Had a very interesting experience last night courtesy of a friends very high end system listening to music in multiple digital formats on the fly as it were. We are talking ripped CD, 24 bit and DSD. I personally would have liked vinyl in the mix as well as a reference, however it was not set up as an alternative.
In particular we listened to Diana Krall (The girl in the other room) and Dire Straits ( Love over Gold).
The listening was done via a Chord DSX1000 Reference Network Player and a Chord SPM 1200MK11 Stereo Power amp into KEF Blades. I can tell you this is not a system for the faint hearted, I have heard it many times and it is extremely revealing and can produce monumental dynamics with a magnificent sound stage and a scale only a few of us could hope for? A NAS storage was fed to the Chord Network Player via some Cat7 ethernet cables and all controlled via some nice software via ipad mini.
We used the track Temptation from the Diana Krall album to start with and listened at 16 bit/ 24 bit and DSD version. For me the absolute truth was revealed like night and day between the formats as the KEF Blades are ruthless in their honesty and the DAC in the Chord Player is up there with the best.
First up ripped CD - very good, surprisingly so compared to the other digital formats but switching to 24bit showed its limitations. The 24bit recording had more air and ambience and much greater definition across the recording. Each aspect of the recording could be picked out much more clearly with lots more detail especially around instruments. Very good indeed and difficult to go back to 16 bit. Next up DSD. I was expecting great things considering all the hype around the format but quite simply it did not deliver. I found it slightly dull and lifeless compared to the 24 bit and preferred the 16bit CD rip. DSD did sound quite natural but lost the sparkling detail and ambience of the 24 bit recording.
Dire straits - Private Investigations was the next track we chose to analyse the digital formats and again we had 16bit rip/ 24bit and DSD.
To save a long explanation we found exactly the same differences between the formats with the 24 bit recording sounding glorious. The detail and bite on the acoustic guitar strings was exceptionally well revealed via 24bit, blurred in 16bit and DSD - fail! Just did not measure up. The ambience was also significantly better via 24bit. Again all the instruments had so much more detail and ambient information around them.
One of the conclusions I personally came to other than DSD was a little hyped and unfulfilling, was that DAC,s are not only the key to unlocking the potential of digital audio their development in the future will ultimately bring digital audio to the final frontier - It may one day sound as natural and as real as the best vinyl/analogue systems.