happybob

Wow, realtime upsampling for streaming content would be amazing! I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for this feature!!

Wow, this was such an excellent and helpful review/article! So many variables tested by you with clarity of results. Thanks! I'm wondering ahead of time (assuming you went with the option or can test it one day), how these products and variations you reviewed will compare to say a price no object option. I'm thinking of the Taiko Olympus with included DAC (or some other DAC) as one such option. So in a sense Olympus vs Extreme - hopefully something you'll write about soon :-) Another question I have that you may have clarified elsewhere but I don't remember: how do these products/variations sound via your speaker based playback? Or perhaps these are entirely different systems and not even interconnectable. Time and again some of my friends (who may not have really good systems) tend to say high end audio is basically "diminishing returns", but my experience is almost the opposite - when something really clicks, the experience is transported into a completely higher realm that is laughably better (to my ears and sensations) then "normal" gear. Thanks again!

Congratulations!!

Thanks for the reminder - I just voted on this Roon 48K DSD issue!

I am potentially interested. Not any urgency on my part although I have been of the perspective of transitioning to a much better server. I'm now using a decent but not great SGC SonicTransporter i9 with associated opticalRendu units for the various endpoints. I've really enjoyed watching your posts and amazing audio journey!

Thanks so much for this info - very cool! I have a Linux server - maybe someday there will be a version to work on that too!

Along the lines of does PGGB improve the sound or not on a given system - or perhaps on a given system for bad recordings - I wonder if there's been any sense of when a realtime version of PGGB might manifest. I know ZB had discussed this possibility back aways and it's of course a very difficult task and likely wouldn't achieve what the non-realtime version of PGGB can do but it sure would be cool! Personally I find PGGB definitely improves the sound on two of my systems and I haven't even explored as much the newer version of PGGB (I have it but have been sidetracked with other tasks) and I expect even better results there. I do listen to a lot of Qobuz and Tidal content that I don't own and it would be great to be able to process that with some version of PGGB at some point. Along other lines - here's a question for folks: One of my systems (Chord Dave DAC with DC4 power supply) can do 16x (768K) content, but my other system (Devialet 220 Pro Core Infinity) can only do 192K (although it can accept somewhat higher SR files or Roon can do the downconversion from 7xxK). I will conduct this experiment at some point, but since I'd like to do only one PGGB upsampling and then listen on all my systems - do folks find that at PGGB conversion to 192K (from 44K to 96K source) would be much different than a conversion to 7xxK and then have the device (Devialet or Roon) downsample to 192K?? Thanks for your thoughts!

I just got my capacitor board for my Dave but have not installed it yet - but am looking forward to the upgrade! I have the Sean Jacobs DC4 for my Dave but do not have the ARC6 upgrade. I know this upgrade is a good one, but not in the cards for me at the moment. That said, the DC4 was a huge upgrade to the sound of my Dave!

I'm definitely in the camp (with @austinpop and others) that while Roon has IMO the best UI (and I haven't been having noticeable slowdowns), I also find that other means of sourcing the content to my systems do sound better than Roon. The difference is noticeable but not huge so I still use Roon for most listening, but for critical (especially headphone system) listening, I don't use Roon. My hope is that perhaps the coming (maybe coming soon?) Roon 2.0 might address the SQ issue.

I do the same, Dave HF filter off, PGGB noise filter at minimum. As a side note I also leave off the Dave “crossfeed” settings for headphone use as they significantly negatively impact sound quality from my perspective.

🎄😜

Curious on all the Pink Floyd new 96K/24 releases (specifically Qobuz), are folks finding them to be the best yet digital versions or not necessarily. I recently bought Dark Side of the Moon but haven't been able to PGGB process and listen quite yet. The reason I ask this is that sometimes original CDs are actually better (likely better masters) than even recent HD digital versions of various albums. Hope the Pink Floyd albums are great in HD!

Great review Rajiv! Thanks! I find it quite interesting that while you heard notable differences between the various headphones (and amps) you used, no one totally in every respect blew away the others. This is a tribute to the excellence of all the gear (headphones and amps) at the highend now!

ZB, I just now read about the PGGB-RT and this is exciting! That said, I use a Mac and know that this is not supported now, but wondering if there's a possible path to the RT version on a Mac at some point or are there aspects to this (of course including Foobar) that are limited to Windows only? Thanks - and I love my offline PGGB!

So does the MScaler processing (24 bit noise shaping and maybe dithering?) not interfere with the PGGB 24 bit dithering? Also, I do use these files to playback on other systems via Roon and unfortunately am forced to convert everything to 192K sample rate. I was using 32 bit no noise shaping PGGB upsampling so that the extra bits could be used by Roon for optimal sample rate conversion to 192K (sometimes not power of 2 conversions), but perhaps 24 bit dithering only is close to the same as 32 bit no dithering or noise sampling even for Roon? I thought that Roon would also do dithering on sample rate changes... I know these are likely small changes but if I'm going to reprocess everything it would be nice to be optimal SQ for all my system flows. Thanks!