MERASON FRÉROT & POW1

Color Me Stubborn

Ihave to admit to an enduring prejudice, having spent much of my career co–developing and promoting products that support the current common HRA or High Resolution Audio sample rates; 8 times 44,100 and 48,000. The former “44.1” is the

“magic” somehow embodied in analog tape, vacuum tubes and vinyl. Why, pray tell, am I telling you all this? Read on, gentle observer…

One of the many reasons why pro audio companies pushed the technical boundaries of sample rate, inching ever upward from that

Compact Disc sample rate, while 48k is the base digital video rate. That math comes out to 352.8 and 384kHz respectively. For music consumers, 4x 44.1 or 176.4kHz is a very high precision recording and playback format, and is easily downsampled without heroic mathematical efforts to 44.1k. When done carefully, 4x digital audio easily surpasses even the best analog in terms of measurable and, for me, subjective performance. Recent discoveries in DSP or Digital Signal Processing have even managed to capture the first 44,100 samples per second “Red Book”

CD standard, was to increase the bandwidth or highest frequency that can be stored. Analog tape can encode quite high frequency, but it’s buried in steaming heaps of noise, so engineers wanted to do better. Starting with the initial “R–2R” or “multibit” digital–to–analog converter (DAC) designs, the process of transforming a stream of discrete numbers back into a continuous analog signal gradually improved to the point where now we have “delta–sigma” oversampling DAC chips with exceptionally good sounding (and measured) performance. All that blather leads me up to