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[Sashaaa]

Hey everyone,

With Media Center 29 on my mac I noticed that it was adding extra upper treble when playing back tracks in DSD. It could be that I'm just relatively young so I can hear those higher frequencies, but since around 15% of my music collection is DSD it's the main thing that was holding me back from using Media Center as my main player. It's just not super subtle and it makes everything sound artificially really bright in really high frequencies. Especially because I'm really into high end audio it just makes MC unusable for DSD if you can hear those high frequencies as well.

I brought this up in a previous thread for the previous version here, https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,133539.msg925299.html#msg925299, but with the release of MC 30 I decided to give it a shot to see if it had fixed the issue but unfortunately it's still here. In the other thread you can see the 16/16 double blind test I ran so the issue is still definitely not placebo.

I usually don't post issues multiple times but I just thought I'd bring light to it in hopes of it getting fixed. I really like Media Center, and it's unique in just how powerful it is. It's unfortunate that this issue is present, because it makes the player pretty much unusable for accurate DSD playback on Mac's if you don't bitstream. I'd really love to upgrade to media center 30, especially just to support the dev's, but until (or if) this gets fixed I think I'll pass on upgrading. I also understand that this might just not be much of a priority or be too complex to fix for the time being.

Really hope this doesn't come off like I'm upset or rude for posting this again for MC 30, I genuinely really like Media Center and think it's a great piece of software. I just really want to see this fixed so that I can switch to it (and also justify upgrading!).

[Matt]

You can set the low-pass filter for DSD conversion.

Look at Options > Audio > Configure input plug-in > DSD > Low-pass filter

If you want an even more restrictive filter, we could probably add that.

Thanks.

[Sashaaa]

You can set the low-pass filter for DSD conversion.

Look at Options > Audio > Configure input plug-in > DSD > Low-pass filter

If you want an even more restrictive filter, we could probably add that.

Thanks.

Holy crap that actually fixed it. Thank you so much for the answer! I will now go get myself a shiny new license of Media Center!

[Matt]

Great!

What setting were you using and what did you change it to?

[Sashaaa]

The original setting was at Safe (24hz @ 48dB/octave) and changing it to Permissive (50khz @ 48dB/octave) seemed to give me the best result that was closest to all of the other players I've used. I wonder why the more permissive filters made it sound right, maybe the safe filter has a peak in the higher frequencies that's more audible than the permissive ones.

 Just my 2 cents, but for the time being I think it should probably be on this setting by default for other users who can hear those upper frequencies.

[AGAWA]

Interesting, this is filter for DSD to PCM conversion. What frequencies you hear in PCM? Hi Res PCM also has high frequencies, as DSD does.

[Sashaaa]

Interesting, this is filter for DSD to PCM conversion. What frequencies you hear in PCM? Hi Res PCM also has high frequencies, as DSD does.

In comparing a recording of media center playing back a song from dsd to pcm thru loopback and the same song converted to pcm from dbpoweramp in a spectrogram, the differences seem to be mostly around 15khz and up. This also checks out to what my ears had been hearing. The problem isn't present with media center playing back normal hi-res files, only when playing back DSD with the default filter.