooth - it's seen as a bit of a classic. Er, I have three.

It's a hi fi tragedy they didn't continue with and develop the concept.

 

My understanding is that redbook cds can't be played with a Shure V15, so yeah, a DAC is a real good idea, even if it's in a redbook only CD player.

 

I've heard that also, BUT isn't that only because CDs play from the inside out instead of the outside in like vinyl!

 

As someone who has worked in the automotive field, I don't get at all this analogy. You're suggesting that somehow workmanship declined because technology improved. There's no logic here.

 

My copy of Jack White's Lazaretto plays from the inner groove to the outer groove. So that's not true, a cartridge can absolutely track that way.

 

I did not quite get what is the difference between FLAC files and listening off a CD — same data, isn't it?

 

The uneven seams have always been there on a Rolls Royce, but one would accept them because as a whole the car would be a step above other cars, especially above crappy British cars of 1970s. When the Japanese came, they brought good and consistent quality overall the whole lineup, no matter Corolla or Lexus, and the differentiator is now whether you want the same innards with cheap seats or with fine leather seats. Compared to a Lexus, a Rolls Royce seems like a 19-century coach made in a barn.

 

Indeed it can. I have a techno 12'' from the early 90s that does the same thing.

Drop Dead's second LP from the late 90s (which I no longer have) also did that.

These are a bit of a PITA to get to play on some semi-auto or full-auto decks but will work just fine on any manual turntable pretty much.

 

Well yes and no. Flac Files are just that, pure digital media without a traditional physical player IE zero noise SSD storage nor even hard drive noise can never affect the signal where as a CD requires one to have both a physical handled media that can be dirty or optically compromised plus the physical Player itself that is usually right beside the analog output stage or even in best situations where the Optical or SPDIF output is used they are still in the presence of mechanical devices with minimum care paid to isolation. My CD player has two separate parts, the physical isolated CD Transport and Dodson DA-218 DAC. Yes my situation is similar to a simple CD player using a digital output to feed a DAC or Home Theater preamp/Receiver but great care is taken with a standalone CD Transport to ensure maximum isolation where as a CD or Blu ray doesn't put much effort into it.

 

Purple Text does not mean sarcasm on this Forum? And also in general even my sarcastic comment is correct 99 percent of the time as far as the ALL CDs are concerned and the overweighing vast majority of Vinyl is designed to be played outside to inside!

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I’ve always equated 1-bit DAC’s as cheapos. I avoid those.

 

I think it all about implementation of a DAC with the analog output stage. I remember the Cal Audio Labs Dx1 turning a lot of heads at its price point and I believe it used a one bit chip. The player was tuned to play cd’s though. Today’s dacs and multi device units have to process multiple formats.

 

Cheapos because they are simple and work out of the box? You prefer ones that are complex and needs precise adjustment to make them as good as the cheapos?

 

Hold up, holdup, ho-dup. You mean there are other, better sounding versions of this?!!

Won't sleep.

 

Even after reading the supposedly pop-sci articles I am afraid I still do not have good conceptual understanding of how 1-bit DAC works. Without getting into how the feedback loop works and stuff like noise-shaping I just want to get the gist of it. Please correct me if the following analogy is right:

Suppose you go to a market to buy apples. You ask around for prices, and the sellers give you something like "three apples for a dollar" or "four apples for a dollar" or "five apples for a dollar". You ask once, they give you one answer as a single number. Then you can compare the numbers for different sellers.

1-bit DAC would be similar to the following: the first seller would reply "one, one, one". The second seller would reply "one, one, one, one". The third seller would reply "one, one, one, one, one". Instead of giving you a single number they shout out a series of counts just like some of our prehistoric ancestors did 10 thousand years ago or so. If you replace the normal human interaction with something like a string or a light, then the first seller would hit the string three times, the second - four times, the third - five times. They would use just a single line to send information over, this is in fact similar to Morse code. But Morse code uses two types of beeps: short and long. In case of 1-bit DAC they are all of the same length, and all that matters is how many of them are sent.

Clearly, it takes longer — that is, more time — to transmit something like "one, one, one, one" than just to say "four". In fact, you need 4X more time to transmit this message. The larger numbers need even more time. 8-bit number needs 256X more time. 16-bit number needs 65536X more. This is why the tiny 1/44100-second timeslices are additionally sliced to ensure these series of "one, one, ..." are processed.

Why this is better than converting a single number? My understanding is that an error made when converting a single number can seriously throw off the sine curve, especially if the number converted is large. Converting a series of "one, one, ..." is more resilient. My mental picture for this is an old Lunar lander game: there is a lander that falls on the lunar surface, it has some fuel onboard, and the goal is to land on the Moon as smoothly as possible. To do this one would fire the engine in short pulses, each pulse changing overall velocity and acceleration just a bit. More pulses - more change, but it takes time to build up. One extra small pulse changes little in the big picture. Similarly, one pulse missed in 1-bit DAC conversion changes little of the output amplitude. Also, am I correct to consider that analog electric circuit works similarly to this lunar lander thing? That a series of small electric pulses increases amplitude proportionally to the number of pulses per unit of time? That is, there is some "lag" in the circuit (capacitors?) that allows amplitude to build up off these series of small pulses?

Looks ok so far?

Now, I have a question to those in the know. The articles say that 1-bit DACs of late 1980s have only 256X oversampling, which according to my understanding should be enough for 8-bit numbers, but not enough for 16-bit numbers. They skim over this part, just saying that the particular Philips DAC has 4X then 32X then 2X oversampling, which is 256X altogether, but somehow miraculously "the output from this stage consists of 17-bit data (the dither adds one bit) at a 256x rate, ie, at 11.2896MHz. This is where something akin to magic occurs." This part I don't quite get, and I would appreciate if someone could explain it on the same complexity level as selling apples at a market

 

My Kenwood CD 203 changer has an excellent sounding 1-bit DAC built in. For my BDP-6700 Blu-Ray player, I have connected it to a Monster branded DAC I got at Walmart and that DAC is excellent as well.

The DAC I use for the Sony Blu-Ray: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Digital-Analog-Analog-To-Digital-Audio-Converter/470416214

This is the device I use to convert my living room TV's optical output to RCA: https://www.amazon.com/Musou-Digital-Optical-Toslink-Converter/dp/B01HGHNCMW/

The LG Blu-Ray player in the living room here has a DAC built in so I can use RCA cables.

 

...and now we come to Tesla, which a friend mentioned his sister's $130,000 Model X had, and I quote "panel gaps like an early 90s Nissan" (upon which utterance I choked on my beer). So apparently Elon Musk has re-invented the Rolls-Royce

P.S. From my work in infotainment/navigation testing, I believe your thesis also applies to BMW and Honda and their likes. The mass brands gained very nice interiors and technology, had very nice handling within front-wheel-drive limits, and efficient engines. BMW in particular then ran their heads up their collective @sses getting obsessed with silly tech like "we will use elevation data within the navigation to decide whether to shift your transmission on mountain curves" all whilst porking up their curb weights.