One a recent YouTube video I made, A Tour of Octave Studios, I got a bunch of nice comments but one really stuck out for me.
"Impossible", is how it was framed and what the poster was finding impossible was my comment that DSD (PDM) is a digital format we can directly convert into analog without the aid of a DAC. All one needs to do is pass the signal through an analog filter (which can be as simple as a single capacitor) and voila! music.
What he found so impossible to fathom was the idea that a group of 1s and 0s stored on a hard drive could make music without being decoded. Clearly, he's not familiar with DirectStream DAC which does exactly that—though, in fairness, it is a DAC.
Very confusing, though just because the concept may confuse does not mean it is incorrect.
When we get faced with the impossible: the Earth is round, the sun doesn't move across the sky, facts don't have alternatives, 1s and 0s can be analog without conversion, we have two choices. We can accept the answers and educate ourselves, or we can cry out it's unfair and untrue.
Truth is, the universe doesn't much care whether you accept it or not.
But sometimes, it can be personally rewarding to have a new light shine, even if it goes against everything you ever thought you knew.
