USB + PCM -> DSD conversion

[Confused]

I have to say that I am a bit of a purist, so to me the thought of upsampling to DSD, to send to a Devialet which by necessity converts DSD back to PCM is simply wrong and cannot be good for sound quality. Then I had a demo of the dCS Vivaldi upsampler and clock. The demonstration was performed mainly with good old 16/44.1 material. The dCS rig was upsampling to DSD, this was then being sent to the Devialet via AES/EBU. It sounded superb. However, to me this was wrong. As the ADH core architecture is PCM, this means that you are taking a PCM file, converting it in the dCS to DSD, sending DSD to a Devialet that then converts the DSD back to PCM such that it can be utilised in the ADH core. As a purist, I thought this was just plain wrong. Anyway, at my request, the dCS rig was then was then set up to feed the Devialet PCM. We listened to the same tracks, and quite simply, it did not sound as good. All this stuff does baffle me a bit, but I know what I heard and if implemented well, it appears to work.

I have seen a couple of other posts suggesting using DSD DACs, feeding the Devialet an analogue signal. I am not sure if anyone has tried this though!

My thoughts are that this is definitely worthy of investigation. Via a very (very!) expensive dCS rig, I have experienced DSD upsampling producing stunning results into a Devialet. Can similar, or at least good, results be achieved using upsampling software, using I guess a very powerful computer, or maybe by converting files to DSD, and then playing as pre-converted DSD files? I have no idea. All I can say is that this is an interesting topic and something I plan to investigate and maybe experiment with, when I get some decent free time.