> On Tue, 22 Apr 2003 19:54:09 -0500 > "Dustin Barlow" <duslow at hotmail.com> wrote: > > > I read an interesting article on Direct Stream Digital (DSD) / Pulse Density > > Modulation (PDM) entitled "A Better Mousetrap" by Brian Smithers in the May > > 2003 issue of Electronic Musician. Since, Brian did a good job explaining > > PDM/DSD in quasi-layman terms, I'll just quote snippets from his article to > > set the stage for my questions. > > <snip> > > > DSD/PDM appears to be a superiour technique for recording and playing audio > > material. > > Having been around digital audio and digital signal processing for over 10 > years, I am still far from convinced. > > > Granted, this technology may never catch on because of all the > > hardware and software changes that would be required to mirror what a > > typical PCM based DAW currently does. But, if DSD/PDM does catch on, and > > DAWs start being produced, how will this effect current audio DSP > > techniques? > > I have not looked into the maths behind algorithm development in DSD/PDM, > but I doubt it is anywhere near as easy as with PCM. > > > The article mentions a program called Pyramix (Windows) which features DSD > > support. However, for Pyramix to do EQ, dynamics, reverb processing, and to > > display waveforms and vu levels, it converts DSD to a "high quality" PCM > > format. > > That should tell you something :-).
<snip> So..? Most PCM converters utilize a 1-bit stream also. Why not utilize all the tools available for the task at hand? As for processing, you can look at a PCM representation of a waveform to ease the processing load and then just apply the changes to the orignal DSD stream without ever having to process in the 1-bit domain directly (which is way more processor intensive since you have to look at a huge chunk of the stream in order to extract the amplitude data that is available in each multi-bit sample). IMHO, though, the hippest alternative at present is to process a DSD stream in the analog domain and re-record it to DSD. This results in a very "analog" sound. These days you can get analog gear with a respectable dynamic range for a song (Mackie Onyx anyone?). When you can get a 130 dB S/N ratio in the analog domain you really don't lose too much converting back and forth from 1-bit domain. It's freakin sweet! If you haven't tried recording 1-bit. Do yourself a favor and demo one of the new Korg recorders. It really is really good, no kidding. ~Maitland _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-dev
