Quick question

[bdc]

I notice a few people here 'upsample' their music. Does this do anything to the music even if the source is at 44.1 khz?

[Daddy Dee]

BDC,

Yes, surprisingly it does. I'm not technical enough in my understanding to recall or replay the explanation I head some months ago. But it did make sense.

Below is some material excepted from www.upscaleaudio.com.

http://www.upscaleaudio.com/AH!/ahN.htm

Music on CD's is currently sampled (in Redbook standard) at a speed of 44.1kHz and at rate of 16bits. Oversampling uses an even integer of the 44.1 base rate i.e. 88.2, 176.4, and so on to produce a 2x, 4x, 8x oversampling at any bit rate like 18, 20 or 24 bits, etc., but there is no bit rate conversion. 16 bits remains 16 bits.

Upsampling uses a re-sampling rate. This rate is derived from the decennia-long standing industry standard of 48kHz (DAT tape etc), ie 96kHz, or even 192kHz. In the case of the Tjoeb Upsampler (192kHz), it has (as such) no relation to the original sample frequency anymore. At the same time, it converts the bit rate to 24 bits as opposed to the original 16 bits. Hence, more detail.

http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/1103tjoeb/index1.html

There isn't room here to delineate the technical nature of upsampling or how Njoe Tjoeb mates it to a tubed output stage, but based on my experience of these units, and of conjugal visits with the pricey, pace-setting, supremely musical dCS Elgar, I was reminded anew of how, when all else is in doubt, the culprit is invariably noise. Proponents of upsampling assume that, as you remove noise by reducing jitter errors and kicking high-frequency artifacts upstairs into ever less audible realms, ambient backgrounds get blacker and deeper.

The resulting sound, as I apprehended it with the Njoe Tjoeb 4000 with 24/192 upsampler, was indeed more musically involving: quieter and more resolved, with a stunning increase in resolution and small details. There was simply more there there. Straightaway, the 4000's superb rhythm and pacing made my experience of small-combo jazz far more enjoyable. The 4000 didn't display the transient snap and steely, vise-like grip on low frequencies that I enjoyed with my longtime reference, the now-departed Sony SCD-777ES SACD/CD player. But in some ways its portrayal of bass information was juicier and more detailed, while its depiction of acoustic space rivaled, and in many ways exceeded, that of the tubed CAL Delta/Alpha and the solid-state CAL CL-20 CD/DVD player. For instance, clarinetist Bill Smith's Folk Jazz (Contemporary OJCCD-1956-2), a wonderful 1959 recording engineered by Roy DuNann, there was significantly more harmonic information present in the leading edge of bassist Monty Budwig's acoustic bass than through the Sony: the sound of each individual string, the touch of the hand, the air around each note, the way those notes blossomed and decayed. =

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I think the best review is on www.enjoythemusic.com, but their server seems to be down as I write this.

On the upsampler, I was skeptical that it actually would made a difference to my ears... however, it actually exceeded my expectation.

The AH! Njoe Tjoebs is the cd player I use, and it has been my only gear to use upsampling. No other experience to compare this gear to... in terms of upsampling.