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

MHz refers to the samples per second, not the pitch. CD audio for example is 16-bit/44.1kHz. What that means is there are 16-bits of sampling (audio) taken 44,100 times per second. DSD on the other hand is 1-bit samples taken 11.2 million times per second. What that translates to is a digital wave that looks a lot closer to an analog wave than a CD does. It has nothing to do with the frequency of listening in this case.
You should also check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD7YFUYLpDc
Debunking the Digital Audio Myth: The Truth About the 'Stair-Step' Effect

YouTube
I think this article covers it more succinctly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem
Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia