Is anybody sick of the recent spate of threads?

[darrenyeats]

Just using sox:

fflc flc * *
        # FT:{START=--skip=%t}U:{END=--until=%v}D:{RESAMPLE=-r %d}
        [flac] -dcs $START$ $END$ -- $FILE$ | [sox] -q -t wav - -t flac -b 24 - | [sox] -q -t flac - -t flac -C 0 $RESAMPLE$ - gain -38 dither

Edit: now corrected to
1) force bit depth to 24 before dithering
2) allow track seeks
3) allow down-sampling if required

[darrenyeats]

Darren, could you explain how you got those waveforms? As far as I can see, they are screen shots from an audio editor, which presumably means that you recorded the output of the DAC to a WAV file via a soundcard.

Is it possible that the obvious clipping we see in the second waveform might have been introduced by the soundcard at the recording stage, rather than in the DAC during playback? To be sure that this isn't happening, you'd need to attenuate the DAC output in the analog domain before recording it. Did you do that?

Clive, exactly four years later I notice I didn't reply!

The answer is the second waveform is simply the original samples at 44kHz. The conclusion that the Benchmark DAC1 and others digitally clip is not proven by the two screenshots, it's proven elsewhere - the screenshots are just to illustrate the intersample overs you would be clipping with any DAC that does digitally clip. Some people say such inter-sample overs are few and hard to spot without heavy zooming, but with this music the difference can be seen easily throughout, at whole-track scale.