The new Sony Walkman costs more than you think, here's why

https://lemmy.world/post/2604307

The new Sony Walkman costs more than you think, here's why - Lemmy.world

This feature ensures the NW-ZX707 can transform standard MP3 or PCM audio to the ultra-high frequency 11.2 Mhz DSD audio stream.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

  • Humans can only hear up to about 20kHz, so you're not getting much benefit above about double that.

  • Even assuming that humans could hear frequencies hundreds of times higher, audio isn't generally available sampled at 11.2 Mhz. If you're getting music, the recording and audio engineering work, the microphones, etc, aren't designed to accurately capture data at high frequencies.

  • Even assuming that none of that were the case, the audio engineer and artists weren't trying to make audio that sounds good at that frequency (which they can't hear either). The music doesn't intrinsically have some aesthetically-pleasing quality that you can extract; they were the ones who added it, and they did that via making judgements using their own senses, which can't hear this.

The NW-ZX707 also gets Sony's proprietary digital music processing technologies, including the DSEE Ultimate technology, developed in-house to restore compressed music files to the quality of a CD by interpolating sound algorithms.

And it makes even less sense if your starting audio has actually thrown out data in frequencies that humans can hear by using lossy compression there, even if we aren't terribly sensitive to those.

Nyquist frequency - Wikipedia

the benefit of sampling above 20khz is that you can even out the signal over a period of time which will make it more accurate for frequencies up to 20khz. you will get a noisy signal but all the noise is in frequencies you can't hear.

you also need to consider how the voltage is generated. in general there are limits regarding how quickly can voltage surge. e.g. you can't reproduce a square wave properly in most cases after amplification. in the end this makes dsd much less relevant.

you also need to consider that the reproduction is not perfect and neither is the recording. e.g. a square wave will not be captured properly